You've thought about Price's mouth everyday for four months.
Not obsessively. Or... no, that's a lie. Obsessively, but in the involuntary way the brain latches onto a detail and will not release. The texture of his lips under yours. The way his chest had refused to move on its own, and you had put both hands to his sternum and pushed like you were trying to reach something buried deep inside of him. The count in your head- one and two and three and- and the absolute, animal terror of those seconds where he was just weight. Just absence shaped like a man.
You had brought him back.
You have not been the same since.
His office door is open. That's normal for him. Door open to the corridor unless there's a briefing or someone catching hell. You pause in the frame without announcing yourself, long enough to take him in: him at his desk, hunched slightly over something on the screen, the lamp casting him in an amber glow. The overhead is off. He hasn't noticed you.
You should knock. Say his name. Do any of the many reasonable things someone does when they enter someone's space.
You cross to him quietly- not sneaking but not announcing yourself either- until you're close enough to smell the wool of his jumper, close enough to see the silver threading through the short hairs at the back of his skull. You watch his movements. The slight rise and fall. The small shift of weight as he reaches for something on the desk.
You weren't doing that, you think and do not say. For a minute and forty five seconds you weren't doing anything at all.
"Can I ask you something," you say instead.
He doesn't startle. You've noticed that about him. He registers people before they expect to be registered, like some part of him is always tracking. He tips his head back just slightly in acknowledgment.
You press your lips together. You heart pounds against your rips. "Do you trust me?"
A pause- not hesitation, you think. But the stillness of a man choosing his words carefully. Then:
No qualifier. No of course or within reason or that depends what you're-. Just the word, clean and flat and entirely sure of itself. The same voice he uses to give orders. The same voice you've heard go soft exactly twice in the many years you've known him.
You close your eyes briefly.
Then you lift your hand and sit it over his eyes.
Your palm covers them both: the left, the right, the fine skin of his brow, wrinkles from the corner of his eyes expanding into his temple. You can feel him breathe. He goes very still under your hand, the way prey goes still, except that isn't right. Price has never been prey in his life. He's choosing this stillness, holding just for you.
He doesn't reach up. Doesn't ask.
You find his mouth with yours the way you found it four months ago, in the dark, kneeling over him on concrete with your hands shaking and your lungs full of something cold. Except... this time his lips are warm.
That's the first thing that you notice. Just the warmth of him. You had forgotten or maybe you had never let yourself remember it properly, the way the mind protects itself from the things it can't afford to want. But his mouth is warm and present and you feel something in your chest that has been held very tightly for four months begin, incrementally, to release.
You don't rush it. You can't. This is too careful of a thing to rush.
His lips are slightly chapped, you can feel the faint drag of it, the realness of it, and something about that detail makes your eyes sting behind their closed lids because he is real, he is here, he is warm and breathing and his heart is beating entirely on its own. You press in just a little more, closer, like you're trying to verify it through contact. Like you need to know he's solid all the way through.
He makes a sound, very low, barely there at all, more a shift in the quality of his stillness, and this his lips part for you. Slow. So slow you feel each small movement of it, careful and deliberate, the way he does everything. Like a door being opened by something who knows what's on the other side and has decided, having considered it fully, to open it anyway.
You taste coffee and tobacco and something faintly sweet, and you think oh, the way you think oh when something you have been bracing against turns out to be something else entirely.
Both of his hands come up. One finds the wrist of the hand covering his eyes, and wraps around it loosely, not pulling, not directing. Just... there. Just present. His thumb settles against the thin skin on the inside of your wrist where your pulse is doing something mortifying and rapid and you wonder if he can feel it, and you suspect that he can, and you find that you don't mind.
The other hand finds your face.
It's tentative at first, just his fingertips at your jaw, the lightest possible contact, like he's asking a question before he commits to saying it out loud. Then his palm settles over your cheek, broad and scorching and rough, and he tilts you, just barely, into him. The movement splits you open somewhere quiet.
You had put your hands on him four months ago with the desperate force of something trying to keep another person alive. You and pushed and counted and breathed into him and felt nothing except the terror of the task. You had not let yourself feel anything else until it was over and he was breathing on his own and someone was pulling you back and you were sitting on the ground with your knees wet and your hands shaking, and you had looked at your own palms like they belonged to someone else.
Your hand is still curved over his eyes. He is still holding onto your wrist. His other hand is still cupped against your cheek, and you are leaning into it without meaning to.
You pull back the smallest distance. An inch. Maybe less and you stay like that. Your hand over his eyes, his over your wrist, the lamp the only light, the corridor outside quiet. His breathing comes out slow and steady. Yours is less steady.
"Okay," You say, eventually. To no one. To the four months of it.
His thumb moves against your pulse point once.
"Yeah," Price says. Low and rough and soft all at once, like okay is the only word big enough for what he means, and also not nearly big enough at all. "Okay."
