Chapter 253: She Needed Him to Stay

DOVE’S POV

The house had ugly yellow curtains, a shaded garage and two ways out, which was enough to make Dove interested.

She stood beside Edrik at the open kitchen door while he listened. No footsteps answered. The windows were dusty, the refrigerator warm and empty, and a note on the counter said the family had gone north with the church buses weeks ago.

"We’re borrowing your questionable taste," Dove murmured. "I hope the bus had air-conditioning."

Edrik checked the upstairs rooms while she stayed where he could see the kitchen entrance. When he came back, they walked through together. A back stair led into the laundry room, and the garage opened onto a narrow driveway screened by overgrown bushes.

It was not home. It was somewhere they could breathe without half a road watching them do it.

Dove claimed sound canned food from an open box marked for whoever needed it, clean towels and a pair of loose shorts from the same pile. She stored the useful things after checking them. Sprout marked three useful finds without offering a separate payout; today’s shelter quest was the reward she had accepted. She kept checking the box anyway.

*There are still towels,* she told Sprout. *I’m not leaving them because you like small numbers.*

"You may continue collecting."

"Look at us agreeing. Disgusting."

Edrik heard the last word and looked over.

"Not you," she said. "You can keep looking pleased with yourself."

"I wasn’t planning to stop."

He had washed the blood from his hands, but she could still see where the cloth had missed a mark beside his wrist. She caught his arm and cleaned it while he watched her face.

"You missed some."

"Then it’s fortunate I kept you."

"I believe the arrangement was the other way around."

"Whatever you say, wifey."

She glanced up. Wifey sounded ridiculous coming from the man with blood on his sleeve, and she liked it so much she had to hide her smile against his wrist. He noticed anyway and kissed the top of her head.

His smile made her want to stay standing there for longer than cleaning one wrist required.

She found a chipped mug beside the sink and washed it before making coffee from their own supplies. Edrik offered to do it, but she shook her head. She wanted this tiny job, the familiar smell and the few minutes of knowing exactly what came next. When she handed him his cup, she kept hers in both hands until the warmth reached her fingers. He didn’t call her brave for making coffee. He drank it with her, which was better.

Upstairs, Dove chose the room overlooking the driveway. They put the ready bag beside the bed and her clean clothes on the chair. Edrik checked the back stairs again before opening a window only wide enough for air.

She understood the first check. She understood the second. By the third time he looked toward the landing, she put down the towel.

"Come here."

"I’m here."

"You’re in the doorway considering whether to murder the stairs. Come sit beside me."

He gave her a look that would have made another man reconsider his whole afternoon. Dove patted the mattress.

Edrik sat.

She rested her hand against his chest, feeling the steady beat beneath it. He was warm and solid and alive, and she had been trying not to think about how desperately she needed all three things.

"What are you doing in there?" she asked, tapping him once.

He glanced at her hand. "Nothing polite."

"In your head, Edrik."

For a moment he did not answer. Then he looked toward the window rather than the door.

"Thorne could watch you while I cleared a place. I could watch while he slept."

Dove waited.

"Now if I have to go through somebody, there’s nobody standing behind me except you."

He did not sound weak. He sounded angry at a fact he could not threaten into changing.

"I’m getting better," she said.

"I know. I taught you some of it. I like that you remember."

His fingers closed around hers, warm and careful.

"It doesn’t mean I like every man out there getting a turn to test you."

She thought of Ash throwing an armed man into the men behind him at the clinic turn. Of Thorne on a bed and Edrik trying to be a wall, a weapon and somewhere she could sleep, all at once.

She had treated needing another man as if it meant somebody had failed. Looking at Edrik, she could see how unfair that was.

"You don’t have to prove you deserve to be here," she said. "You’re my husband. I want you beside me, and I also want you rested enough to keep being extremely annoying."

His mouth moved against her fingers. "I can do annoying half asleep."

"Wonderful. A skill we can afford to practice."

She drew him closer. He came willingly, one arm settling around her while she tucked herself against him. When she wanted a kiss, she asked with her hand at his cheek and watched his expression change before he leaned down.

For a little while she wanted no answer from anybody. She wanted him, and the room, and the chance to stop holding herself upright through sheer temper.

"Dove," he says, just her name, because it’s the only thing his mouth can manage.

"Hm?"

"Nothing. I just like saying it."

She smiles up at him, and it’s not the sharp little smirk she gives everyone else, the one that dares the world to try her. This one is softer. This one he thinks might only be for him, and that thought alone makes something in his chest swell so large he’s afraid it might crack a rib.

He leans down and kisses her, and she meets him halfway, her mouth parting against his, unhurried, deep. He feels her fingers curl into his hair and the small pull of it sends a jolt down his spine that makes him groan against her lips. She swallows the sound like she’s hungry for it.

"Careful," he mutters when they break apart for air, foreheads pressed together, breath mingling. "You do that again, I might not survive it."

"Good," she whispers. "Means I’m doing it right."

He huffs a laugh, breathless, and kisses the corner of her mouth, her jaw, the soft spot just below her ear where he feels her pulse jump. She tilts her head back to give him more room and her hips roll against his again, slower this time, deliberate, and he has to grip her waist tighter just to keep himself steady.

"You’re going to kill me," he says against her skin.

"You say that like it’s a bad thing."

He pulls back to look at her properly, just for a second, just to take in the sight of her, her lips kiss-swollen, her eyes dark and half-lidded, her hair mussed from his hands tangled in it. He doesn’t think he’s ever seen anything as beautiful as her like this, undone and looking at him like he’s the only thing worth looking at in the whole world.

"I mean it," he says quietly. "I don’t think I’ve ever felt like this before."

Something flickers across her face, surprise, maybe, or something gentler than that. She reaches up and brushes her thumb along his jaw, and the touch is so tender after everything else that it nearly undoes him more than the kissing did.

"Like what?" she asks.

He doesn’t have the right words. He’s never needed them before, not like this, not with the kind of want that isn’t only in his body but somewhere underneath it, somewhere he didn’t know existed until she looked at him the way she’s looking at him now.

"Like I’d burn the world down if you asked me to," he says. "Like nothing else matters as long as you’re looking at me like that."

Dove goes still for a moment, searching his face, and he lets her look, lets her see whatever it is she needs to see, because he isn’t hiding it anymore. He’s done hiding it.

"Edrik," she says, and his name in her mouth sounds like something sacred.

"Yeah?"

"Your impossible, love you."

Later, with the room quiet and the bags still beside the bed, Dove told him she wanted them both to sleep. He checked the exits once more, showed her the chair where he had set their things, and lay down close enough that she could reach him without searching.

Four uninterrupted hours passed before she opened her eyes again.

The bond was still there. Thorne was alive.

Sprout waited until she was properly awake before displaying the completed shelter quest. Two hundred and fifty Normal Coins entered the private balance. The fans, batteries, net and meal packs waited as owned rewards, with no fee for keeping them. Her bullet shield was ready too. Dove told Edrik its limits before taking anything out. Thirty seconds might save her life; it did not make either of them safe enough to get careless.

Dove retrieved one fan and a meal while Edrik watched her. The air against her damp neck felt so good she almost cried for an entirely different reason.

"Now that’s a reward," she told Sprout.

She divided a generous meal with Edrik, opened another when he remained hungry, and draped the net where they could use it. These things were theirs. She did not have to turn around and sell the comfort away.

Below them, light moved across the kitchen window.

Edrik set down his food without a sound. Dove heard a hand test the back door, then a man’s voice tell somebody else to try the garage.