Page 90 of Code Name: Harbor

“I made all this food and we’re really going to leave a whole chicken on the stove?”

“You really want to stack the orgasms I can give you against chicken?” I throw back at her.

She giggles, a girlish, very anti-Josie sound that makes my heart thump. “You’re that confident, huh?”

“Yeah. I am.”

“I’ll let you choose what you’ll do to me,” she says, and that’s all I need to hear.

I bend, get an arm under her knees, and lift her off her feet. She squeaks—this composed federal analyst who reads Russian crime syndicates for a living actually squeaks—and then laughs into my neck as I carry her out of the kitchen and toward the stairs.

“The chicken’s going to be cold.”

“Josie.”

“What?”

“I will buy you a hundred chickens. Stop talking about the chicken.”

She laughs again, low, and presses her mouth to the spot below my ear, and I take the stairs two at a time.

In my room, I lay her on the bed in the half dark, the only light from the lamp on her side that she left on this morning. I come down over her, intent to take her apart with my hands and my mouth.

But when I get her undressed, when I get myself undressed and stretch out over her and she puts her palms flat against my chest, the expression on her face stops me.

My pulse skitters because in my entire life, I can’t remember a single time that another human being has looked at me like I was something they wanted to keep.

And it fucking guts me.

“Tell me what you want,” I hear myself say, which is a level of vulnerability I rarely admit. I’m the one who decides. I’ve always been the one who decides, in bed and out of it, because having control is the only way I’ve ever known how to keep anyone safe. But I don’t want to decide right now. I want her to give it to me. I want to do exactly what she needs and nothing else.

Her hand comes up and cups my jaw, her thumb at the corner of my mouth. “Slow. I want you to go slow.”

Something in my chest loosens and I sink into her by incremental degrees. I watch her face the whole way and when I’m bottomed out, she releases a sigh that sounds like she just found her home. I drop my forehead to Josie’s collarbone, hold still and feel her, the heat and the give and the way her heart beats from her body into mine.

And then I move, and it’s nothing like any other time.

There’s no race in it, no fight. I work into her, slow and deep and unhurried. Warmth blankets over me, soothing a part of me that’s been cold so long I forgot it could be anything else. It’s peace. That’s the closest word and it’s not close enough, and it terrifies me because it means so much, I’m scared to lose it.

For one second, the old wiring kicks in. For one second, I almost go hard, almost drive into her the way I know how to, the way that turns this into a dance about bodies instead of a dance about us.

Josie’s hands slide up my back, both palms flat, dragging up the length of my spine like she’s reading me. She breathes into my ear, “I’ve got you,” and the old wiring goes quiet.

I let it be what it is.

I let myself be hers.

We move together in the lamplight, and I keep my cheek against hers so I can feel every breath she takes. Josie runs her fingers into my hair and over my shoulders and down my arms like she’s trying to show me with her hands what she can’t say, and I’m trying to show her the same thing the only way I know how, which is to be gentle and present.

Focused solely on her.

When we go over, we go over together, and it isn’t loud. There’s no shout, no slam of the headboard, none of the beautiful roughness of the other nights. It’s a long, rolling wave that moves simultaneously through our bodies and carries us together to oblivion. I press my face into her neck as she arches and shudders under me.

It shreds me from the inside out and after, I can’t move.

I don’t want to move.

Want to stay here forever.