Page 84 of Run Rabbit Run

He kisses them off my cheeks and whispers praise against my lips and I hold onto him like he's the one solid thing in a world gone liquid and strange.

"Stay with me," he murmurs, and I know he doesn't mean tonight.

He means forever. He means until I forget I was ever anything but his.

"I'm here," I answer, and it's surrender.

It's surrender dressed up as devotion, and I can't tell the difference anymore.

He drives into me harder now, his control fraying, and I feel him getting close.

I want it.

I want to feel him spill inside me, marking me from the inside, claiming me in the most primal way a man can.

I want to keep him with me, in me, always.

"Come inside me," I beg, and he groans like I've wounded him.

His rhythm stutters, breaks, and then he's burying himself deep and I feel the pulse of him, the heat, the way his body shudders as he fills me.

I hold him through it, my hands in his hair, my legs locked around him, keeping him where I want him.

Where I need him.

Where I've been trained to need him.

We stay like that a long time after, his weight on me, his breath slowing against my neck, his hand still wrapped around my throat like a collar.

The fire's burned down to embers.

Outside the tall windows the dark is absolute, heavy, enclosing.

Afterward, he doesn't leave.

That's new too, the newest turn of it, and I feel the wrongness of how much I don't want him to go.

He stays, and he pulls me back against him, and his hand moves slowly through my hair.

I lie in the dark of the room he built for me with the fire low and his heartbeat steady under my ear, and I am, God forgive me, content.

That's the word.

I turn it over and it doesn't frighten me anymore.

Content.

A woman who ran a man's woods all night to buy her freedom, lying warm and easy in his arms in the dark, content.

The ghost at the bottom of the well doesn't even call up anymore.

She's gone quiet.

Not dead, I don't think, not all the way, but sleeping, folded down small in some room of me I've stopped visiting, and I let her sleep because waking her only ever brought the drowning.

Ezra's breathing goes deep and even against my back.

He trusts me enough to sleep beside me now.