His first instinct was to wave it off. To make a joke. To tell her the eagle had been waiting to come out for a year, and she'd just done him the favor of finally pulling the cork. He had thedeflection ready to deliver before he'd decided whether to deliver it.
But he had made a promise, and he enjoyed the heat of her palm that was still on his chest.
“Thank you for being serious,” she whispered, acknowledging that his knee-jerk reaction had been curbed. He wanted her to know he heard her, without making it any easier on her. That he'd taken her apology at the weight she'd given it.
"Killa," he said. "I'm not blaming you."
"I know."
"I want you to hear me when I say it. I'm notblamingyou. The font pulled the eagle into battle. It was protecting you. I can’t argue with that. The fracture made the channel. Severance made the moment. You didn't choose any of that. The fact that the current went through you doesn't make you the one who fired it. Do you hear me?"
Her jaw worked once.
"I hear you."
"Do you believe me?"
She hesitated, so not like her. He watched her find her honesty. "Not fully," she said. "I will."
He let that stand.
He hadn't earned full belief from her yet on this. He hadn't yet shown her enough non-coercive presence to make her trust his absolution. He filed herI willas a credit he'd have to earn against.
"How did we get here?" he asked.
“I opened a corridor. It was so easy. I was surprised I haven’t done it before.” She described everything, and he was sorry he’d been unconscious.
“Your corridor. I felt what you were feeling.”
The words punched her in the face like a body blow she hadn't braced for. He watched her ribs catch. Her hand fisted against his chest.
"You felt it."
"All of it."
He went still.
He'd thought he was carrying the team alone through the fold. He'd thought his interior was sealed inside the channel and the channel was only one direction. He'd been performing restraint, exhaustion, the active work of not chasing her, and he'd been doing it on the assumption that no one inside the threads could see.
She'd been inside him.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I refused your arm. I thought I was protecting you. The threads showed me I wasn't. The threads showed me what it cost you to keep carrying me anyway. I've been hurting you, and I've been calling the hurting protection, and the cosmos used your own slip corridor to make me feel what I'd done."
Her ribs lifted and lowered in a breath that didn't steady her. She kept her face composed, holding the apology in her own body the way she'd been holding everything in her own body since the flashback fucked them over, with the discipline of a woman who'd spent thirty years learning how to function alone.
“Can I hold you now?” he asked again, his voice thick with an emotion he couldn't name. “Please, babe, before I start crying like a goddamned baby.”
A sound escaped her, a choked, broken thing that was half laugh, half sob. It was the sound of a dam finally breaking. The last of her formidable control, the wall she had built brick by agonizing brick over a lifetime of solitude, crumbled into dust. “Jae,” she sobbed, his name a ragged prayer on her lips.
She collapsed into him, a desperate, fluid motion that was all surrender. She slid into his arms, her body fit against his, as if carved from the missing piece of his soul. Her face buried itself in the crook of his neck, her hot tears spilling onto his skin, each one a scalding drop of all the pain she had refused to let herself feel. Her hands clutched at his shoulders, her fingers digging into his muscle as if she were afraid he might disappear. He was content to be her anchor down to his very bones to keep from being swept away by the storm of her own grief.
He wrapped his arms around her, one hand splayed wide across the trembling expanse of her back, the other tangling in the thick silk of her hair, holding her head to his chest. He just held her, his body a solid, unyielding harbor against the tempest of her release. He could feel her heart hammering against his ribs, a wild, frantic rhythm that slowly, gradually, began to match the steady, reassuring beat of his own. He pressed his lips to her hair, breathing her in, and just held on.
“This won’t solve anything,” she whispered. “But it feels so damn good.” Her breath was warm against his neck. “When I saw you go down…I lost my mind. Please don’t let me hurt you. I couldn’t bear it.”
He clasped the back of her neck, holding her against him, the small, intimate pressure that saidI'm here and I'm paying attention to your body. She closed her eyes for one count. She opened them.
"I've been afraid of myself with you," she said. He held still. "I've been afraid of what I am.” She brushed her cheek with a hard sweep. "When I'm near you, touch you, let you in, I don't know what I am, Jae. I don't know what my body's doing. I don't trust myself with you."
