For the Dead Travel Fast
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Nebraska was reassuringly flat as far as the eye could see. She knew that, the closer to Utah they got, the more the iconic it would appear: covered wagons and rocky buttes with dusty roads. Oregon Trail-esque.
For now, they were in the middle of brown-green fields in rural countryside, their SUV clinking with cooling fluids at the side of the highway—and she could see for miles. Nothing man-sized could sneak up on them out here. They'd taken a plotted exit off the interstate and driven down one highway until it connected to another, passing five silos and a barn before a scrubby tree and a wide field of soybeans had called to them.
A field of cheerful soybeans. That factoid had been Castle's contribution, after she'd squatted behind some plants, feeling badly for ruining their gorgeous lushness with her urea. He had told her soybeans were the top export of Nebraska, but don't ask me how I know that. She'd asked, and he had looked at her blankly for a moment, and she'd realized there was no fun writer story—he just knew soybeans = Nebraska, and he no longer remembered why.
She had swung up into the driver's seat again, intending to get under way, but Castle had opened a package of trail mix and was cracking pistachios in his teeth, standing beside the field with red-brown dirt on his shoes.
Okay, a rest break, then.
"Come here," she hummed, spreading her knees and scooting to the outer edge of the seat.
He glanced over at her and came at her gesture, put his body between her knees with an elbow on her thigh to prop the bag of trail mix closer to his mouth.
She laid her hands on his shoulders, startled with the leanness of their width. She wasn't sure he had much fat left on his frame, and it was shocking to realize the shape of the man she loved was, actually, a part of what she loved about him. It was going to take her some time to get used to the spareness. To love the spareness because it meant he lived, rather than lamenting how it was one more thing she'd changed.
She spread her fingers down over his collarbones, under the loose gap of the t-shirt collar, and he mumbled something appreciative as she pressed her palms flat to his chest. Pectoralis major, connecting the front wall of his chest to the bones of upper arm and shoulder, and her fingers could detect the flicker of kinetic energy with each shift and shiver of his body.
He had never been able to sit still; the transition seemed to be making all that potential energy almost impossible to contain.
She rubbed her thumbs up the back of his neck, along the vertebrae, and then out along to his ears. He chuckled, either at her or at himself she didn't know, but she continued the sweep of her thumbs along his neck. He was warm. Those soft hairs at his nape were love.
This, at least, felt familiar and right.
She hadn't realized how very physical she was until this moment, her hands on his body and relearning him to some extent. The relief of touching a place that she'd already claimed, that was hers, that had not been reshaped by the lichen.
He was nominally quiet between her knees. Chewing. A motion towards a butterfly dipping in an unfelt breeze. The rustle of a green insect on a leaf. She ran her hands over him and did not really pay attention to his one-side commentary. Tall enough that she could press her thighs against his ribs and make him squeak her name if she wished. Instead she laid her cheek to the top of his shoulder and wondered if he would always smell like this.
Intoxicating.
"These are good," he said, apropos of nothing.
She vaguely gave an answer, more sound than sentiment, but he was content to have spoken. She slid her hand down the curve of his spine and up under his t-shirt, not to seduce him, merely to remember, relearn, to be close.
He pushed back against her hands and body, a brief turn of his head so that his salt-dusted lips touched her temple. She ran her fingernail up the bones of his spine until she cupped the peak of his scapula, his shoulder blade like an arrested wing. Skin over bone.
He had been thick and full in her arms, once. He had been taut and supple and responsive to her hands. He wasn't not those things any longer, but he was also hard and straight in places, unbending, and she wasn't sure what that meant yet. Wasn't sure if it meant anything at all.
He stayed perfectly content between her knees and she scooted a little more to the edge to wrap her arms around him from behind.
He caught her fingers under his shirt with a little laugh, a breath of that tickles as her fingers brushed high at his stomach. She inhaled and filled herself with this new scent—new but old, older than them, something that reminded her of him alone, of the faint whiskey-and-sweat stink of him in her interrogation room after his book party, of the cocky smiles and the constant jokes which always had to include some kind of kink (as if to educate her, Detective Becket, a woman who had done her time in Vice). He smelled of that man, the one she was sure she would never love but might actually jump into bed with, repeatedly, against her better judgment.
"You smell like sex," she husked.
He laughed, loudly, and tried to turn in her arms. She wouldn't let him, and she was still, shockingly, stronger than him right now. He said her name with a plaintive kind of noise, and she knew if she did let him turn around, it was all over.
She clung for an instant more, and then all discipline left her, and he was turning around and tossing the bag of trail mix towards the passenger seat even as he pulled at her.
She began tugging his shirt up, the sunlight catching his hair golden and making his eyes so very pale blue that her breath caught. He kissed her fingers; she dipped two into his mouth and stroked up along his gums to those teeth. He grunted and pushed his hands into the back of her jeans, pulling her harder into him, and her legs wound around his upper ribs.
It was fine. Fine. Nothing could be hurt by taking a break, one little—
"Oh God," she gasped. His mouth against her breast, fingers tearing at her bra. She worked on it too, all her focus just to get the damn thing off, all of it off, shirt and bra in a tangle, and he growled her name and raked his teeth between her breasts.
His breath hitched; his shoulders hunched.
She clutched his ears. Felt his lips lightly against the healing scar.
"N-no," she whispered. Tried to tug.
He nosed into the wound, his breath hot and fast. She flinched but there was no pain—no pain but a wild need, almost intolerable, for the force of his suckling mouth on her.
"No," he rasped. "Not yet."
"Not yet," she whimpered.
His tongue laved along the scar and she shuddered.
She wasn't sure if she was grateful when he began unbuttoning her pants, or almost terribly disappointed.
But the moment his mouth met the bare warm skin of her upper thigh, she forgot about the almost entirely.
—-xxx—-