Page 58 of Into the Fire

“Good?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I retrieved a condom from the nightstand and a small bottle of lube. There was nothing to discuss. I rolled the condom on, and Boone kept looking at my hands moving over my cock.

I opened him up slowly with slick fingers, one and then two. His hips were impatient, rocking against my hand. His cock lay hard and leaking against his belly.

“Dante.” His voice was ragged. “Sometime soon—please.”

I grinned.

I pushed into him in one long thrust. Then I moved my hips. Boone’s eyes stayed open.

It nearly made me come right there. He looked at me while I rocked into him, his heels dragging at my calves. The headboard thumped against the wall.

Nobody had looked at me like that. I kept my eyes open so that he could see everything.

“Fuck,” I moaned.

“You,” Boone said.

He wrapped a hand around his cock and stroked himself while I drove into him harder, deeper, matching the pace of his fist. He came like that, with his eyes on mine and my name muttered in a growling tone.

The sight of him and the clench of his body sent me over about ten seconds behind, grinding deep, with his hand holding the back of my neck to carry me through it.

Afterward he dealt with the condom and came back with the washcloth. I submitted to the equipment wipe down again, and he pitched the cloth at the hamper and made it. Boone, the subtle athlete. I pulled the quilt up and pushed my shoulder against his.

We were on the same sides of the bed as before. Boone apparently had a side, and it was non-negotiable—the door side, nearest the hall. I could have drawn the diagram myself. Boone slept between the people in his house and the exits.

He lay on his back, and he was quiet.

“Tomorrow we’re on rotation,” he said finally to the ceiling. “The grass is dry. If that north wind holds, and something starts, we’re jumping it. You’re second stick, behind me.”

“I know where I am on the board.”

“Yesterday, when I wrote your name,” Boone said. “I started doing the math. Fire weather, staffing, the late-season calls, and you on the second stick. It doesn’t quite work.” His arm was still against mine. “I don’t know if I can do it. Loving somebody whose name I have to put on that board, and then stand on the ramp and watch the plane take him toward the thing that—” He stopped.

He’d said it without knowing what he was saying.

Boone loved me. He lay there beside me and told me the truth. What frightened him wasn’t loving me. It was sending me into the flames.

He believed me now.

I didn’t argue with him. It wasn’t the right time yet. He was lying beside me, telling me the thing that scared him most. I understood because I’d been there when Dutch didn’t come off the mountain.

“I know,” I said.

He didn’t say more, and soon his breathing slowed.

I lay there in the quiet, staring at the ceiling, next to the man who loved me.

Chapter fifteen

Boone

Dante was awake when I got up. His breathing had changed a while before the alarm, but he had his face in the pillow and one arm over his head.

I let him lie in bed a bit longer. We didn’t have to be down the spur until seven.