Chapter 2: Steady Hands
For a long moment he doesn't move. He looks at your hand, held out between you in the blue light, and you watch him look at it, and you can see the exact second he runs out of reasons.
"It's been forty minutes," he says.
"I'm a fast thinker."
"Yeah." He stands up out of the chair. He's taller than you remember, or the room is smaller. He comes across the carpet in his socks and stops close enough that you can feel the warmth coming off him through the damp towel, and he takes your outstretched hand and turns it over and looks at your palm, at the calluses at the base of your fingers from the climbing ropes and the hot sticks, the healing burn across the heel of your thumb.
He kisses it. Right in the center of your palm.
"Ask me," he says.
"Leon." Your voice comes out lower than you meant it to. "I want you to take me to bed. I'm not in shock. I'm not confused. I know exactly who you are and I know you're leaving in the morning, and I want you anyway. I want you to make me forget what Second Street smelled like."
He breathes out, long and slow, like he's been holding something under water for a very long time and has finally let it come up.
"Okay," he says, and kisses you.
It isn't careful. You'd half expected careful from him, after all that talk, the gentle hand over yours and the breathing exercises. But Leon Kennedy kisses like a man who has spent the whole night not dying and has only just remembered what that's for. His hand slides into your wet hair and tips your head back and his mouth opens over yours, hot and hungry, and you make a sound you've never made in your life and grab two fistfuls of his henley to keep yourself upright.
The towel goes somewhere. Neither of you looks.
"Christ," he says against your mouth, his palms coming down your bare back, spreading over the curve of your hips, pulling you flush against him. Through his jeans you can feel how hard he is, and it goes through you like a current. "You have no idea. You have no idea what you looked like up there. Forty feet up with the sparks coming down around you."
"Tell me," you say, and you drag his shirt up.
He pulls it over his head one-handed, careful of the stitches. Under it he's lean and hard and covered in scars, the history of every bad night of his life written across him in white lines and puckered dots. A long one on his ribs. A burn on his shoulder. Something that looks like teeth, old and faded, below his collarbone. You put your mouth on it. He shudders.
"Like you'd been sent," he says roughly. "That's what you looked like. Like someone finally answered the radio."
You get his belt open. Your hands are absolutely steady now and you make them prove it, popping the button on his jeans, sliding the zipper down, pushing denim and cotton over his hips, and when you wrap your fingers around his cock he swears and his forehead drops to your shoulder and his whole body goes taut.
"Bed," he manages. "Bed, or I'm going to embarrass myself against this dresser."
You walk backward. He follows, kicking his jeans off, not letting go of you, and the backs of your knees hit the mattress and you go down onto the ugly duck bedspread, laughing, and he comes down over you, braced on his good arm, and for a second he just looks at you.
The television light moves over his face. His hair has fallen forward again. He's breathing hard.
"You good?" he asks.
"I'm very good."
"Tell me if that changes. Anything. Any second."
"Leon." You reach up and push his hair back one more time and leave your hand there, cupping the back of his head. "I'm a grown woman. I climb power lines for a living. I'll tell you."
That smile, the crooked one, pulls at one corner of his mouth. "Yes, ma'am."
He takes his time.
He kisses down your throat, slow, his stubble scraping, his breath hot. He finds the place where your neck meets your shoulder and stays there until you're arching up off the bed. His mouth closes over your breast and his tongue circles your nipple, then the other, and his free hand slides down over your stomach and between your thighs, and when he finds you wet he groans against your skin like he's the one being touched.
"Already," he murmurs.
"Since the pharmacy. I told you."
He laughs against your ribs, and then he stops laughing and slides two fingers into you, slow and deep, curling them, and the laugh you were going to give him back turns into his name.
He works you open with his hand, unhurried, watching your face. He learns you fast. He's a man who notices things for a living, which way a shadow moves, which door is about to open, and he turns all of it on you now: the hitch in your breathing when he crooks his fingers just so, the way your hips chase his hand when he slows down, the noise you make when his thumb finds your clit and circles it. He moves down the bed. He puts his mouth where his thumb was. You grab the headboard. You grab his hair. The ducks on the bedspread get a show they will never recover from.
You come with your thighs locked around his shoulders and his name breaking apart in your mouth, and it's not like anything you've felt before. It's like the moment the feeder line takes the load and the whole street lights up at once, every window, every lamp, all of it coming on.
When you can see again, he's kissing the inside of your knee.
"Come here," you say, and pull him up by the hair.
He comes up over you and kisses you, and you taste yourself on his mouth and it makes you want him so badly you ache. He reaches for the nightstand, for his wallet, and you hear the tear of the condom wrapper and feel his hands shake, just a little.
You catch his wrist. "Your hands are shaking, Kennedy."
"Yeah, well." He looks down at you, breathing hard, his eyes dark. "Different reason."
You take the condom from him and roll it on yourself, slowly, and watch his jaw clench. Then you wrap your legs around his hips and pull him down, and he braces his good forearm by your head, and you look at each other in the blue light as he pushes into you.
It's a lot. He's thick and he goes slow, and you feel every inch of the stretch, and your breath goes out of you all at once. He stops when he's all the way in. He holds there. His forehead comes down against yours.
"Okay?" he breathes.
"Don't you dare stop."
He doesn't. He starts to move, long deep strokes that drive the air out of your lungs, and you meet him, hips rolling up, your heels pressed into the backs of his thighs. The bed creaks. Somewhere outside a Guard truck idles. You don't care. You have your hands on his back, on the scars, on the shifting muscle, and you hold on to him the way you held on to that pole, all your weight and all your trust, and he holds you back.
"Look at me," he says, and you do.
It's the looking that undoes you. Not the angle, though the angle is very good, not the slow grind of his hips or the drag of him inside you. It's his face. You've seen him all night with his face shut like a door, cool and wry and unreadable even with blood on his cheek. Now it's wide open. He looks at you like you're the first light he's seen in years.
"You're so good," he says, low and ragged. "God. You feel so good. You're—" He loses the word. He drops his head and kisses you instead, hard, and his rhythm breaks and quickens.
You reach between you and touch yourself, and he sees and groans and pushes your hand away and does it for you, his thumb slick and certain, his hips snapping now, and you come a second time with your nails in his back and your mouth open against his shoulder. He follows you with your name in his throat, buried deep, shaking all over, and then he goes still and heavy on top of you, careful even now to keep his weight on his good arm.
You lie there. Your heart pounds against his. The television flickers through a commercial for a mattress store in Bend.
"Well," he says into your neck, after a while. His voice is wrecked. "That was a hell of a debrief."
You laugh so hard he has to roll off you.
Afterward he lies on his back with you sprawled half across his chest, his fingers moving lazily through your drying hair. He's quiet. Not the closed quiet from the car. Something looser.
"Can I ask you something?" you say.
"You just did."
"Funny. How often does this happen?"
"Outbreaks?"
"Motels."
He's quiet for long enough that you lift your head to look at him. He's looking at the ceiling, at a water stain shaped vaguely like Florida.
"Not often," he says. "Not like this." He turns his head on the pillow. "Usually by now I'm already on a plane. Hunnigan's yelling in my ear, there's a report to write, somebody in a suit wants to know why the building blew up. I don't stay. I'm not great at the part after."
"You're doing all right."
"Ask me again in the morning."
His phone buzzes on the nightstand. Both of you look at it. The screen lights up the ceiling Florida a sickly white: HUNNIGAN.
He picks it up. "Kennedy."
You can hear her voice, tinny and brisk. You can't make out the words. You watch his face instead, and you see it start to close again, door by door, until by the time he says "Understood" and hangs up, it's the face from the car.
"What?" you ask.
He sets the phone face down. He doesn't look at you right away.
"Extraction's at five now, not seven," he says. "One seat on the helicopter. Mine." He finally meets your eyes. "And they're sending a second team for you. Not DSO. A contractor. Hunnigan doesn't like the paperwork. She says it reads like they want you to disappear."