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There was nothing careful left in him after that, and she didn't want careful. She rose to meet every stroke, her heels at the backs of his thighs driving him deeper, her hands moving over his back and into his hair and down to grip his hip and pull him into her harder. He set a rhythm and she took it and asked for more, and he gave her more, the bed knocking the wall and neither of them caring, the whole locked-down vocabulary of four years coming out of him low and wrecked against her mouth, her throat, her ear — fuck, Lara — that's it — you feel so — Lara — her name surfacing over and over through all of it, a tide he couldn't stop, the only word that ever held the whole of it. She was loud now, past the level voice entirely, yes and please and Dean and don't stop spilling out of her unguarded, and the sound of it, the proof that he'd undone the most composed woman he'd ever met all the way down to this, drove him harder than his own want did.

He got a hand down between them and found her with his thumb and she shattered for the second time almost at once, clamping down around him and crying out and arching up off the bed, her nails scoring his shoulders, and that was the end of any holding back. He drove into her through it, chasing it, and it took him hard and fast and total, every muscle locking, his face buried in her hair and her name breaking apart on his mouth one last time like the last word of something, and he went over the edge of the world with her arms wrapped around him and her heart going wild under his.

For a while after, neither of them moved. The lamp was still on. He could hear her heart going under his ear where he'd dropped his head to her chest, and his own going to match it, and the small tick of the old building settling, and a dog somewhere two streets over, and nothing else.

He was spent. Pleasantly, completely, the kind of wrung-out a body got to once and remembered forever. And under it, rising slow, the thing he'd been outrunning all day and all week and for a good long while before that, the thing he had no system for, sitting warm and enormous in his chest where the want used to be: there's no driving away from this one.

He'd known it on the rise. He'd known it on the highway out of Odessa with the want riding shotgun. He knew it now with a certainty that had stopped being frightening somewhere in the last hour and gone quiet, which was worse, because a fear you could fight and a fact you could only live with.

He'd shifted them somewhere in there, got the lamp off, got the both of them under the sheet, got her settled against his side with her head on his chest like she'd always slept there. He didn't remember deciding to do any of it. His body had just done it, the way it had reached for her in the kitchen weeks ago before his sense caught up, except that this time there was no sense coming to take it back.

Her hand was open on his sternum. His was in her hair. The dark was soft and complete now, the streetlight coming faint through the curtain, the whole town gone quiet around the two of them.

"I can hear you thinking," she said, into his chest. Drowsy. Amused. "You've got a very loud chest."

"Sorry."

"Don't be." She tipped her face up. In the faint light he could just see her, her hair a mess he'd made, her face gone soft and open the way it never once was in the daytime around him, and there, slow, the corner of her mouth pulling up, the dimple coming out in the dark just for him, given on purpose, the first one in three months he hadn't had to catch sideways across a room. The ledger noted it the way it noted all of them. For you, it said, for once, quiet. That one was for you.

He put his thumb on it before he could stop himself, the small dent of it, and she laughed, low, and turned her face into his hand.

"I haven't done this in four years," he said.

He felt her go still, not stiff, just attending, the whole of her listening.

"...Done what?" She said.

"Slept next to a woman."

He let it sit there in the dark. It was more than he'd meant to say, and truer than the words made it sound, because she'd know, she had the way of knowing things he didn't spell out, that it wasn't the bed he meant. It wasn't that there'd been nobody. There'd been the drives, the cities, the strangers, the careful contained nothing of it, a body's business handled a county away and driven home from clean. What there hadn't been, not once, in four years, was this. A woman whose name he knew. A woman he wanted in the morning. A woman he'd put his head down on and let himself stay.

She didn't fill the silence. That was the thing about her, she never reached to smooth a thing over, never grabbed for the easy word to make a hard moment pass quicker. She just lay there with her hand on his heart and let him have the quiet to have said it in.

"It's just sleeping," he said, after a while. Rough. Like he could make it smaller by naming it small.

"It's not just sleeping," she said.

A long beat. Her hand moved once on his chest, slow, not pushing, just there.

"...No," he said. "It's not."

And that was all either of them said, because it was the truest thing that had been said in that room all night and it didn't need anything stacked on top of it. The ceiling was still there. He'd built it himself and named it to her over cold coffee the day before and he hadn't moved one inch off it, and she hadn't asked him to. She'd just come up the stairs anyway, eyes open, the same way she'd opened the door. There was a thing in that he didn't have the courage to look at straight, lying there in the dark with her heartbeat slowing against his ribs, so he didn't look at it. He just held it, the way he was holding her.

Her breathing changed. He felt it go from the shallow rhythm of a woman talking to the deep slow pull of a woman going under, felt the last of the tension leave her, felt her get heavier against his side as sleep took her by degrees the way it had taken Levi on the couch a week ago, the boneless letting-go of a person who felt safe enough to. She made a small sound, settling, and fit herself closer, and then she was gone, all the way under, asleep on his chest in the dark with her hand still open over his heart.

Dean lay still so as not to wake her.

He lay still under the warm weight of her, eyes open on the dark, and let the truth he'd been outrunning all day finally catch up with him. For four years he'd told himself wanting was a thing of the body, a thing a man drove out of town and handled and drove home from clean. Not this. This was the other thing, the one he'd buried out on the rise and sworn never to dig up again, and it was lying on his chest right now under her open hand, heavy as anything, with no driving away from it in any direction. He'd told her plain what he couldn't give her, and she'd come up the stairs to him anyway, and he was holding her now like a man with no intention on God's earth of ever letting go of a thing he'd already promised to lose.

What the fuck am I gonna do now, he thought.

He didn't have an answer. He pressed his mouth once to the top of her head, light, and stayed where he was, awake in the dark, holding on with both hands to a thing he'd already told her he couldn't keep, and did not sleep for a long time.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

She woke alone, in sheets gone cold everywhere but the long stretch down her left side where he'd lain until sometime before the light. No surprise there. The man had two kids, four thousand head of cattle, and a day that started at five; he was never going to be the type found lounging in a woman's bed come sunup.

He'd left no note. He'd left everything else, though, his shape still dented into the other pillow, the clean soap-and-skin smell of him on the sheet she had her face half-buried in, a low good ache in muscles she'd half forgotten she owned. Lara lay in the gray light and added it all up, because adding things up was the one thing she'd never once stopped being able to do, and the total came out the same however she ran the numbers.