Chapter 2: Knots
You don't go the first night. Or the second.
On the third night you tell yourself you are going because the knot is still on your mast and you can't untie it, and it's bothering you, and a skipper should know every knot on her own boat. You say this to yourself all the way up the shingle in the dark, with a twist of paper in your pocket holding four sugar cubes you bought at the market and felt stupid about. You're still saying it when you push open the door of the net shed and see him.
He's sitting cross-legged on a heap of old sailcloth under a hanging lantern, barefoot, with a net spread across his knees like a blanket. His fingers are moving through it, finding holes, closing them. He doesn't look up right away. You get a full five seconds of him not knowing he's being watched, and his face in that time is nothing like the one Panem knows. It's tired and intent and private, his lower lip caught in his teeth, a frown of concentration between his brows.
Then he looks up, and the frown goes, and something brighter and much more careful takes its place.
"You came."
"You left a knot on my mast."
"I did." He puts the net aside. "Did you bring sugar?"
You take the paper twist out of your pocket and throw it at him. He catches it one-handed without looking, which is irritating, and unwraps it, and laughs under his breath when he sees what's inside.
"Four," he says. "Generous."
"They were cheap."
"Mm." He pats the sailcloth beside him. "Sit. I'll show you."
It's called a sailor's heart, he tells you. Two loops that run through each other and can't be pulled apart from either end, only from the middle. "Old District 4 knot. Mags taught me. She said a net should hold against the whole sea pulling on it, but come undone in one breath if the person who tied it wants it to."
He shows you with a length of cord, slowly, then gives you one of your own. Your hands are good with rope. They are not good with this. You get it wrong four times. He doesn't take the cord from you. He leans over, close enough that his shoulder warms yours, and moves your fingers with his, under and through and back.
"There," he says.
"I did it."
"You did."
You look down at it, two loops locked together in your palm, and then you look at him, and he's not looking at the knot. He's looking at you, and he's very close, and the lantern is making his eyes the color of shallow water over sand.
"Tell me why," you say. "Why me. Why the boat. Half of Panem would crew for you if you asked. Half of Panem would do a lot more than that."
He's quiet for a long moment. He takes the knotted cord out of your hand and turns it over, running his thumb along the loops.
"Because you don't look at me like that," he says finally. "You never have. You look at me like I'm a deckhand who keeps sitting on your nets." The corner of his mouth lifts and falls. "Do you know how long it's been since someone looked at me and didn't see something they wanted to buy?"
You do know. Everyone knows. He told the whole country, on live broadcast, what the Capitol made him do and who paid for it. You heard him say it and you remember putting down your knife.
"I'm not buying anything," you say.
"I know." He sets the cord down between you. "That's the problem. Every time I've ever been in a bed with someone, it was because someone else decided. Snow decided. A sponsor decided. I decided, sometimes, in the sense that I decided I would rather the people I loved stay alive." He says it lightly. His hands are not light; they're pressed flat on his knees. "Annie was the only one I chose. And we were in a war, and then we were in a hospital, and by the time it was over we'd both figured out that what we had was the kind of love that lives in the same house, not the same bed. She's my family. She'll always be my family. But I've never, not once, been the one who got asked."
You understand, then, what he did on the boat. Why he held perfectly still with his hand on your hip and waited.
"You want me to ask," you say.
"I want you to want to." His voice catches on it. "And then I want you to ask. And I want to be able to say yes, and have it be mine."
Your heart is going so hard it hurts. Outside, the surf is coming in on the shingle in long, steady breaths. You think about rule three. You think about the fact that you have kept it for four years and it has not once made you happy.
You reach out and put your hand flat on his chest, over his shirt, over his heart. It's racing as hard as yours.
"Finnick," you say. "Can I kiss you?"
He closes his eyes. When he opens them they're wet.
"Yes," he says. "Gods, yes."
You kiss him slowly at first, because he's shaking slightly and so are you. His mouth is warm and tastes faintly sweet, like he's been eating your sugar cubes while you fumbled the knot. He lets you lead. He keeps his hands on his own knees until you take one of them and put it on your waist, and then he makes a low sound into your mouth and curls his fingers into your shirt like he's holding on to a rope in rough water.
You push him back into the sailcloth. He goes down easily, laughing breathlessly up at you, his hair spread out on the canvas like spilled bronze. You straddle his hips and sit back and look at him, really look, and he lets you. He doesn't pose. He doesn't do the thing with his eyes you've seen him do on screens a hundred times. He just lies there under you with his chest rising and falling, flushed down to his collarbones, hard against you through two layers of canvas, waiting.
"Tell me what you want," you say.
He blinks. You think nobody has ever asked him that before either.
"I want you to take my shirt off," he says slowly, like he's testing each word for whether it's true. "I want your hands on me. I want to touch you, wherever you'll let me. And I want..." His throat moves. "I want to make you come. Not because I'm good at it, though I am. Because I want to watch it happen to you and know I did it because you asked."
Heat goes through you so hard it's dizzying.
"Then do it," you say.
You pull his shirt over his head. The scars run under your palms, ridged and pale, and he flinches once, then stills as you trace them all the way down his ribs to his hip. You bend and kiss the worst of them, the one that curls under his shoulder blade, and he swears softly at the rafters. Your own shirt goes somewhere in the dark. His hands come up and hover, asking, and you take his wrists and put them on your breasts, and he groans as if you've handed him something precious.
He's careful, then not careful, his thumbs dragging over your nipples until they're tight and aching, his mouth following. He sits up under you to get closer, one arm locked around your back, and you rock against him through his trousers without meaning to and then entirely meaning to. He's breathing your name against your skin. He says it like a question, every time, and every time you answer, "Yes."
You undo his trousers. He lifts his hips and helps you, and then he's bare under you on the sailcloth, all long brown limbs and pale scars and a cock so hard it's leaking against his stomach, and you wrap your hand around him and stroke once, slow, and watch his head fall back.
"Fuck," says Finnick Odair, very sincerely.
"Is that a yes?"
"That's a please," he says, and then laughs at himself, helpless and bright.
He gets your shorts off with clumsy, hurried hands, nothing like the hands that unpicked the ghost net. When he touches you between your legs, he does it like he did the knot, slow, reading you, finding the one place that makes your breath stop and staying there, patient and sure, his fingers sliding through how wet you already are. He watches your face the whole time. When you gasp, he does it again. When you grip his shoulder, he does it harder. He curls two fingers inside you and presses his thumb where you need it, and murmurs, "Like that? Tell me," and you tell him, in a voice you don't recognize, and he does exactly what you say.
You come on his hand with your forehead pressed to his, shaking, your thighs tight around his hips. He holds you through it, breathing with you, and when you finally open your eyes he's looking at you as if you've just shown him a sunrise.
"Again," he says. "Please. With me."
You reach down and guide him to you. You sink onto him slowly, inch by inch, both of you watching, and the stretch of it pulls a sound out of you that makes his hands clench on your hips. He's thick and hot and he fills you so completely that for a second neither of you moves. You just sit there, joined, foreheads together, breathing.
"Alright?" he whispers.
"Yes." You rock once. His eyes roll back. "Are you?"
"I'm..." He laughs, broken. "I don't have a word. I've had a lot of words for this. None of them fit."
You ride him slowly in the lantern light, finding the rhythm the way you'd find the swell. He meets you, his hips lifting, his hands sliding up your back and tangling in your hair. When you speed up, he lets you. When you slow down to kiss him, he groans into your mouth and holds still, trembling with it, waiting for you to move again. He's so careful with you that it makes your chest ache, so you take his hand and press it between your legs again, and he understands at once, and rubs you in tight circles until you're gasping against his neck.
"Can I..." he starts, strained. "Are you close? I want..."
"Yes. Don't stop. Finnick, yes."
You come apart around him a second time, harder, clenching on him, crying out into the warm hollow of his shoulder, and he follows you over with a sound like he's been punched, his arms locking around you, hips stuttering up, your name breaking in his mouth.
Afterward you lie tangled together on the sailcloth with the lantern burning low and the sea breathing outside. He's on his back with you half on top of him, his fingers moving slow and absent in your hair. At some point he reaches over and finds the paper twist of sugar cubes, and eats one, and gives you one, and you let it melt on your tongue while you listen to his heartbeat slow down under your ear.
"That was the first time," he says into the dark.
You lift your head.
"The first time I got asked." He looks up at the rafters. His eyes are wet again, but he's smiling, small and unguarded. "Thank you, Skipper."
You don't know what to say to that. So you kiss his scarred shoulder and say nothing, and fall asleep in a net shed like a fool, wrapped in a famous man and old canvas.
You wake to light through the shed's cracks and the sound of voices on the beach. Not fishermen. Not gulls.
A woman's voice, polished and capital-bright: "...told he swims here every morning. Get the wide shot of the cove, and if he comes out of the water, for gods' sake, keep rolling."
Finnick is already sitting up beside you. He's gone completely still, and all the color has left his face.
Through the gap in the boards you can see them: three people on the shingle with a camera on a tripod, pointed straight at the net shed door.