Chapter 2: Since Spring
He locks the door.
It takes him two strides to reach it and two to come back, and you spend those four seconds understanding, in your whole body, exactly how much room he takes up when he stops trying not to. He doesn't duck. He doesn't fold. He crosses your shop like it belongs to him, and when he stops in front of you again he's so close and so tall that the light from the ceiling goes dim around his shoulders.
"The carrier," you say, stupidly. "You should take it off, I don't want you to scratch the..."
He reaches up, pulls the quick-release tab on the front, and the whole thing drops off him in one piece and hits the floor with a heavy thud. Eleven kilos of custom armor you fought procurement for three months to get. He doesn't even look down.
"Okay," you breathe. "Or that."
"Tell me if you want me to stop." His hands are at your waist. They aren't moving. They're just resting there, the heat of them soaking through your shirt, waiting. "Tell me anything. Too much, too hard, wait. Anything. I will listen."
"I know you will." You put your hands flat on his chest. No plates between you now, just thin gray fabric and the solid heat of him. "I want you to kiss me. That's what I want. Can you kiss me with that thing on?"
He goes still. Then he reaches up with one hand and, without lifting the hood, works his fingers under the edge of the cloth mask and pushes it up. Just to the bridge of his nose. The mesh veil still falls around his face, so all you get is a jaw in shadow, rough with stubble, and a mouth.
It's a good mouth. A full lower lip, a pale scar cutting through the top one at the left corner. It parts on a breath when you look at it.
"Only this," he says. "For now. Is it all right?"
"It's more than all right."
You have to pull him down. He comes willingly, bending, his hands sliding around to your back to take your weight as you go up on your toes, and when his mouth finally meets yours it's careful for about a second and a half.
Then it isn't.
He kisses like he's been starving. Like he's been sitting at a table for six months watching someone else eat. His mouth opens on yours and he makes a low rough sound into it, and one hand comes up to cradle the back of your head, fingers sliding into your hair, tilting you exactly where he wants you. You grab fistfuls of his shirt and hold on. He tastes like coffee and the cold. The mesh of his veil brushes your cheeks, scratchy and strange, and you find you don't mind at all.
You don't notice him lifting you. One moment you're on your toes and the next your feet aren't on the ground at all, and your back meets the edge of your workbench, and he's sitting you on it, scattering a box of plate screws that go skittering across the concrete like hail.
"Sorry," he mutters against your mouth.
"Don't care."
"Your screws..."
"König. I swear to God."
He laughs into the kiss, and you feel it all the way down your spine. Then his hands are on your thighs, pushing them apart so he can step between them, and the laugh turns into something else.
On the bench you're almost at his height. It's the first time you've been able to look straight into his eyes without craning your neck, and they're right there behind the mesh, dark now, pupils huge, fixed on you like nothing else in the building exists.
"I think about this," he says. His thumbs are moving in slow circles on the insides of your knees. "Here. This bench. You sit here and drink your coffee and you swear at the radio, and I come in and I cannot speak because all I am thinking is, I want to put her on that bench and..." He stops.
"And what?" You hook a finger in the collar of his shirt. "Finish the sentence."
He doesn't answer with words. He takes your hand, the one in his collar, and kisses the inside of your wrist through the cuff of your sleeve, and then he starts undoing the buttons of your work shirt. One at a time. His fingers are so much bigger than the buttons that it's almost funny, except that he's so focused, so careful, that it isn't funny at all. It's the most devastating thing you've ever watched. When he gets the last one open he pushes the shirt off your shoulders and just looks at you, in your plain black sports bra, under fluorescent light, with grease still smudged on your forearm from this morning.
"Schön," he says, like a man looking at the Alps for the first time. "So schön."
"It's a sports bra, big guy. It's not exactly..."
He pulls it over your head, and you stop talking.
His hands are rough. Calluses from the rifle, from rope, from years of things you don't ask about. When they close over your breasts you arch into them without deciding to, and he makes that sound again, the one from before, a groan torn out of somewhere low. His thumbs drag over your nipples and you gasp and grab his wrists, and he freezes.
"No," you say quickly, "no, don't stop, God, that's the opposite of stop."
He doesn't stop.
He bends his head and puts his mouth on you, and it's the scratch of stubble and the heat of his tongue and the sheer size of him curled over you on that bench, one arm braced around your back so you can't fall. You thread your fingers into the mesh at the back of his head and hold him there. He takes his time. He takes so much time that you start to squirm, rocking your hips forward against nothing, and he notices. Of course he notices. He reads a battlefield for a living.
"Here?" His hand slides down your stomach to the waistband of your cargo pants. He's breathing hard. "May I?"
"Yes. Yes, please, take them off."
He gets your boots off first, unlacing them with a field-medic's patience while you lean back on your palms and try not to whine, and then your pants and underwear in one long pull, and then you're naked on your own workbench in your own shop with the steel shutters down and a six-foot-ten sniper kneeling on the concrete in front of you.
Kneeling. Even kneeling, his head comes up past your knees.
"Oh," you say faintly, as you understand his intention.
He hooks your legs over his shoulders. His hands slide under your hips, and he pulls you to the very edge of the bench like you weigh nothing, and he looks up at you once, one last check, eyes asking through the mesh.
You nod. You can't speak.
The first touch of his mouth is so soft you almost don't feel it. A kiss to the inside of your thigh. Another, higher. The stubble scrapes and you shiver all over. Then he licks into you, one slow broad stroke, and your head drops back against the pegboard full of wrenches hard enough to rattle them.
"Fuck," you say, to the ceiling.
He hums against you. It's obscene. He does it again, slower, and then he finds your clit and closes his lips around it and you stop being able to think in full sentences. You're vaguely aware of your hand clamped on the back of his hood, of your heels digging into the broad muscle of his back, of the sounds you're making, which are loud, which would carry across the motor pool if the shutters weren't steel. He doesn't care. He holds your hips down with those huge hands, so you can't twist away, and works you with a patience that feels cruel, slow circles, then quick flicks, then that slow broad pressure again until your thighs are shaking around his head.
When he slides a finger into you, you swear in a language you didn't know you still remembered. When he adds a second, curling them, you grab the edge of the bench so hard it bites into your palm.
"König. König, I'm going to..."
He growls something in German against you, low and rough, and doesn't let up, and you come apart on your own workbench with his name in your mouth. It goes on and on. He keeps his mouth on you through all of it, gentler now, coaxing, until the last tremor runs out of you and you're lying back against the pegboard gasping like you've run up the range hill in full kit.
He doesn't stop.
That's the thing. That's the thing he warned you about, and you thought he meant it figuratively. His mouth softens but stays, his fingers still inside you, moving slow, and when you twitch and whimper at the sensitivity he pauses, waits, presses a kiss to your hip.
"Too much?" Muffled against your skin.
You think about it. You're shaking. Your whole body is buzzing like a struck wire. You should say yes.
"No," you hear yourself say. "Again."
He makes a sound like you've shot him.
The second time is slower and deeper and builds from somewhere behind your navel, and when it hits you he has to hold you up, both arms wrapped around your hips, while you shake and shake and grab at his shoulders like a drowning woman. By the end you're sobbing his name. Not crying. Just breathless broken sounds, the edges of words.
Then he's standing, and lifting you off the bench, and you wrap your legs around his waist because there's nothing else to do with them, and you can feel him through his fatigues against the inside of your thigh, thick and hard and very, very proportional.
"Oh, God," you say, into the mesh at his throat.
"We do not have to." He's breathing like he's just sprinted. "I am happy, just this. Just you. Liebling, we stop whenever you..."
"Do you have a condom?" You bite his jaw through the veil. "Tell me you have a condom."
A pause. Then, with tremendous embarrassment: "In my wallet. Since spring."
You start laughing and can't stop. He carries you, laughing, through the door at the back of the shop into the little storeroom where you keep the cot you nap on during long inventory nights, and he lays you down on it like you're made of glass, and he's laughing too, quietly, his forehead pressed against your collarbone.
"Since spring," you say.
"I was hopeful."
"You were hopeful for six months and you never said more than hello."
"I said your hands were cold."
You pull his shirt off over his head, carefully, tugging the fabric up underneath the hood, and he lets you. In the dim storeroom light he's a wall of pale skin and old scars, a long knotted one along his ribs, a starburst under his collarbone that you know without asking is a bullet. You put your mouth on that one. He shudders.
Then he's out of his fatigues and the condom is on and he's braced over you on the creaking cot, holding his weight up on his forearms so his body is a cage around you, a warm, enormous, trembling cage.
"Slowly," he says, like a promise.
It is slow. It's slower than anything has ever been. He pushes in an inch at a time, watching your face through the mesh, stopping every time your breath hitches, waiting until you nod, and the stretch is enormous and burning and so good that by the time he's fully seated you're clutching his back and making noises you're going to be embarrassed about tomorrow.
"Okay?" His voice is shredded.
"Move." You drag your nails down his spine. "Please. Move."
He moves.
He fucks you like he's been thinking about it for six months, which apparently he has. Long, deep, deliberate strokes, every one of them hitting something that makes your vision go white at the edges. His hand finds your thigh and hitches it up over his hip and the angle changes and you shout. Actually shout. He kisses you through it, mask still pushed up, his mouth hot and messy on yours, murmuring into it, German and English all tangled. So good. So good for me. Ich habe dich. I have you. I have you.
You come a third time with him buried deep, and he follows right after, his rhythm breaking, your name torn out of him in a rough low groan against your neck.
For a long time neither of you moves. He's heavy and hot and shaking slightly on top of you, and you've got both arms around as much of his back as you can reach.
Then his phone buzzes on the floor. Once. Twice. A third time, insistent, a pattern you recognize, because every operator's phone in this compound plays that pattern when they're spun up.
He lifts his head. You see his eyes behind the mesh go from soft to something else entirely.
"Deployment," he says.
"When?"
He picks up the phone, reads it, and is quiet for too long.
"Tonight," he says. "Three days." He touches your face again, as carefully as the first time. "And when I come back, Liebling, I am taking off the mask."