by Megan Crane
How had it never occurred to Melyssa that she’d always want to do the same?
The strange truth of that felt like a bomb exploding within her, rolling around inside until she was sure she was nothing but shrapnel. Hollowed out and raw, with nothing but tiny pieces left inside.
This time when he moved his hand it was to her face, and she was too busy trying to survive the last explosion to do anything but watch him do it. She could feel him all around her, bold and tough and every inch of him the nightmare raider warrior she’d been taught to fear since birth. And yet somehow, when his fingertip touched her cheekbone, it was so gentle she actually leaned toward him instead of away.
As if she was pressing herself further into his touch, when she knew that couldn’t be what she was doing. Because she hated being touched.
But she didn’t stop doing what she was doing.
He didn’t speak. He only traced one cheekbone, then the other, with the same intense concentration.
“Let me tell you what I think,” Jurin said, his voice gruff in a way that seemed to roll all through her, one detonation after the next. “I saw the men you came here with. They were weak. Hardly men at all. I don’t think you have the slightest idea what a real man can do.”
“That sounds like another threat,” she whispered. But strangest thing was, though she felt threatened, she thought a real threat came with fear. And couldn’t call the trapped, suppressed light inside her fear, exactly. She also felt . . . new.
Different, somehow, with his hands on her.
As if everything in her had been lit on fire. The crazy thing was, she couldn’t say she didn’t like the burn.
“Oh, it’s definitely a threat,” Jurin murmured.
And that should have alarmed her. Maybe that was what that feeling was that wound its way through her and made her feel so weak and warm at once. Maybe it was a deep, whole body alarm.
His gaze followed his finger as he moved it over her cheek and out to her temple, then back. And Melyssa didn’t know what to do about it. Surely she should push herself away from him. Put the distance between them that she usually insisted upon keeping between her and everyone.
Any second now, she told herself, she would slap his hand away.
His finger kept moving as if he was painting. Tracing little patterns over her cheek, then down her neck, then right back up over her jaw.
Melyssa had seen this expression on his face before. Out on the practice green, where the raiders flung their blades around with terrific force and all that noise. Out there, Jurin looked focused. Intent. She’d told herself more than once that she’d never want to be on the other end of a look like that.
But now she was. And she couldn’t pretend that she disliked it.
“I don’t know what you’re doing,” she whispered. Her fingertips ached and she realized that she was pressing them back against the door behind her. As if she could sink them into the door or dig her way out. She eased up on the pressure and tried not to pay attention to how close his mouth was to hers. “But you should know that I don’t like to be touched.”
If that surprised him, the way she’d expected it would surprise any raider since they all seemed to live for nothing more than having their hands all over each other all the time, he didn’t show it. If anything, that smile of his deepened further.
“How do you know?”
“How do I . . . ?” She frowned at him. “Because I don’t like it.”
“Rhiannon touches you all the time. Do you hate it?”
“Of course not.”
“Then you like to martyr yourself to your own child. Is that it?”
“No. Rhiannon is different. Obviously.”
He shifted, leaning closer and over to one side so he could do different things with the hand that was still touching her. He ran his fingers down the length of her left arm and then gently tugged her hand off the wall. Then, staring at what he was doing as if he was fascinated—which made her fascinated in turn—he laced their fingers together.
It was such a simple, silly touch. There was no reason it should wash over Melyssa like an unexpected summer.
“So it’s this you don’t like,” he murmured, his voice a low thunder.
She opened her mouth to say that of course she didn’t like it, because she didn’t think she should. She’d never liked the kind of touching that everyone else seemed to like so much—or at least tolerate. Helena and her mother had always gone on and on about how doing their duty was nothing scary. Nothing strange.
Melyssa had always thought that there must be something wrong with her that she found it all so upsetting. Too intimate and yet impersonal. Too matter of fact and yet deeply, impossibly dreadful. Surely, if she was any kind of decent person, she wouldn’t have found her single obligation as a bleeding woman to be so . . . distressing.
She’d known better than to discuss it with anyone. The point of sex was children, not the strange giggly way some of the women talked to each other about it. And she’d told herself that she’d figured it all out well enough when she’d gotten pregnant. She’d achieved her purpose, according to the church. She hadn’t thought much of Ferranti, but what did that matter? He heaved himself over her once a day for a few excruciating minutes and the rest of the time, Melyssa got to be safe and cared for.
No more running, the way she and her family had always done. No more hiding, the way she and Helena had been doing since their parents were killed. No more looking over her shoulder. A woman’s place was secured in a compound like Ferranti’s, once she’d born a king like him a child.
And if every way Ferranti touched her had hurt, well. That was a small price to pay for a warm, dry place to spend the winter. And anyway, he didn’t touch her very often in the grand scheme of things. It was better than being left outside the walls for wolves to snack on.
But no one had ever done what Jurin was doing. Certainly not Ferranti, but none of her other winter husbands either. No one had ever . . . played with her fingers as if they were miraculous. Or as if the way their skin rubbed against each other was a kind of music. Winter marriages weren’t about fingers. And winter marriages were all Melyssa really knew about men.
Because she didn’t dare let herself think about her father too closely, or all the ways he’d always been an exception to everything else out there in the dark, sad world. Sometimes she thought the way she missed her parents would never go away. It was better not to think about all the ways the loss of their affection and support still reverberated through her, all these years later.
“Are you going to answer me?” Jurin asked. There was something different in his voice then. Still gruff, the way it always was, but there was that undercurrent in it that caught at her. She wasn’t sure she could identify it.
Then it dawned on her. It was laughter. Threaded there in the deep timbre of his mighty voice. Like lightning in the midst of all that thunder and it made everything inside of her seem to slip off to one side, then crash down until it pooled in a new place, low in her belly.
She jerked her gaze away from their entwined hands to find him studying her face and she didn’t understand why that made all that thunder and lightning inside of her seem to glow. Then pulse.
“I don’t . . .” Melyssa didn’t know what to say.
She didn’t understand how he seemed to know that, but that gleam in his gaze intensified and his hard mouth curved again. But not as if he was holding back laughter. As if he was waiting for something he already knew would end the way he wanted.
That pulsing deep inside her intensified.
Then turned to something new.
It felt a lot like gold, and Melyssa knew—she knew—that Jurin was making it happen.
As if he knew her body better than she did.
4.
“What is it, exactly, you don’t like?” Jurin asked then, as if he had all the patience in the world.
Melyssa knew that no one else seemed to find him a particularly pat
ient man. She always found that so strange. She’d sit at those big dinners around all the tables thrown together in the Lodge Hall and she’d pay attention to the way they all spoke to each other. All the raiders of the brotherhood and the camp girls who serviced their needs. She heard how they felt about each other, and what they thought about each other, and all the rest. It was there in the way they taunted each other and dared each other. It was in the stories they told of far-off battles while they were gathered around the fire. It was how they moved around each other—some comfortable, some not. And she knew that no one thought Jurin was as calm as she did.
But to her, he was like a foundation. The only one she’d had since she’d come here.
She shoved that strange little thought away.
“I don’t see how anybody likes it,” she confided in him because she thought, somehow, that because he was a raider he might understand. Or at least not condemn her outright.
No one else back home—not that she really thought of any of the places she’d stayed over the years on the mainland as a home—could ever have understood her feelings because they’d all been compliant. And compliant people always said the same things about sex, touching, and everything that went along with it. It was a duty, nothing more. How Melyssa felt about it never signified. She’d always known to do what was expected of her: lie back, stay still, and think about the repopulation of the drowned and battered earth—not what was happening to her.
What happens to you is less important than what happens to the human race, the priests always told them. Because compliance was a duty and a glorious chore. The fate of humanity was entrusted to the compliant, who set aside childish, outdated notions of “passion” and “love” for the greater good and a better future for all. It was selfish to think her feelings should supersede any of that.
Melyssa had always done her duty. Wasn’t that how all this had happened in the first place? She and Helena had been on the run all their lives. First with their parents, but then they’d been killed and Melyssa and Helena had ran. They’d always ran. There was no settling into a place, no finding their feet. They’d always had to stay one step ahead of the people who wanted to kill them for their family secrets, and so they had.
And Melyssa had never been the smart one. That had always been Helena’s job. So maybe she hadn’t understood the driving necessity of it all—and after their parents had died so horribly, she couldn’t pretend she cared—but she’d understood that running and running and running did nothing but exhaust them both. She hadn’t wanted to end up dead, so she figured they should do the exact opposite of what their parents had done. Namely, their duty.
I have a radical idea, she’d thrown at Helena once as they’d hidden beneath some awful, smelly bridge while death marched above them and the thick, half-frozen mud threatened to suck them down into its depths. Why don’t we try to be normal for a change? Maybe fewer people would chase us if we weren’t running.
And maybe, just maybe, she’d been a little bit jealous of her sister. She’d never understood how Helena had found it so easy to ignore all the things they’d been taught as children. Helena hadn’t seemed to care how many priests told her what a good woman ought to have spent her time hoping for. She’d always been ranting on about satellites and server farms while Melyssa had wondered if she’d ever find a mate.
And look where it had gotten them: run down like dogs by terrible men.
Melyssa had been so thrilled when she’d gotten pregnant. She’d thought that finally, finally, she got to prove her worth. That Helena might be smarter, but Melyssa was fertile, and in the places they’d grown up that should have made all the difference.
For a while, it had. But then the raiders had come and everything had changed, and now Melyssa was here.
Her sister and she had never been as close as they should have been, and that hadn’t changed with their relocation across the Atlantic. They’d spent a lot of time together here, as they always had, but here it wasn’t fraught with peril and their own imminent demise. Here, they weren’t running from certain death all the time. The raiders were dangerous, lethal machines, but they rarely killed their own, which made Helena safe and Melyssa something like . . . safe-adjacent. Melyssa even thought that maybe someday, she and Helena might be better friends than she’d ever imagined possible back on the mainland.
Rhiannon helped with that, as with everything. Because who couldn’t adore her daughter’s beautiful, chubby little face?
The raider clan loved babies, like everyone else, but they didn’t treat fertile women the same way that they were treated back on the mainland. For one thing, the women here had babies when they felt like it. Otherwise they took herbs to keep those babies at bay. Or so the camp girls had told her while she’d still lived in that room in the Lodge, down in the lower rooms tucked up on the other side of the kitchens where the less lofty folks lived. The cleaners and the cooks. The lower-ranked healers. And the brand new camp girls, who were kept separate from the others until they found their footing in their lives of sexual surrender.
You get to be in control, love, one of them had said, as she changed Rhiannon’s diaper in those early days, when Melyssa was still reeling as much from giving birth in the first place as from the crossing over the sea she’d been forced to endure. All she’d been capable of was curling in a ball on her bed and staring in awe at her child. Babies should be loved and cherished, not forced upon anyone. Here, we get to control when we get pregnant. Or if we get pregnant at all.
But that was the thing. Melyssa had no idea how to be in control or even why that was something she should desire in the first place. She’d never been in control. Her parents had been, then Helena, with her insistence that they continue their parents’ mission. And Melyssa had been much better than Helena at assimilating into her winter situations. Maybe she’d always been good at handing someone else control.
But Jurin wasn’t compliant, and it wasn’t as if she could be in much less control than she was now. She lived in the middle of this clan, but it wasn’t lost on her that she was an outsider, and with no way to make herself an insider the way she’d done in other places—with a winter husband. Still, she thought it was very unlikely that Jurin would throw her out of the city and let the wolves have her if she admitted all the things she’d always felt, yet could never admit to another soul.
“You don’t know how anybody likes what?” Jurin was asking. “Be specific, baby.”
Had he always called her baby? Melyssa wasn’t certain. She thought she ought to dislike it, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to do that. Not when it seemed to land like his hand on her, so warm and oddly fascinating.
“Sex,” she told him. Because why not? They’d had nine months to hurt her and no one had. She doubted something she said now would make a difference. “It made sense on the mainland. Of course anyone can succumb to a few moments of pain and unpleasantness if it means you save the human race. But I don’t understand what happens here. All the time. For much, much longer.”
Jurin shifted again, and she was sure she’d read his expression wrong. Why would he look something like . . . sad? He pulled her away from the wall and she was so busy looking for condemnation or censure on his face that she forgot to be afraid that he was holding onto her. He moved the few steps over to the foot of the bed and sat down, drawing her to stand between his knees.
And Melyssa had never been close to him like this before. She’d never been able to look at him directly, no craning of her neck or tilting of her face. She was surprised that she didn’t mind the way his big hands settled on her hips, holding her in place.
Keeping you safe, something in her whispered.
The way he always had, she thought, and then felt herself flush more.
“You don’t like sex?” he asked.
“Of course not,” she said severely. Then cleared her throat when he only kept looking at her in that mild way of his. “You’re not supposed to.”
&
nbsp; “But you know that people secretly do, Melyssa.” His hands seemed to grip her hips tighter. As if in response, something deep inside her spun over and tied itself into a bright, hot knot. “Behind closed doors, it’s amazing how much people like the things they pretend to hate.”
“I was never pretending.”
He nodded as if he was filing that away. “What, specifically, don’t you like?”
“Sex,” she said again.
She thought he was laughing at her, though he never made the sound. It was that light in his amber eyes.
“Describe a typical round of sex to me,” he ordered her.
Melyssa tried to back away, but he held onto her. And somehow she ended up with her fingers wrapped as far around his heavy arms as they would go, which wasn’t far. He was so different from other men. So hard. Hard and heavy, as if he was made of steel. But he was so warm, despite the weather outside. She could feel the heat of his skin through the long-sleeved henley he wore beneath his usual weapons harness.
“I can’t describe it,” she finally said, scandalized.
“You can.”
And he waited.
There was no reason that his waiting should be worse than actual, shouted commands she’d received in the past, to say nothing of the odd cuff. She licked her lips, not surprised to find them dry.
“It’s pretty much the same everywhere,” she said after a moment. “Especially when you share sleeping quarters with your winter husband, which you do in the smaller compounds because there isn’t much space. At least it happens at night there. The places where you have to fit it in during the day are always worse. You have to leap back up and get back to whatever tasks you were doing when you feel so . . .”
She didn’t supply a word there and Jurin just watched her. Still and ready, as if he was keeping watch. And she didn’t know why that made it easy to keep going.
