Page 44 of Crown of Thorns

"Yes," he says.

The word hangs there. Admission. Diagnosis. The thing he's been sitting with in the dark. The thing he won't say aloud except here, in the kitchen, with me standing close enough to touch.

I reach out. My fingers touch his collarbone. The skin is warm. My hand moves across it. The ridge of bone beneath. The slight indent where his neck meets his shoulder. The hollow where the pulse runs under the surface. His breath changes. Shallows.

"Padraig?" I ask.

He nods.

I don't make him say more. The name is enough. The loss is enough. I can feel it in the way he's holding himself — careful, like he's been reconstructed after shattering. Like the whole architecture of him is still settling after the disaster.

My palm goes to the back of his neck. The vulnerability of it. The place where the skull is thin. Where the spine is exposed. Where the nerve endings are close to the surface. I can feel his pulse there. Fast. Real. Alive.

"I'm not him," I say.

"I know."

"You're going to have to learn to live with being scared."

He reaches out. His hand comes up to my face. His thumb traces the line of my cheekbone. The contact is slow. Intentional. Like he's learning the topography of me all over again. Like this is a different kind of mapping than before. Not claiming. Just understanding.

"I love you," he says.

The words are rough. Not pretty. Just the statement of it. The brutal fact of it. No qualification. No operationalization. Just the truth in its simplest form.

I pull his head down. Kiss him. The angle is awkward. The counter is between us. But the kiss is not awkward. It's demolition. It's both of us agreeing to burn something and walk through the fire without the exit planned.

He moves around the counter. His hands are on me. Not claiming. Not performing. Just needing to have contact. The fabric of my shirt is thin. I can feel the heat of his palms through it. The specific temperature of his skin. The way his fingers move like they're asking permission with every touch.

We don't make it to the bedroom. The kitchen table is solid. He pushes glasses aside. Not rough. Deliberate. Making space. His mouth is on my neck. The collarbones. The places he's mapped before but never like this — not with the reciprocity. Not with the vulnerability that comes from admitting the depth of the need.

My hands are on him. The scar tissue on his shoulder. I've seen it before. Haven't touched it. Now I trace it. The ridge where the wound closed. The body's repair of itself. The violence that marked him. I feel him shudder at the contact.

"Look at me," he says.

I do. His eyes are dark. Blown wide. The iris almost gone. The actual biological response, pupillary dilation under sympathetic drive, the same reflex I look for in a horse that has decided to trust me or bolt. To presence. To being seen by someone who isn't afraid of what she's looking at.

He unbuttons my shirt. Methodical. Each button gets a kiss. The hollow of my throat. The space between my breasts. The freckle on my ribs that I didn't know was there until he pointed it out weeks ago. Now he knows it intimately. The geography of me. The specific spots that live in his mind.

I pull his shirt over his head. He's muscular in the way that comes from discipline, not vanity. The scar on his shoulder is bigger than I thought. Multiple wounds. Multiple repairs. His body is an archaeology of survival. Of violence endured. Of pain managed.

I get his belt open. He lets me. That is the whole of the new thing, that he lets me, that his hands stay flat on the table either side of my hips while I take his trousers down and take him in my hand and watch what it does to his face.

"Renny."

"You said my name like that in the study."

"I know."

"Say it again in a minute."

I go to my knees on the kitchen flags. He makes a sound and starts to reach for me and then stops himself, and the stopping is deliberate, and I look up at him and understand that he is trying not to put his hand in my hair because he does not trust himself to do it without pushing.

"Put your hand where you want it," I tell him. "I'll move it if I need to."

He puts his hand in my hair. He does not push. I take him in my mouth and his head goes back and the sound he makes is the least controlled thing I have ever heard out of him, and I stay there a long time, unhurried, using my hand and my mouth and every piece of information about him that I have been collecting since January. He talks the entire way through it. Not commands. Not the low territorial register of the wedding night. My name, mostly, and then a string of Irish I don't have the vocabulary for, and then, near the end, "stop, stop, not like that, I want to be inside you," which is the closest thing to begging that this man has in him.

His hands are on my back now. His mouth is warm. I can taste the tea and the whiskey. The night he's been awake. The emotional hangover he carried down the stairs. The weight of admission.