Page 83 of Crown of Thorns

"I won't."

"Don't perform. Don't strategise. Don't—"

"I won't."

I kissed him. Not the negotiation of the library. Not the desperate collision of the study. Something stripped of architecture. Mouth against mouth with the raw simplicity of two people who'd seen everything about each other and had chosen, not through strategy or necessity but through the ungovernable fact of wanting, to be in the same dark room.

His hands. On my waist. The placement was where I'd put them in the study , the same coordinates, remembered by muscle memory, and the remembering broke something open in both of us because the memory was from before the detonation, and the memory being alive meant something between us had survived.

The encounter was wreckage. There was no other word. The tenderness was absent, not suppressed but irrelevant, the way tenderness is irrelevant during triage. This was triage. The desperate, ungovernable act of two people holding each other together because letting go felt like drowning and the alternative to drowning was this: his mouth on my neck, my hands fisted in his shirt, the desk swept clear for the third time in this study's history because the surfaces between us had been eliminated and the only remaining surface was skin.

He got my shirt open without undoing any of it. I heard something give at the shoulder seam and neither of us stopped. My hands were at his belt and his were dragging my skirt up and there was no undressing in it, none, just the minimum clearance required, his trousers open and my underwear pulled aside and his hand between my legs finding out whether I was ready and not waiting for the answer.

"Now," I said. "Don't be careful. I've had ten days of careful."

He wasn't careful. He put his hand flat on my sternum and pushed me back onto the desk and took hold of the backs of my thighs and pushed into me in one stroke, and it was too fast and the angle was wrong and I did not want it to be right. It hurt in the specific way that a thing hurts when you have chosen it. I put my heels into the small of his back and pulled him in further.

He gripped too hard. I didn't stop him. The gripping was honest, the physical expression of a man who'd spent ten days doing nothing and whose body was channelling every suppressed impulse into the urgent need of holding on. His fingers pressed into my hips, the same hips he'd mapped on the wedding night, catalogued in the library, worshipped in the study. The pressure would leave marks. I wanted the marks. I wanted the evidence on my skin that this had happened, that the wreckage had been real, that two people who'd seen the worst of each other had chosen to reach rather than retreat. My back against the desk. His weight above me. The geometry of a man and a woman who'd been fighting and touching and fighting about the touching since the wedding night, and who had arrived, through the accumulated wreckage of ten months of power and concealment and grief, at a place where the fighting and the touching were the same thing.

It was ugly. That is the honest word for it. There was no rhythm for the first minute because neither of us could find one, and the desk edge was cutting into the backs of my thighs, and he kept losing the angle and having to take hold of my hip and drag me back into position, and at one point my elbow went into the lamp and the light swung across the ceiling and neither of us looked at it.

He put his hand over my mouth. Not to silence me. He did it and then stopped, his palm hovering an inch off my face, and I understood that ten days of not touching me had left him with impulses he no longer had a filing system for.

"Do it," I said.

He did it. His hand came down over my mouth and I bit the heel of it, hard enough to break skin, and he made a sound and fucked me harder, and he took the hand off my face only when I turned my head and got my mouth against his wrist. The corridor was live. The door was open. The whole of that house could have walked past and I would not have stopped.

I found his collarbone. The landscape I'd mapped in the collision, the scar below his left clavicle, the ridge of muscle along his shoulder, the vulnerability at the back of his neck where the tension gathered. My mouth on the scar. His sound, low, involuntary, the raw register of a man whose composure had been dismantled and who'd stopped trying to rebuild it. Not surrender. Exhaustion. The exhaustion of a man who'd been holding everything together through discipline and had run out.

His mouth on my collarbone. One moment. The encounter's single point of tenderness. His lips against the hollow of my throat where the freckles scattered, and the touch was so light it was almost not there, a breath, a ghost, the involuntary worship of a man who couldn't stop reaching for the coordinates he'd memorised even when reaching felt like sacrilege.

"A rí-bhean." The word against my skin. Not spoken. Exhaled. The endearment that had been ironic, then contested, then mutual, now reduced to its most essential form: a prayer. Breathed against my collarbone because the prayer needed a surface and my skin was the only altar he had.

I didn't answer. My hands were in his hair. My breathing was wrong, too fast, too shallow, the respiratory pattern of a woman whose body had been starved of contact for ten days and was processing the restoration with the indiscriminate urgency of deprivation. I pulled him closer. The pulling was its own form of prayer, wordless, physical, the body's language for the thing the mind couldn't articulate.

We went off the desk onto the rug. Not gracefully. He took my weight badly and we went down half on the rug and half on the boards and something rolled away into the dark, and he was inside me the whole way down and stayed there through the landing, and the impact went up through my shoulder blades and I laughed once, wrecked, which was the first sound either of us had made in that room in ten days that had anything human in it.

The rug was old and coarse and it took the skin off both my elbows. I found out about the elbows the next morning. At the time I registered nothing except his weight and the fact that he had got both my wrists in one hand and pinned them above my head into the pile of the rug and was holding them there, and that I had let him, and that the letting was the only thing I had left to give him.

It went on. Rough. Honest. Without the performance of every previous encounter, no territorial claiming, no contested power, no calculated reciprocity. He fucked me on the floor of his dead father's study with my wrists still pinned above my head and his forehead pressed into the join of my neck, and he said nothing at all for a long time, and then he started saying my name and could not stop saying it.

"Renny. Renny."

"I'm here."

"Say it again."

"I'm here. I'm here. Don't stop."

He got his hand between us and found me with his thumb, and it was clumsy, and he was shaking too much for it to be anything else, and it worked anyway because it was him and because I had spent ten days in a guest bedroom listening for footsteps that didn't come. He pushed my knee up toward my shoulder and the angle changed and I felt it go from something I was surviving to something that was going to take me apart.

"There," I said. "Don't move. Right there."

He didn't move. He held the angle and the pressure and the pace and he did not deviate by a single degree, and two people who had detonated everything else between them found, on a rug in the dark, the one system that still worked.

I came apart with my face pressed against his shoulder and his arms locked around me and the sound I made was not pleasure. It was grief. The accumulated grief of a woman who'd lost her father twice, once to Maura's interception and once to Lorcan's concealment, and who'd found, in the wreckage of this encounter, the only form of mourning her body understood.

He held me through it. The holding was different from every previous time, no assessment, no strategic awareness, no cataloguing of my responses for future use. Just the steady, mindless pressure of a man whose only objective was keeping the woman in his arms from flying apart. His face was against my hair. His breathing was ragged. The arms around me were locked, not possessive, not territorial, just present with the simple, overwhelming fact of a body refusing to let go.