Page 95 of Breaking His Exile

Rainey stopped beside him. She’d changed at some point into the flannel shirt from the pile Mariah had put together, sleeves shoved up, and her hair was loose around her face in a way that made her look younger than she was, or maybe just less armored. She looked at his hands first. Then at his face.

“Bear says he’s stable.” She said it like she knew that wasn’t what he was standing out here for. “Clean exit wound. No broken bones. He’ll be okay.”

He didn’t respond. Didn’t trust himself.

“Come inside, Evander,” she murmured.

He let her take his hand. He told himself it was only because arguing cost more than complying, and that lie lasted exactly as long as her fingers wrapped around his.

She ran the water hot in the little bathroom off the guest room and made him sit on the closed toilet lid while she worked the blood out of the creases in his knuckles with a washcloth. Tilly lay across the bathroom doorway, one ear up, watching them both with concern.

“You’re quiet,” Rainey said. “Quieter than usual, and that’s saying something.”

“Thinking.”

“About?”

He watched the water run pink, then clear. “Boone shouldn’t have been out there.”

“He made that choice.” She said it like she’d rehearsed it, like she already knew the shape of the argument he was building and had come prepared to dismantle it piece by piece. “You didn’t drag him into that field.”

“He came because of me.”

“He came because someone shot at you and Boone doesn’t let people get shot at alone.” She wrung the cloth out and set it on the edge of the sink, then took both his hands in hers and turned them over, checking the skin for anything that needed more than water. “That’s not the same thing, and you know it isn’t. You’re just choosing the version that lets you leave.”

He didn’t answer. She let the silence sit instead of chasing it, which was somehow worse, because it meant she was watching him not answer.

“I’m not going anywhere tonight,” he said finally. It was true when he said it. He held onto that.

She studied his face like she was deciding whether to believe him, then apparently did, because her shoulders came down half an inch and she leaned into the space between his knees and kissed him.

It started soft. It didn’t stay that way.

He’d meant to let her lead — she’d been managing his ribs and his stitches and his stubbornness for two days now and had earned the right to set the pace — but something in him had gone loose and reckless since the porch, since the math had finished resolving, and he found his good hand at the back of her neck, drawing her down onto his lap, careful of his own ribs and utterly careless of everything else.

She made a sound against his mouth, surprised and pleased, and he thought, with a clarity that scared him more than Creed on the ridge ever could, I want to remember this. All of it. Every piece.

He stood, taking her with him, and carried her the eight steps to the bed like his ribs weren’t cracked and his side wasn’t stitched, and she laughed low in her throat and said, “Bear is going to kill you,” and he said, “Later,” and put her down on the quilt like something he intended to spend a long time with.

He undressed her slowly. Each button, each layer, a small ceremony he didn’t examine too closely because examining it meant admitting why he was doing it this way tonight and not some other way, why his hands lingered instead of hurried.

He found the sparrow first, the small black line work faded soft at her inner forearm, and put his mouth there before he even thought about it.

“That’s from when I left home,” she said, watching him. “First tattoo. Felt like I’d earned wings, even if I didn’t know how to use them yet.”

He kissed it again, said nothing, moved on.

The wildflowers wound around her ribs in a way that made him bend closer, tracing the vine of it with his thumb before his mouth followed the same path — stems disappearing into notes, notes disappearing into leaves, nothing about it as clean as sheet music, all of it more alive than that. She went still under his hands, watching him read her own skin like language.

“Nobody looks at that one this long,” she said.

“Then they weren’t looking right.”

On her wrist, the handwriting stopped him cold.

Go be loud.

He knew whose hand that was before she told him — the same slant he’d seen on the note River had left in the bunkhouse card game. He pressed his lips to the words and felt her pulse jump against his mouth.