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Heat unfurled where his body was pressed against mine, and suddenly the adrenaline and pain and friction of the evening slid off my shoulders, replaced by need and impatience at the clothing that separated my skin from his.

“Bedroom,” he said, pulling back from the kiss that had drugged me. “This couch squeaks.”

“I know how you hate disturbing the furniture,” I said.

We were naked faster than we’d thought about it, his shirt pulled over my head in one clean motion. The rest fell from us just as quickly to puddle at our feet. We sank to his bed. The sheets smelled of him, and under that, the sawdust that got into everything in that building.

“I’ve wanted this since I first met you.”

“Hmm?” I said, lost in what his hand was doing at the top of my thigh. My legs spread like he’d told them to directly.

“To make you forget your name without the fight ahead of us.”

“The letters are already blurring,” I said, as he found and teased the spot that made me dig my fingers into his bicep.

He touched me like he had all night, because for the first time he did. I rocked my hips up after his hand and whispered his name.

“Not yet,” he said against my neck.

Every time I got close he eased off and waited, then started again, lighter, slower, until I had a fistful of the sheet in my hand and I was almost mad at him for it.

There was nothing looming. Nothing waiting. I kept waiting to remember the thing I was supposed to be afraid of, and there wasn’t one.

He entered me just as slowly. As he moved inside me, his hand skated down my belly to find that same place again. When at last the pleasure cracked and spilled, I said his name into his shoulder and held on while it went through me. He stayed exactly where he was until it had.

Afterward, we lay in a room I’d never slept in, in a building whose sounds I didn’t know. Somewhere below us the bay worked at the pilings. I put my hand flat on his chest and felt it rise and fall, and I realized I wasn’t listening for anything. Not a car on the street. Not the stairs. Nothing at all.

“What?” he said, into my hair.

“Nothing. I’m just not waiting for something to happen.”

He was quiet long enough that I thought he’d fallen asleep.

“Neither am I,” he said, like he was trying the sentence on.

Above the bed, where the wall met the ceiling, I could just make out the line of nail heads in the wood. I wondered how long they’d stay there.

Chapter Forty

Iwoke from my first eight hours of deep sleep in months. And unlike the other mornings I’d woken up with Damian, this morning he was still asleep at my side, his arm a deadweight across my ribs, the sheet a rumpled fold at his hip. I lifted his wrist and eased out from under his arm, turned onto my side, and he didn’t wake.

I lay perfectly still, my head turned toward him, watching the rise and fall of his breathing. The morning sun skimmed his cheekbone, his jaw, his shoulder, the V of his hip flexor. His hair was a disheveled mess I wanted to sift my fingers through. His dark lashes fluttered once, and he sighed in his sleep. I watched him until his eyes blinked open.

“Hey,” I said.

“What time is it?”

I glanced at my phone. “Nine.”

He looked like he was doing complicated mental arithmetic with the information. “I haven’t slept that long…ever, I think.”

I curled into him, stealing his warmth. He scooped me into his arms and we lay like that, too comfortable to move for a while.

Eventually we negotiated with ourselves to get out of bed, and I showered and pulled on the clothes I’d thrown in my backpack while he ran to the coffee shop a block away. He came back holding coffee and a bag of croissants, which we ate at the kitchen table he’d made from an old solid wood door with a lock hole still visible at one end.

“How’s your hand?” he said.

“A little better,” I said. “But the thought of it still makes me queasy.”