She laughs, and it rings down two bonds now, hers and Finn's both, bright and gold and doubling back on itself, and I feel Finn feel it, and for a second the three of us are lit up like a house with all the windows on.
“For the record,” I manage, scrubbing a hand over my wet face, reaching for solid ground the only way I know how, “that was even better than I'd built it up to be. And I'd built it up alot, Porter, more than I ever let on.” She feels the wobble under the joke, I know she does, because the bond's wide open and there's no hiding in it. She just laughs harder and it goes straight through my chest.
And then the laugh softens into something slower, and I feel the exhaustion roll over her through the bond, the heatgone quiet for now, her body wrung out and heavy and finally, blessedly still.
“Rest,” I murmur, easing us both down onto our sides, careful of the knot still tying us. “I've got you. We're not going anywhere.”
She's already half gone. Finn tucks the good blanket around her shoulder. Someone gets water into her, a few slow sips, and she takes it without opening her eyes. I stay wrapped around her back, purring low and steady, and she drifts off tied to me with two marks on her throat and both of us still locked together.
I hold her through all of it while she sleeps. And for the first time I can remember, I'm not on the outside of anything, not hiding behind a single joke. I'm exactly where I always wanted to be and never let myself ask for, and she's safe, and she's ours, and she loves me.
I press my mouth to the back of her neck, breathe her in, and let her rest.
Chapter 34
Logan
I've been watching her sleep.
Hudson's got her tucked against his chest, both of them finally quiet, and I've been sitting at the edge of the nest not saying anything, which is the thing I'm best at. Finn's on her other side with his eyes half shut. The whole room smells like woodsmoke and juniper and her, and I could sit here in it forever and count myself the luckiest man in Montana just for being allowed in the room.
I don't know how long it is before she stirs. A while. Long enough that Hudson's knot has eased and he's slipped free of her, long enough that the marks on her throat have gone from red to something softer. Then I feel it come up through the room before I see it — her scent thickening, sweetening, that honeyed edge sharpening again — and she shifts, and makes a small sound, and the next wave takes her.
Her eyes open, heavy and dark and finding me first thing, like she went to sleep knowing exactly where I'd be.
It was always going to end with you.
She holds out her hand across the nest, and I look at it, and I can't move for a second, because I've imagined some version ofthis so many times over so many years that the real one doesn't feel like it can be allowed.
Five years. Five years of the fence I wouldn't finish, of coffees left on her desk, of the walnut coaster I sanded for a week. Five years of standing at a fence line every day at two o'clock like a man reporting for a shift nobody assigned him.
Five years of watching the whole town take to her the way you take to sunshine, everybody easy with her, everybody able to just say it — good to see you, missed you, sit with us — while I did it in the only language I had. Showing up. Fixing things. Never once saying why.
And now she's looking at me with two bonds already lit inside her and her hand held out and the wordalwaysstill in the air.
“Logan.” Gentle. She always says my name gentle, like she knows it's a thing I flinch from being called too loud. “Come here. Please.”
I go.
I don't havethe words the others have. I never have. Finn can say everything in four and Hudson can talk the paint off a wall, and I've spent my whole life at the back of the room with the thing I mean stuck sideways in my throat.
So when I get close enough to touch her at last, I don't try to say it. I show her the way I know how.
I take her hand first, the one she held out, and I press my mouth to the center of her palm, and then her wrist, and then I just hold it against my face for a second, her skin against mine, five years of not-allowed suddenly allowed, and my hands are shaking and I don't care.
“Hi,” she whispers, bright-eyed. She's picked up Hudson's word, and it's the sweetest thing anyone's ever said to me.
“I've—” My voice cracks and gives out entirely. I try again. “I've loved you a long time. I don't know how to—I'm not good at?—”
“I know.” She pulls me down. “Logan. I know. I've always known, I just didn't let myself—show me. You're allowed. It's you and me now.”
And something in me that has been locked for five years just quietly opens.
I kissher like she's the first and only good thing, because she is. She's slick and swollen and heat-drunk from the others and still she arches into me, reaching, past words now, and that nearly ends me right there.
I touch her everywhere I've spent five years not letting myself touch. My hands map her, reverent and shaking, the curve of her waist, her breasts, down between her thighs where she's soaked and swollen and so ready she's dripping with it. I press my fingers into her, slow, and she clenches around them and sobs my name, and I could come apart just from the sound of it, just from being allowed.
But she's too far gone to wait for slow, and she doesn't.
