Page 41 of One-Track Pride

30

EVANDER

Three days of clearing the pass, briefing federal teams, and answering the same questions from four different agencies have hollowed me out like no rescue ever has. I come through my own front door well after dark, boots caked, shoulders aching from carrying weight my body barely registers, and I stop short at the threshold. There's a lamp on in the living room. Camille is folded into the corner of my couch with a mug, a stack of her own paperwork abandoned across her lap, half-asleep and stubbornly waiting up.

"You didn't have to stay," I say, though every bit of me is glad she did.

"I wanted to see your face before I convinced myself you'd been buried under something again." She sits up, blinking the drowse away. "You look terrible, Van."

"I've been told worse by kinder people."

"There are no kinder people than me. I'm a delight." She pats the cushion beside her. "Sit down, I have news, and you're going to want to be off your feet for it."

I lower myself next to her, and the couch takes my weight with a groan I sympathize with. She faces me, tucking one leg beneath her, and there's a brightness in her that hasn't been there since the mountain nearly killed us both.

"The federal team finished their preliminary review this afternoon," she says. "It's enough. They're freezing every Northstar acquisition pending prosecution. Nothing moves, nobody sells, nobody buys, nobody so much as surveys until this is settled."

"And the line itself?"

"The preliminary recommendation is repair, not closure." She watches me absorb it. "They can't argue systemic failure anymore. The evidence proves sabotage, so they fix the railway, they fund the modernization, and Stonehaven stays connected. You won, Van. Your mountain is safe."

I've spent so long braced against the next catastrophe that hearing there won't be one feels almost physically impossible to hold. My whole adult life has been organized around the certainty that something is always coming for the people I love. Now a tired woman on my couch is telling me danger is over, and we beat it, and I'm allowed to set it down.

"Say something," she prompts. "This is the part where the emergency coordinator gets to be relieved."

"I keep waiting for the catch."

"There isn't one." Her voice softens. "You can stop standing guard for a minute."

"That's the part I don't know how to do." I scrub a hand down my face. "The avalanche didn't scare me half as much as this does. On the mountain I knew what to fight. Now the fighting's over, and your assignment ends, and you're free to go back to the life you had before this. That terrifies me more than the snow ever did."

She's quiet, taking that in.

"I'm not going to ask you to stay for me. I watched my father decide other people's choices for them because he thought he knew best, and I swore I'd never do that to someone I…" The word catches. "Whatever you decide about where you live and what you do, it has to be yours. Free and clear, I only want the future you actually pick, not one I talked you into."

"You know what your problem is?" she says. "You think loving somebody and deciding for them are the same move. They're not." She reaches over and threads her cold fingers into mine. "I don't have the whole answer yet. I honestly don't know what staying permanently looks like. I've never done permanent. It's foreign to me."

"But?"

"But I know I don't want this to end when the paperwork does." She holds my gaze without flinching. "I don't want to file my report and drive out of that pass and let you become a memory. That's the truth I've got tonight. It's not a promise about zip codes. It's bigger than that and smaller than that at the same time."

I lift her hand and press my mouth to her knuckles. She makes a low sound and shifts closer, and the exhaustion that flattened me at the door burns off like frost under a hard sun.

"Van." My name comes out unsteady. "The mountain's not going to explode this time."

"I noticed."

"Nobody's radioing us. Nobody's tracking through the storm. There's no reason to hurry and no reason to stop."

"I noticed that too."

She climbs into my lap, knees straddling my hips, and takes my face in both hands, except now there's no urgency driving it, no fear underneath demanding we prove we're still breathing. This is a decision, unhurried and deliberate, made in a warm room with the door locked against the world. When she kisses me it's slow, thorough, an unspooling rather than a collision.

My hands wander her body without the frantic edge that governed every touch before. There's time, that understanding changes everything about how I hold her. She strips my flannel off my shoulders and traces the healed places where the wreckage caught me, and I catch her fingers and bring them to my mouth. She giggles low against my throat, and that sound makes my restraint loosen.

Her hands go to my belt, working the buckle open. The zipper comes down, and she reaches inside. Her fingers close around my cock and stroke the length of me once, firm. I lift my hips so she can shove the pants lower, and I toss them aside with my foot. Naked under her, I rise to my feet and start walking her to the bedroom. On the way, we are kissing passionately, and I stumble into a wall still holding her and she laughs.

In the bedroom, I put her down and I peel off her own shirt over her head, admiring her body. Her eyes have a desperation in them, and I unclip her bra and her breasts hit the cool air, her nipples harden instantly. She undoes her own pants, and lowers them, stepping out of them, and then grabs my wrists and pulls me to the bed.