The Night Was Ours

Saoirse POV 

I kept my hand against his face for a long moment before either of us moved, and then I stopped waiting.

On the first night two months ago, in my own living room, a mask between us and a broken wrist in my lap I had taken. I had reached for a stranger's power and bent it toward my own reclamation because I had spent three years unable to take anything at all, and I would not apologize for a second of it. But this was not that. This was his face under my hand, unmasked, known, mine to touch. And I understood, standing at the window with the river going dark behind him, that I had not come here tonight to take.

I had come to give. And I could only give myself because I finally, completely, owned myself and because I owned myself, I could choose to hand it to the one man who had never once tried to take it from me.

So I chose. I fisted my hand in the charcoal sweater and I pulled his mouth down to mine.

He kissed me slow at first, both hands coming up to hold my face, and I let him have the slow for exactly as long as I wanted it and then I ended it. I bit his lower lip, not gently, and I felt the sound break out of him — low, rough, involuntary, the first sound I had ever pulled from him that he had not decided to make — and something in me went molten at the fact of it. This controlled man. This man who modeled every response, who had stood on a sidewalk and let a detective photograph him without changing the angle of his body. That man made a sound against my mouth that he did not choose, because of me, and I wanted every one of them. I wanted to take him apart until there was nothing left of the control but my name in his mouth.

I got the sweater off him. I dragged my palms down the bare warmth of his chest, over the flat of his stomach, and I felt him go still under my hands the way a man goes still when he is holding himself on a very short leash. I found the scar on his right thumb the one I had noticed the first night in his front room and had wanted, even then, to put my mouth to and I lifted his hand and I did it, closed my lips around his thumb and looked up at him while I did, and watched the leash slip.

His grey eyes had lost the slate. Gone dark, gone wrecked, looking at me like I was the one variable his whole careful life had failed to account for and he had stopped wanting to account for it. “Saoirse,” he said, and it came out ruined.

“Bed,” I said. “Now.”

──

He undressed me the way he did everything he cared about slowly, with a reverence that was almost unbearable, except I did not want reverence tonight and I told him so with my hands, pulling him down onto me, arching up into him, making it clear that the slow was over. He came down over me, the full warm weight of him settling between my thighs, and the first drag of his bare skin against mine tore a sound out of me I did not recognize.

He caught it with his mouth. He kissed me deep and unhurried even as his hands moved down my throat, over my breast, his thumb finding the peak of it and circling until I gasped into him, then lower, tracing the line of my hip, the inside of my thigh, learning me with a focus I had once watched him turn on a case file and was now feeling turned entirely on me. Every place he touched lit up like it had been waiting three years for exactly his hand.

When his fingers finally found me where I was aching and slick for him, we both went still for a heartbeat him at the feel of how ready I was, me at the first stroke of him against the part of me that had been building toward this since a bookstore, since a café, since a voice in the dark telling me to breathe. Then he moved, slow and certain, and I came apart against his hand embarrassingly fast, and I did not care, and he did not stop. He worked me through it and kept going, building me back up before the first wave had even finished, his mouth at my ear murmuring something low that I could not parse and did not need to, because the meaning was in the register of it, in the fact that Marcus Reed was undone enough to be talking.

“I want,” I got out, and could not finish it.

“Tell me,” he said against my throat. “Anything. Tell me and it's yours.”

“You,” I said. “I want you. Now.”

──

He rose over me, and there even there, even with both of us past the edge of wanting anything but each other he stopped.

He held himself above me, braced on his forearms, and he looked down at me and he said, in the voice that had told me to breathe on the worst night of my life: “You first. Tell me, and I follow.”

The same words. The words from the night, from my own living room, when a masked stranger had inverted everything I understood about power and handed the leading to me. He had brought them here, to this bed, on this last night, and he was telling me with the only sentence that could have told me that nothing had changed about who led and who followed between us that even now, even as the man about to give himself up to save everyone he loved, he would not move until I chose it.

I put my hand flat against his chest, over the heart going hard under my palm, and I held his eyes, and I said: “Now. I'm choosing it. Now.”

And he followed.

The first push of him into me drew a low broken sound from both of us at once. He sank in slow, watching my face the whole way, reading me the way he read everything, stopping when I caught my breath and moving again when I pulled him in with the hand I had fisted at the small of his back. And then he was fully seated in me, both of us shaking with the held stillness of it, and for a moment neither of us moved — we just breathed, joined, his forehead dropping to mine, and I understood that this was the thing under all the heat, the thing that made every stroke heavier than a stroke: he was memorizing me. A man who was going to spend years behind glass, learning my body tonight the way you learn a thing you will have to live on the memory of.

So I gave him more to remember.

I moved first rolled my hips up into him, set the rhythm, took the lead the way he had left it for me to take and he groaned and matched me, and then we were moving together, slow and deep and building, his hand sliding under the small of my back to change the angle until I saw white behind my eyes and said his name like it was the only word I had left. He said mine like he was learning it all over again. The careful surface of him was gone completely now, dissolved into a man who was simply, helplessly, entirely with me, and I looked up into his wrecked dark eyes and understood I was seeing the thing no one else had ever seen not the Verdict Killer, not the CEO, not the man in the charcoal coat who controlled every room. Him. The man under the man, the undefended center the mask and the company and the clinical voice had all been built to protect.

And he let me see it. On the last night he could, he handed me the one thing he had never handed anyone, and he did it as he moved in me, both of us climbing, the grief and the heat inseparable now, the loss threaded all the way through the pleasure until I could not tell them apart and stopped trying.

“Don't stop,” I said. “Don't — Marcus ”

“I've got you,” he said, ragged. “I've got you. Come with me.”

And I did the whole night, the whole autumn, the whole reassembled length of myself breaking apart around him at once and I felt him follow me over the edge a breath later, my name torn out of him and pressed hot into the skin of my throat, the control I had spent all night dismantling finally, completely gone.

──

We did not stop at once.

The night was ours, and we were not going to give a minute of it back, and so we came back to each other again in the dark — slower the second time, laughing once, quietly, at nothing, then not laughing; and a third time near dawn that was almost unbearably tender, my back against his chest, his mouth at the nape of my neck, his hand laced through mine on the pillow while the grey came up in the window. Each time he learned another sound, another place, another thing to carry with him. Each time I gave it, on purpose, so the memory would be complete enough that no wall they built could ever take all of it.

──

Afterward, we lay tangled and wrecked in the grey light, my head on his chest, his heart going slow and steady under my ear — the heart of a man who had, for one night, stopped bracing for the world.

I said, into his skin: “I'm not going to disappear into this. The waiting. I'm keeping my life my business, my mother, Priya, the apartment with the trees. I'm going to come see you and I'm going to love you the whole time, but I am not going to become a woman who only waits. I did that once. Not for you. Not even for you.”

His hand paused in my hair. Then and I heard the rare actual smile in it he said: “Good.”

“Good?”

“I did not fall in love with a woman who waits, Saoirse. I fell in love with a woman who buried my flowers in dead November dirt to tell me I did not get to decide what happened to her. If you disappeared into the waiting, you would not be her.” His hand started moving again, slow through my hair. “Keep your life. All of it. Come when you want to and not when you feel you have to. That is the only way any of this was ever worth doing.”

I lay there with his heart steady under my ear, and I understood he had given me the last thing the man about to lose his freedom telling me, plainly, in the dark, to keep mine.

I did not cry. I had decided I was not going to spend the night crying, and I kept the decision. Instead I turned my face up and found his mouth again in the grey light, unhurried, because there were still a few minutes before the world came back for us and I was not going to waste one of them.

It was the best night of my life. It was the night before the worst day. Both were true.

I had gotten good, by then, at holding two true things and I held these two all the way until the light came full into the window, and I did not let the worst day steal a single minute of the best night, and when morning finally arrived I was still awake, still tangled in him, still his, and the night that was ours had been, from the first still moment at the window to the last, exactly and completely and only ours.