Chapter Text
It’s not until he’s fucked her for the third time that it crosses his mind they aren’t using condoms. Soon after, the thought comes in that he’s just fucked her three times, and there’s been no crushing wave of fatigue, no quieting of his heartrate, no desire to stop.
If Sara’s noticed, she hasn’t complained, or commented.
Well. There have been comments.
Most fall in the R-rated variety and comprise a profuse amount of blasphemy. There’s been a few Pauls, which he’s made a mental note of saving for rainy days.
But she has said nothing of his stamina, let on that this is strange to her. Then again, seeing as she hasn’t asked him to stop—has, in fact, been explicit about wanting him not to—he doesn’t feel he needs to point it out.
The pleasure is nothing like what Paul ever experienced.
It feels ridiculous for a man to say this. You expect boys learn from adolescence the gateway to satisfaction. Porn. Masturbation. Tales of women who unlock the mysteries of that universe well into their thirties or forties—that’s nothing to write home about. But not men.
Yet Paul feels in his blood, in every inch of his body, that something wholly new and unchartered is happening.
It’s nothing so corny as learning the difference between fucking and making love. Paul isn’t shy of using the right words, and it’s fucking, all right, what they’re doing. It’s also mind-blowing, intoxicating, inexplicable. The hot waves that ride him down, over and over, wash him into a drunken pool of desire, seem never to relent. Never to tire.
After the third time, he flips Sara over on her back, to look at her. He intended to talk, but the sight of her bare breasts sinks into him before he has time to draw breath. He vaguely remembers tearing off her bra, at some point, so he could run his tongue down her spine undisturbed.
She gleams with sweat, crimson-cheeked, and the look on her face is almost as sensual as the taut nipples that perk up at him.
Kellerman’s hands turn to fists around the sheets. He’s hard. Again. It feels like something he should talk to his doctor about.
“I think something’s wrong with me.”
It takes her a moment to settle down. For it to sink in that he wants to talk. For all her reproaches about his chattiness, she’s been more verbose than he has lately.
“What?” she manages. The delight of taking her off-guard—of seeing her like this, hair tousled, glowing with climax, wrists tied above her head, should make for good teasing terrain.
But Paul can’t focus on that just now.
She sobers, and doesn’t look too happy about it. “Are you serious? Of course, something is wrong with you. I can’t believe you think that’s worth stopping over.”
“I mean this.”
“So do I. Do you want me to write a list about the things that are wrong with you? I know you love making me write lists, Paul.”
“Sara, I don’t—” he licks his lips. “I don’t want to stop.”
The breath she lets out is so exasperated, he wonders if she’s about to get physical. “Then why are you stopping?”
He can’t help the suspicion in his eyes as he considers her, like he might pinpoint what it is about her that has stabbed him with insatiable appetite.
“You don’t think it’s funny?”
“I’ve got other words than funny in mind!”
Her arms tense, and she wriggles beneath him. Not helping with his state of arousal. It takes a while for him to realize she’s trying to get out of the belt.
“You want me to untie you?”
“Yeah. Yeah, if you’re going to wax philosophical, I’d like to be in a position to slap you.”
“I just—” he shakes his head. Fumbles with the knot with one hand, too absent-minded to make much progress. “I don’t feel like stopping.”
“Could have fooled me. Christ,” she uses her shoulder to brush a lock of hair out of her face. “Haven’t you ever done this before?”
He shoots her a look. “If I gave you that impression—”
“No, of course not.”
It throws him off she doesn’t even try to tease. Her wrists are red when he finally helps her tear loose. Guilt sprinkles into his chest as she rubs them without looking.
“I mean, have you never done this. Fucked your way into oblivion, craved it so much you forgot sleep and food and physical limitations.”
“Do you do it like this? Like you could just go on and never stop?”
“I’m a woman. I never have to stop.”
A black gleam winks at the dirty neon as she gathers her legs next to her. Neither of them found time to remove the stilettos.
Kellerman stays silent. Finds he can’t shake himself from that strange region, between obsession and lust. His mind prickles at the impact of discovery—of Sara, yes. But also himself. In a way, it’s absurd. He’s had sex before. Yet there should be separate words for what he experienced tonight and what he used to think of as pleasure and want. Swimming in a pool and swimming in the ocean should go by different names.
If his mind weren’t blown by the sheer existence of this world he had only brushed the tip of his fingers against, he would probably be embarrassed.
Sara sighs. “Okay. Are you over yourself yet? No,” she raises a palm. “You know what? This is your night. You’re the client. If you want to talk—”
He grabs her by the hips and buries his face in her thighs. She goes silent for a while—well, not silent-silent. But she does not complain, and does not tease about having landed the perfect way to shut him up.
By the time he does start experiencing signs of tiredness, he’s secretly relieved to find his body is still functioning on that old human logic of exertion and rest.
Sara lies on her back. As the tunnel vision of desire abates, he can look at her. Truly look at her, as he intended.
It strikes him as strange a woman who’s been through hell so many times should have a body immaculate from scars. The skin he grazes with his fingertips is smooth as vanilla ice cream. Only her thinness betrays the collapse she’s endured after Michael’s death. Her eyes that open onto abysses. And the black ink carved onto her stomach.
He makes an effort not to look at the tattoo, stop his fingers as they reach her navel. Sara sighs. When he looks up, he finds her eyes closed.
“Are you done?”
A ball of shame drips down his stomach. Now, he feels like a brute. Masks it with attitude. “Did I wear you out?”
She laughs, like she sees right through him. “I’m down for another round if you are.”
He checks his watch. He’s still wearing most of his clothes. Shirt, jeans, even shoes. There didn’t seem to be time to take them off, even when the room grew hot enough to bathe in.
A quarter past five.
“Shit.”
“How early do you need to get up?” she says.
“I’m meeting Senator Green for lunch.”
A smile crawls up her face. Something squeezes into his chest, and he wants to die a little, that she can hold him in a spell, even now, when all the mystery around her ought to have evaporated.
“You’re going to have a problem with that, after tonight? Talking with colleagues, legislation, politics, and all that jazz?”
Her index trails the patch of hairs that break from his shirt. A few buttons got ripped during the night.
“I don’t think you will,” she says. “You’re still good at being two-faced, Kellerman? Wearing masks?”
Surprise flashes over her face when he takes her hand and kisses the heel of her palm. She likes him rough, hungry, selfish. Tenderness hits her like a slap. When he breaks out of the game—out of his part. The monster who tortured her, who’s obsessed with her, who could feast on her flesh all day and all night.
When he stops being the man who will destroy her.
Those are the only moments when she looks afraid.
“Can I ask you a question?”
Her eyes darken with caution. “Sure.”
“Where is Lincoln?”
Her muscles grow taut, her spine snapping straight, like his used to when the drill sergeant walked by at the military.
“You’re his brother’s wife,” Kellerman goes on, though part of him knows he should back down. “If I were him—”
“If you were him, you would have tried to screw me before my husband died. Right?”
The attack is meant to distract him. But he goes on watching her, patient, even as she bristles into defense mode.
“I didn’t think he’d be the type to let you do this to yourself. The bars, the morphine. The men.”
The line of her jaw is a warning of its own. “Lincoln has bigger concerns than saving me from myself.”
That doesn’t sound good enough to Paul. True, the loss of his brother must have been a terrible shock. But isn’t Sara his family now, through the bonds of marriage? Shouldn’t he look after her like a sister?
Maybe it’s best, for Kellerman’s sake, that he doesn’t. Still, he can’t help but think it’s a betrayal, a flaw in Burrows’s character. If ever a man was born to defend his wolf pack, then Lincoln was. And he just leaves Sara to spiral back to her old demons, sell her body to the first person who’ll give her a chance to get high?
“I just think—”
“Let’s not talk about Lincoln. We aren’t in touch anymore. You want to hear how he’s doing, invite him over for a drink. I’m pretty sure he’ll punch you in the face, though.”
Kellerman tries to digest the information. “You don’t keep in touch?”
She lets out a sigh of exhaustion. He can tell it’s a façade. A coat of annoyance dressed over a wound. “What do you care who doesn’t touch me so long as you do?”
She rolls to her side. The curtain of strawberry-blond cuts between them, and he knows he’s made her retreat farther away. That though he could reach a few inches and put his hands on her, she is galaxies away from him.
“If you don’t want to fuck me again, I’m going to sleep.”
“Okay.”
“Does our agreement include cuddling?”
“I don’t—do you want it to?”
“I don’t care one way or the other. If you want to do other things, just wake me up first.”
A bar shoots between his brows. “Of course I’d wake you up first.”
“You’re sexy when you act like you have scruples.”
“It’s not a—” he stops, because she’s achieved exactly what she intended. Distracted him.
Within a few minutes, her chest starts filling up in even breaths, and he can sense, somehow, that she’s not faking. She just fell asleep, with no hesitation, no concern whatsoever that the man in bed with her once left her to drown in a bathtub.
Do you trust me, Sara?
Or do you not care what I do to you, as long as you can sleep through it? Would you jump out a window to escape me? Do you care so hard now if you live?
He runs an index down her bare shoulder. After all, she okayed cuddling. Part of him wants to draw her against him, but the image of spooning her body with his is so ridiculous, he resists.
He’s not Michael. He’ll never be Michael.
And the woman who lies before him is not the Sara he knew.
“I’ll find out, you know,” he says, to himself. Brushing strands of auburn hair behind her back. “What happened to you. Whatever you’re hiding.”
Maybe he sounds like a Scooby-Doo villain, but he can’t stop himself from meaning it. It’s as surprising as the desire she awoke in him tonight. Kellerman was never the kind who couldn’t leave a mystery be. Curiosity isn’t a skill the military tends to value. Someone gives an order, and that’s that. You do what you’re told, without asking questions. ‘Yessir’ was the only dictum he lived by. Until recently.
But now?
He thinks of the unintelligible tattoo on her stomach. The abysses in her eyes when she looks at him.
If she wants to destroy herself, really wants it—why bother with all of this? The men, the drink, the morphine.
His teeth clench, just thinking it. But if Sara can’t live without Michael, why take the slow-winding road to destruction and not the highway? She sure as hell doesn’t strike him as a woman who likes wasting time.
Minutes wind into hours. Before he knows it, the sun is up and rising, and he’s still staring into a pool of mystery, trying to trace the woman’s secrets by carving every inch of her skin into his memory.
Kellerman always liked to think of himself as a man of principles. Maybe not mercy. But a code, from which he never deviated.
As the sunrise bleeds into the room in shades of red and gold, he swears to himself he will not destroy Sara Tancredi. But he will get to the bottom of what she’s keeping from him.
He lets out a hoarse sigh and says to himself, “If it kills me.”