"Beck." I pull at him. "Now."
He moves over me and meets my eyes — checks, once, and I nod — and then he's there, slow and deliberate, and I exhale against his jaw at the stretch of it, my hands sliding to his lower back to pull him closer. He goes still for a moment, forehead dropping to mine, breathing carefully, like he needs a second to hold himself together. I know the feeling exactly. I turn my head and press my mouth to his jaw, his cheek, whatever I can reach. He makes a low sound and starts to move.
He moves and I move with him. The room is warm, the lamp throwing gold across his shoulders, and I keep my eyes open because I want to watch his face — want to see the moment the careful, controlled captain of Station 7 stops being careful and controlled entirely. It happens slowly, and then all at once. He says my name when it does, low and wrecked. I follow him over the edge with both hands in his hair and my face pressed to his neck.
Later, when we're both catching our breath, there is a loud crash from the direction of the nightstand.
We both freeze.
The plastic stegosaurus has launched itself off the edge and landed on the floor with a resonance entirely disproportionate to its size. It's upright. Both of us stare at it.
Beck closes his eyes.
"It's fine," I say.
"It was watching us."
"Dinosaurs have been extinct for sixty-five million years."
"That one," he says, "had a direct sightline."
I press my face against his shoulder and try not to laugh and fail completely. He makes a sound that is unmistakably a laugh — low, surprised at itself — and then he's laughing too, properly, in a way I haven't heard from him before, and the whole thing collapses into the best kind of disaster.
He leans over and picks up the stegosaurus and sets it on the dresser, facing the wall, with the calm of a man settling a workplace dispute.
"Better?" I ask.
"Significantly," he says.
He comes back and I'm still laughing and he's still smiling, and it's different now — softer, easier, all that careful wanting turned into something that has room in it for us to be people. Real people, as it turns out, with finicky zippers and a kid's plastic dinosaur standing sentinel on the nightstand.
He pulls me back to him and we settle, and the room gets quiet again, and this time it's not the careful kind of quiet.
It's later, and the lamp is still on, and I'm on my back and he's beside me, and outside the window the Montana dark is complete — no city glow, just pure black and the occasional sound of wind through the trees.
My hand finds his jaw before I think about it. He's been wound tight for as long as I've known him — something in the jaw, in the set of his shoulders, that never quite releases. But right now, under my fingers, his jaw is loose. Unclenched. The muscle that usually lives there is just — gone.
I trace it slowly. He lets me.
"I'm not leaving," I say.
The words come out before I've decided to say them. They're bigger than the sentence. Both of us feel it.
His eyes open. He looks at the ceiling for a moment, then at me.
I meant it about tonight. About Copper Ridge. About all of it, maybe — I didn't know until I said it, but I meant all of it, and the terrifying part isn't that I said it out loud. The terrifying part is that I mean it. That some girl who has kept a bag half-packed since she was in her early twenties just saidI'm not leavingand felt no instinct to take it back.
His arm tightens around me.
"Good," he says.
One word. Just that. Beck Delano at maximum emotional output, and somehow it's the most complete sentence I've ever heard.
Outside, the Montana dark holds everything still, and I wait for the itch to go — the one that has been with me since Denver, that shows up at moments exactly like this — and it doesn't come.
Chapter 16
Beck
