Chapter 2: Rule Four
For the first ten minutes, nobody touches anybody.
It's a feat of engineering, honestly. The alcove is maybe a metre and a quarter wide. He's lying on his back on the outer edge, rigid as a plank, on top of the duvet. You're on your side against the wooden wall under it, so close to the boards you can smell the pine resin, and between you there is a gap of perhaps four centimetres that both of you are guarding like a border.
The wind screams. The stove ticks. Your teeth start to chatter.
You try to stop them. You clench your jaw. They chatter anyway, a tiny frantic clicking in the dark, loud as a typewriter.
"Christ," Ghost mutters. The mattress shifts. "C'mere."
"I'm fine."
"You're rattling like a tin of nails. Under the duvet. C'mon."
There's a rustle as he gets under the covers, and then a big arm comes around your waist and hauls you back across the border in one easy pull, and suddenly the whole long length of him is against your back, and he's warm. God, he's warm. He's like lying against a radiator someone has wrapped in cotton. You make a sound you'll be embarrassed about later and press back into him without meaning to.
He goes very still.
"Sorry," you whisper.
"Don't be." His voice is right behind your ear. It's different. There's no fabric over it. It's lower and clearer and has a rough grain to it, flat Manchester vowels, and his breath is warm on the back of your neck, actual breath on actual skin, nothing between.
The mask is off. You realise it all at once, the way you realise you've missed a step on the stairs.
You don't move. You don't turn. You lie there in the absolute black with his arm heavy across your waist and his chest rising and falling against your shoulder blades, and you feel the trust in it like something physical. He took it off. He took it off because it's dark and you can't see, but he still took it off, here, with you.
"Okay," you say, very quietly.
"Okay," he says.
Your teeth stop chattering after a while.
"Rule six," you say, much later, into the dark.
He makes a low sound. Not quite a laugh. "You're joking."
"You only did two sentences today. 'Shed door's come off' and 'Don't make it weird.' That's not enough. You're in breach."
"I said loads."
"Grunts don't count."
A long silence. His thumb moves, absently, against your stomach, through your t-shirt. You don't think he knows he's doing it.
"Don't sleep much," he says finally, "because I got buried once."
You hold very still.
"Mexico. Couple years back. Cartel put me in a hole in the desert and filled it in." The words come out flat and even, like he's reading them off a report. "I got out. Obviously. But I don't like small dark places. Don't like not being able to see the door."
You think about the alcove. About the curtain he pulled shut himself. About how small and dark it is in here.
"Then why'd you close the curtain?" you ask.
He doesn't answer for a long moment. When he does, his voice is lower.
"Because you're in it."
You turn over.
It's slow and clumsy and the duvet tangles, and his arm lifts to let you, and then you're facing him in the black, nose to nose, so close his breath is on your mouth. You can't see a thing. You can feel the heat coming off his face. You can feel how still he's holding himself.
"I want to break rule one," you whisper. "Can I?"
Silence. You feel him swallow.
"You won't be able to see," you tell him. "I promise. It's pitch black. I just want to know what you're like."
For a long moment nothing happens, and you think you've ruined it. Then his hand finds yours under the duvet, big and rough and careful, and lifts it, and lays it against his cheek.
Stubble, short and coarse. Warm skin. You move your fingers slowly. The hard line of his jaw. A scar along it, a raised seam, running toward his ear. His ear. Back across his cheekbone, high and sharp, and another small scar beneath his eye, and the bridge of his nose, which has been broken at least once and set a little crooked. His eyebrows. His forehead, furrowed. His hair, cropped very short, almost soft. He breathes shallowly through all of it, perfectly still, letting you, like a big dog letting a stranger put a hand on its head.
Then your thumb brushes his bottom lip, and his breath catches.
"Simon," you say.
You feel him hear it. He's been Ghost to you for six days, Lieutenant, LT, Bravo Six. You read his name in the file in Tromsø. You haven't said it out loud until now.
He kisses you.
It's not careful. You'd thought, if it ever happened, that it would be careful, that a man this controlled would kiss like he did everything else, measured and deliberate. It isn't. It's like a dam going. His hand comes up into your hair and his mouth opens on yours, hot and hungry, and he makes a sound low in his chest that you feel all the way down your spine. You grab the front of his t-shirt in both fists. He rolls you onto your back in the narrow alcove, his weight braced on his forearms so he doesn't crush you, and keeps kissing you, deep and rough and thorough, until you're arching up off the mattress and the cold is a rumour from some other country.
"Tell me to stop," he says against your jaw, breathing hard. "Any time. You tell me, I stop."
"Don't you dare stop."
He laughs. You've never heard it before. It's short and low and a little disbelieving and it goes through you like heat.
You get his t-shirt off. It takes both of you and he hits his elbow on the wooden side of the alcove and swears, and you're both laughing when you finally get your hands on his bare back. Scars everywhere. Ridges and seams and a puckered round one under his shoulder blade that can only be a bullet. Muscle shifting under all of it like something tectonic. You trace them blind and he shivers, this huge, terrifying man, under your fingertips.
Then his hands are pushing up your t-shirt, and his mouth follows them.
You can't see anything. That's the thing. It makes everything else so loud. The rasp of his stubble down your stomach. The heat of his breath on your breast a second before his mouth closes over your nipple, wet and hot, and the scrape of teeth that makes you gasp and clutch at his head. His hands are big enough to span your ribs. He moves to your other breast and you feel him smile against your skin when you moan.
"Loud," he murmurs.
"There's nobody for a hundred kilometres."
"Good."
He drags your leggings down your legs, slow, and you hear him toss them somewhere into the dark. Then he's kissing the inside of your knee, your thigh, higher, his stubble rough on the soft skin, and you're trembling and not from the cold, and when he puts his mouth on you, you cry out so loud it surprises both of you.
He takes his time. He takes so much time. The man who eats like someone's going to steal his plate eats you out like he's been starving for it and has nowhere on earth to be, his tongue slow and broad and then flickering, his big hands holding your hips down when you buck, listening to every sound you make and doing more of whatever drags it out of you. You've got one hand fisted in the sheepskins and the other on the back of his cropped head. When he slides two thick fingers into you and curls them, the world goes white behind your eyelids even in the dark, and you come shaking and gasping his name, Simon, Simon, over and over like it's the only word you know.
He kisses his way back up your body while you're still trembling. His mouth tastes like you.
"Alright?" he says, low, into your neck.
"Get your trousers off," you say. "Right now. That's an order."
"Rule five," he says. "You do what I say."
"I'm amending it."
He laughs again, against your throat, and gets his trousers off.
He's big. Of course he is. You wrap your hand around him in the dark and feel him shudder, feel his forehead drop to your shoulder, hear the rough, helpless breath he lets out. You stroke him slowly, learning him the way you learned his face, by touch, and he lets you for about thirty seconds before he catches your wrist.
"Keep that up and it's over," he says, voice wrecked.
"Then come here."
He settles between your thighs. You feel the blunt heat of him against you, and he stops, and holds there, braced over you, and you feel him look at you even though neither of you can see a thing.
"Yeah?" he says.
"Yes. Please. Yes."
He pushes into you slowly, a long thick stretch that steals your breath, and he groans low and broken into your hair when he's all the way in. For a moment neither of you moves. You can feel his heart slamming against your chest. You can feel him shaking with the effort of holding still.
"Move," you whisper. "Simon. Please."
He moves.
Slow at first, deep rolls of his hips that drag against every nerve you have, and then, when you wrap your legs around his waist and dig your heels into the small of his back, not slow at all. The bed creaks. The wooden side of the alcove knocks against the wall. Outside the wind is still screaming across the plateau and you couldn't care less. He kisses you the whole time, messy and open-mouthed, and when he gets a hand between you and finds your clit with his thumb, you come again around him, clenching, crying out into his mouth, and he follows you a few strokes later with his face buried in your neck and your name in his throat, rough as gravel.
Afterward, he doesn't move off you right away. He stays, heavy and warm, his weight on his elbows, his forehead against yours. Neither of you speaks. You run your fingers over his face again in the dark, slowly, his jaw and the scar and the crooked nose, and he lets you, and turns his head at the end to press his mouth into your palm.
"That was about forty sentences," you say eventually. "You're good for the week."
He snorts. It's the best sound you've ever heard.
You wake up alone.
Grey light leaks round the curtain. It's the closest thing to day the polar night allows, a few hours of dim blue twilight around noon. The cabin is warm. The generator is humming in its shed. You can smell coffee.
You pull the curtain back. Ghost is standing at the stove, fully dressed, balaclava on, the skull grinning back at you from across the room. He has a mug in each hand. He holds one out without a word.
You take it. Your fingers brush. His eyes, in the slit of the mask, crinkle at the corners.
"Morning," he says.
"That's a full sentence."
"Don't get used to it." He nods at the door. "Fixed the generator. Want to check the shed door with me? Rule two."
You pull on the parka and the boots. Outside, the storm has dropped to a steady, sullen wind, and the whole plateau is blue and silver and so beautiful it hurts, endless snow under a sky the color of steel. He walks ahead of you toward the shed, rifle slung, breaking the trail.
Then he stops so suddenly you walk into his back.
He's looking down. You follow his gaze.
In the fresh snow, there are tracks. Big, oval, crisscrossed prints, the kind snowshoes make. They come in from the north, out of the white nothing, across the plateau, and they circle the cabin once, slowly. And then they stop beneath the small, shuttered window of the alcove where you slept.
They stood there a while. You can see where the snow is packed down.
Ghost goes still in a way you haven't seen before, even in Tromsø. He crouches by the prints and touches one with two gloved fingers.
"Last night," he says quietly. "During the storm."
He stands, and turns, and looks at you through the skull.
"Inside," he says. "Now."