Page 14 of Switch

She’d got the young horse stopped. It stood blowing beside her, and she had one hand flat on its neck without seeming to know it was there. Her other wrist was held against her chest. Her face was dead white.

She’d known what I was. Everybody in Salvation knew what we were. Knowing it was one thing. Watching me break a man’s hand in front of her and put a gun under his jaw and want to use it was another thing entirely, and I’d seen it on her face in the second before I took my finger off.

This was it. This was the thing I’d kept out of her house three years ago. She was looking right at it.

“Let me see,” I said.

She held out her wrist. Red marks where his fingers had been, already going purple at the edges. Nothing broken. I turned it over in my hand, gentle, and my knuckles were split and bleeding onto her skin.

“You’re bleeding on me,” she said. Her voice shook.

“Sorry.”

She let me hold it.

Preacher rolled up the drive fifteen minutes after I called him. He got off his bike and took in the scene, right down to the churned-up dirt by the round pen.

“You put a gun on him.”

“Yeah, his fucking own.”

“That’s not what I was getting at.” Preacher’s voice was quiet. That was worse than yelling. “Keep your head straight, Switch. Next time they won’t send one man.”

“He put his hands on her, Prez.”

Preacher’s eyes went to Savannah, to the purple coming up around her wrist. His mouth went thin.

“I know,” he said. “That’s why I’m telling you.”

She came to me that night.

I’d been lying in the spare room with the light off, running it over and over. The gun. Her face. The way she’d cradled that wrist. And somewhere around midnight I’d worked it out, the way you pick a route when there’s only one road through.

Once this was all settled, I was going to ask Preacher for the long run. The haul to the Gulf and back. Then another one after that. Far enough and long enough that I’d stay gone. That was best for her. She didn’t need a man like me. A man who could kill and not feel a thing about it.

I’d do it right this time, though. I’d tell her before I went, and then I’d get the fuck out of her life.

The door opened. She stood there in the gap with the hall light behind her. Then she came across the room without a word and got into the bed with me and put her cold feet on my shins.

“Savannah…”

“Don’t talk about today,” she said. “I don’t want to talk about today.”

So I didn’t. I kissed her instead. Slow. Different from last night. I took her face in my hands, split knuckles and all, and I kissed her like I had all the time in the world, because this was the last of it and I wanted every second. Her mouth opened under mine. Her hands came up into my hair.

I undressed her an inch at a time. Her shirt over her head. My mouth on her shoulder, the side of her breast, the underside of it where her skin was softest. Her nipple hardened against my tongue and she arched up into me, and I took my time there until she was pulling at my hair and breathing my name.

Then I went lower.

She was already wet when I got there. I spread her open with my thumbs and put my mouth on her, and she made a sound I’d been hearing in my sleep ever since. I learned her again. Slow licks. My tongue flat, then pointed. Her clit swelling under it. I held her hips down when they tried to buck and kept at it, patient, until her thighs were trembling against my ears and her heels were digging into my back.

“Switch.” She was fisting the sheet. “Switch, please.”

I slid two fingers into her and curled them, and sucked her clit into my mouth, and she broke. Her whole body bowed off the mattress. I felt her pulse and clamp down on my fingers over and over, and I stayed with her through every second of it, easing off, until she was pushing my head away because she couldn’t take any more.

I came up over her. Her eyes were wet in the dark. She reached up and pulled me down.

I pushed into her by inches. I watched her face the whole way, her lips parting, her lashes fluttering, the long breath she let out when I was finally, fully inside her. I stayed there, held over her on my elbows with her body wrapped tight around mine and her breath warm on my face.