Page 82 of The Drifter

Then, she tipped her head back and looked up at me, and her eyes were red-rimmed and level at the same time. Something had shifted behind them—some decision arriving.

"I can't think of anything else to do," she said, "before we jump into the fire."

I didn't follow. I was still turning the sentence over, hunting the meaning of it, when she reached down between us and unbuckled my belt, and drew my pants down off my hips.

Oh.

She stepped back, crossed her arms, and shed my shirt up and over her head, and let it fall. Then, she took my hand in both of hers, and she walked backward out of the kitchen, down the hall, her eyes never leaving mine, leading me like a woman leading a horse through a gate it doesn't trust. And I followed her, because I would have followed her through anything, and we both knew it by now.

The bedroom was full of high, gold light.

What happened in it was not like anything I've ever done in a bed.

I've had heat. I've had comfort. I'd had, in the last few days, with her, something I hadn't known existed—the laughing kind, the greedy kind, the kind that felt like being handed a life. This was none of those. This was slower and heavier and it hurt the whole way through. Neither of us tried to make it stop hurting, because the hurt was us grieving.

She lay back on the wrecked sheets and drew me down to her, and we started slow. Slower than the first afternoon. Slow, the way you handle something you're memorizing. Her hands moved over me like she was reading me for the last time—my shoulders, the scars she'd never asked about, the line of my jaw—and I did the same. I knew we were doing the same thing, and neither of us said it.

Every curve of her.

My mind had gone quiet in a way it never goes. No perimeter. No exits. No count running anywhere in me. There was only her—the slope of her shoulder where it met her neck, the weight of her breast in my palm, the flare of her hip under my hand, the long muscle of her thigh coming up around me.

I moved down her body and put my mouth on every place I'd learned, thorough, and I heard myself think, plain as a voice: only her. Only Sasha. Whatever else I had been before this room—the road, the pack, the miles—none of it was in the bed with us. A man spends his whole life being made of somewhere else, and then, one morning, he's made of one woman's skin under his mouth, and that's all he is.

When I finally slid inside her, we both exhaled like something ending.

We moved together, slow. Deep and slow, her hips rising to meet every stroke, her hands on my face, my forehead against hers, the gold light lying across us both. There was no performance in it anywhere, no chase. It was closer to a conversation than anything my body has ever done—I'm here, I'm here, I know, I'm here—said over and over in a language older than the words.

And she cried.

The tears came up while I was moving in her, quiet, sliding sideways into her hair. She didn't hide them and didn't stop me. Her body held mine and her breath caught and broke and caught again, and the crying and the wanting ran together in her until they were the same current.

I tried to soothe it. I kissed the tears where they ran. I kissed her eyes, her temples, the salt trail along her cheekbone. I slowed us down and gentled everything in me and gave her the softest of what I had—and it didn't touch it. The tears kept coming. My mouth on her skin, my body deep in hers, every tenderness I owned laid down over her like blankets, and the grief underneath just kept seeping up through all of it, patient, certain, the water table of her.

It was in vain, and somewhere in the middle of the vainness, I understood what this was.

She was saying goodbye.

Not with words. Maybe not even on purpose. But her hands were memorizing and her tears were grieving and her body was holding on the way you hold on at a departure gate. I knew it because I was doing it, too—I'd been doing it since the kitchen, since I don't know if I can do this, since I'd stood there like a fool and told her to listen to the feeling. I'd handed her the door with my own hands.

You get clear of me. No argument.

I'd meant every word, and I'd meant them because I love her, and I lay in the wreck of what those words were costing me and kept moving in her, slow, because my body didn't know how to stop loving her even while my chest was coming apart.

Something in me broke. Quietly. While the rest of me went on.

I've been shot. I've buried men I trained with. I've stood at the end of a dirt road and watched my whole childhood walk away. None of it made this sound. This was some other breaking, in some room of me I hadn't known was furnished, and it happened without one mark showing, the way a beam cracks inside a wall—the house still standing, the house never the same.

She's going to leave, I thought. She's going to do the smart thing, the thing her gut is telling her, the thing I told her to do. And I'm going to let her, because I promised, and because her being safe matters more than me being whole.

We finished together.

Eye to eye. Her hands framing my face and mine cradling her head, both of us watching, neither of us willing to close our eyes and miss one second of the other. When it took us, it took us at the same time, long and deep and shuddering, her body pulling me in and holding me there, my name on her lips like something being set down gently, and hers on mine the same. We rode it all the way out, looking at each other. Drinking each other in. Saying it without saying it.

Goodbye. Goodbye. Not yet. Goodbye.

After, she lay wrapped in my arms with her back against my chest and her fingers laced through mine over her heart. I held on.

I didn't want to let go.