Page 35 of Grumpy Ex-Military Brewmaster’s Secret

"Yeah."

"I want this. All of it. I need you to know that before we go any further."

"I want it too." I pull back just enough to see her face, to make sure she reads exactly how much I mean it. "I need you to know something first."

"Okay."

"I've got scars. More than the one on my arm. Some of it isn't pretty to look at, and I've spent a long time making sure nobody gets close enough to see it." My voice comes out rougher than I intend, honesty costing more than I expected it to. "I don't know what you're going to do when you see it."

She reaches up and rests her palm flat against my chest, right over the loudest part of me, and holds it there like she's steadying something.

"I'm not going anywhere," she says. "Show me."

I lead her to the bed instead of answering out loud, because some things are easier shown than said, and when I pull my shirt over my head I brace myself the way I've braced for incoming my whole career, muscles locked, waiting for the flinch, the polite recovery, the careful way people's eyes skip past what they don't want to see.

She doesn't flinch. She traces the long scar along my ribs with two fingers, slow and deliberate, like she's memorizing a map instead of enduring a sight, and moves to the smaller ones scattered across my shoulder, the puckered mark below my collarbone that still aches before it rains.

"This one," she says quietly, at my ribs.

"Shrapnel. Bad day, worse week."

"This one." Her fingers move to my shoulder.

"Recoil, wrong angle, dumb mistake I made exactly once."

She doesn't ask about the rest, not yet, and I don't offer more than she asks for, and somewhere in the unhurried cataloguing of every place I thought I needed to hide, something that's been clenched tight in my chest for six years finally, quietly, gives way. Nobody's ever looked at all of it and stayed. She's still here, still tracing, still looking at me like I'm something worth the careful attention instead of something to get through.

"You're not broken," she says, reading exactly what I'm thinking without my having said a word of it. "There's nothing about you I find anything less than whole."

"You don't know all of it yet."

"I know enough. I know the man who drove eleven miles in the dark for a stranger's woodstove. I know the man who let two kids interrogate him on a porch and answered every question like his life depended on it. Whatever put these here didn't take any of that away from you." She leans in and presses her mouth gently to the scar at my ribs, and something in me that's been braced for years finally stands down.

"Jenna."

"I'm right here."

Her hands move from the scars to the rest of me like she isn't finished learning the terrain, palms flat against my chest, my stomach, the line of my hip, and every place she touches feels like the first hand that's ever mapped it on purpose. I catch her wrists gently and bring them up, turning her until her back meets the edge of the bed, and the sound she makes, soft and startled and pleased all at once, unravels something in me I didn't know was still wound tight.

"Tell me if I do anything you don't want," I say, low, my forehead against hers.

"You won't." She says it with a certainty I haven't earned yet and want badly to deserve. "But I'll tell you anyway, so you stop worrying about it."

I find the hem of her sweater and wait, an actual question instead of an assumption, and she answers it by pulling it over her head herself, impatient in a way that startles a laugh out of both of us at once. Whatever careful pace either of us planned dissolves somewhere in that laugh, replaced by something more urgent and considerably less orderly. I kiss the line of her throat, her collarbone, learn the particular catch in her breath when my mouth finds the spot just beneath her ear, and file it away the same automatic way I file everything worth remembering, except this stopped being tactical the second her hands found my ribs.

We end up tangled in the sheets with no clear memory of how we got there, her laugh turning into something quieter and rougher against my mouth, my name coming out of her in pieces between kisses like she can't finish the whole word before she needs to say it again. Every layer between us comes off slower than it needs to, both of us drawing the moment out on purpose now instead of racing past it, learning each other by memory instead of assumption, the kind of attention I've never once let myself give anybody, not like this, not with some part of me standing guard at the door.

There's no guard tonight. There's just her skin warm under my hands, the soft catch of her breath when I finally settle my weight over her, her legs coming up to bracket my hips like she's been waiting for exactly this and isn't interested in waiting any longer.

"Rafe." My name again, rougher this time, one hand fisting in the sheet beside her head, the other pulling me down until there's no space left worth measuring between us.

"I've got you," I say, and mean it as more than words in the moment, and when I finally move inside her the sound she makes against my shoulder is somewhere between my name and a prayer, and I lose whatever thread of coherent thought I'd been holding onto up until that exact second.

We find a rhythm unhurried at first and then anything but, her nails tracing lines down my back that I'll feel tomorrow and won't mind at all, my mouth finding hers again and again like I can't go more than a few seconds without it, both of us chasing something neither of us is in any hurry to reach because reaching it means this particular version of tonight is over. She says my name one more time, broken open and certain all at once, her whole body going tight and then loose beneath mine, and the sound of it, raw and unguarded, undoes whatever restraint I had left. I follow her over that same edge a few heartbeats later, her arms wrapped tight around my shoulders, both of us breathing like we've run somewhere fast and important and finally arrived.

We stay tangled together after, neither of us in any hurry to move, her heartbeat slowing gradually under my palm, my own pulse taking considerably longer to follow it down.

"Well," she says eventually, breathless, a laugh threading through the word.