It wasn’t gentle. I want to be honest about that, because everything before it had been gentle, careful, a man learning the shape of me one inch at a time, and this was neither of us being careful about anything at all.
He carried me to the bedroom the way he had the first time and every time since, but there was nothing patient in it now, his mouth finding mine before we’d even cleared the doorway, hands already working at buttons like the clothes themselves had personally wronged him. I understood it because I felt the same thing clawing up out of my own chest, some animal certainty that if I didn’t get as close to him as a body could physically get, I would come apart in some way no amount of holding afterward could fix.
“Tell me you’re not leaving,” I said against his mouth, half question, half command.
“Never.” He said it like a vow, stripping my shirt over my head, his hands immediately back on my skin like he couldn’t stand the half-second they’d been forced to let go. “Never, Sarah, not for her, not for anyone, not for five hundred more years if that’s what it takes.”
We fell into bed still half dressed, and the first time was fast and almost desperate, more collision than lovemaking, his name torn out of me embarrassingly soon, his own control fraying in a way I’d never once seen from him, like the whole conversation downstairs had stripped some final layer off his restraint and left only the raw want underneath.
We didn’t stop after. I don’t think either of us could have.
The second time, an hour later, was slower, deliberate, both of us relearning each other like we were terrified one of us might vanish if we looked away too long, his mouth mapping every place fear had touched me that week, my hands finding every place I’d been too afraid to touch since the alley, until there was nothing left of that fear at all, just the two of us and the particular silence of a house with no other life in it, entirely our own.
By the third time, near dawn, the light already turning grey at the edges of the curtains, it had stopped being about proving anything to either of us and become simply about not letting go, his forehead pressed to mine, both of us moving slow and certain, like the whole rest of the world could wait outside that door as long as it needed to.
Neither of us slept. I lay against his chest afterward, his heartbeat, or the long, patient absence of one, steady under my ear, and watched the window go from grey to gold without once feeling tired, my whole body too wound up on adrenaline and relief and something that felt dangerously close to joy to let go of the night just yet.
“I want to see her,” I said, into the quiet, somewhere around six.
He went very still. “Sarah.”
“I need to understand how she found us. I need to look at her and know exactly what we’re protecting Noah from.” I sat up, pulling the sheet with me. “I can’t keep being afraid of a shape in the dark. I need her to be a real person, even an awful one, so I know what I’m actually up against.”
“It isn’t safe.”
“Nothing about my life has been safe since a basketball nearly took my nose off,” I said, and after a long moment, he laughed, tired and disbelieving, and got up to find his shoes.