He stares at our joined hands. The boss doesn't have partners. The boss has soldiers and subordinates and assets he moves around a board. The boss stands alone at the top and carries the weight and never asks for help because asking is weakness and weakness gets people killed.
I'm not asking to take the weight. I'm asking to stand beside him under it.
His fingers tighten around mine. He doesn't speak. He doesn't need to. The grip says what his voice can't: yes. Please. I can't do this alone anymore.
I stand. His hand stays in mine. I pull gently.
"Come with me."
He follows. Not the decisive stride of a man who knows what he wants. The uncertain steps of a man stripped of armor, moving through the dark on trust alone. I lead him to the bedroom down the hall from his mother's, the one Lex set up with clean sheets and a lock on the door. I close it behind us.
The room is dim. City light through thin curtains. A bed that doesn't belong to either of us, in a house that isn't ours, on a night when four men died and a mother prayed and the war came closer than it's ever been.
I face him.
I unbutton his shirt. Slowly. One button at a time. Not desire. Not yet. Care. The way I undressed him in our bedroom two nights ago when I pulled him from the desk and put him to bed, except tonight I'm undressing the rest of him too. The layers beneath the shirt. The armor beneath the skin.
I push the shirt off his shoulders. My hands trace his chest. The scar on his ribs, the bullet wound on his shoulder, the topography of a body that has survived everything the world has thrown at it. He stands still under my hands. Letting me. The man who controls everything letting a woman he trusts move through his defenses like they don't exist.
I unbutton his pants. Push them down. He steps out of them. Naked in the dim light, and I've seen his body before. Three nights ago in daylight, last night against a wall. But tonight it looks different. Smaller, somehow. Not physically. Emotionally. The man inside the body has contracted. Pulled inward. Thegrief is a fist closing around his chest and I can see it in the way he holds himself. Shoulders curled, jaw tight, arms at his sides like he doesn't know what to do with hands that can't fix this.
I undress myself. Not performing. Not seducing. I pull my shirt over my head. Unclip my bra. Step out of my jeans. Stand in front of him in the dim light, bare, offering. Here I am. All of me. For all of you.
His eyes move over my body and there's no heat in the gaze. Not yet. There's a different look. Gratitude. Relief. The look of a man who's been drowning and sees the shore.
I push him gently onto the bed. He goes. Sits on the edge, then lies back when I press my hand to his chest. His head hits the pillow. His eyes find the ceiling. His jaw is clenched so tight I can see the muscles working.
I climb over him. Straddle his hips. His hands find my thighs. Not gripping, not pulling. Resting. Like he needs the contact to remember that he's still in his body.
I take his face in my hands. Palms on his jaw. Fingertips in his hair. I tilt his face until his eyes meet mine.
"Look at me."
His eyes try to slide right. The defensive mechanism. Break eye contact when the emotion exceeds capacity, retreat to the side, maintain composure through avoidance. I've seen him do it in meetings, in arguments, in the dark room where he sat with his head in his hands. He does it now.
"Look at me, Nico."
His eyes come back, and I see the sheen of a man holding himself together by will and nothing else.
I hold his gaze. I reach between us. Find him. He's not fully hard. The grief has pulled him out of his body, pulled the blood away from desire and toward the ache in his chest. I wrap my hand around him and stroke slowly, and his breath catches. His eyes flutter.
"Stay with me."
I stroke him. Slow and firm, my thumb dragging over the head on each pass, and I watch the grief and the arousal fight for territory in his face. The grief is older. The arousal is new. She wins slowly. His cock thickening in my hand, his breath going shallow, his hips lifting into my grip. Not urgent. A tide coming in.
When he's hard, when his hands have tightened on my thighs and his breathing has changed from the flat rhythm of grief to the uneven rhythm of wanting, I rise up on my knees.
I position him. His cock against my entrance, the blunt heat of him, and I hold his eyes and sink down.
Slowly.
The stretch. The fullness. The ache of taking him in by inches, my body opening around him, the exquisite pressure of him filling me completely. I feel him everywhere. Not just inside me but in the way my thighs grip his hips, in the way my hands hold his face, in the way my breath catches and holds while I take all of him in.
His jaw clenches. His hands grip my hips. The first real grip, fingertips pressing into my skin. A sound escapes him. Low. Almost pained. Not from hurt but from the overwhelm of being inside me, skin against skin, while his chest is cracked open, and every nerve is exposed.
I don't move. Not yet. I sit with him fully inside me and I hold his face and I let the fullness settle. The weight of what he told me in the dark room. Every death. Every failure. On me. I'm taking that too. I'm taking all of it.
I start to move.