[fic]: I've seen your mouth twice and upper arms once (jason/marie)

[alice_1005]

Title: I've seen your mouth twice and upper arms once

Fandom: bourne; jason/marie

Summary: Relearning his humanity through the pathway set by her touch.

i. revelations

Paris

Their second night in the hotel starts differently to the first. This time, they’ve set a precedent. A memory that followed them around all day, even when they’ve been moving as unpredictably as they have been: following new leads, tracking down promising information, bits and pieces starting to assemble into discernible edges. Still not enough of them to shade anything in, to really know anything about him. The uncertainty of who he might be still feels overwhelming, unsolvable.

But Marie’s beginning to realise just how good Jason is at figuring things out.

Last night, she got to be the sole focus of that effort. Jason dedicated himself to discovering her, and all day, Marie's been carrying the impression of the night before around with them. Something tentative and emerging and newly-found that also feels like it’s been there much longer than it has. Longer than it possibly could have been—it’s only been three days that they’ve known each other.

And yet Marie feels much further away from that first moment when she let Jason into her car. She feels like she’s followed an untraversable distance beyond who she’d been. She thinks it unites them, that feeling—if not a shared lack of memories, a shared inability to return to themselves. Now, they can only navigate forward, along the path he sets.

Though there’s still things left for Jason to learn. For Marie to teach him, in the absence of anyone else.

Tonight, Jason’s thinking only of the task ahead of him, merely standing still in the drab room as Marie shuts the door behind them. He won't look at her. He's looking everywhere else. He's so on edge Marie can feel it: a highly-strung hum emanating from his skin, reverberating within this private place. Whatever theory on his own origins that Jason's been building, he won’t lay it out to Marie until he knows for sure. But it consumes him. It takes him away from her.

After so many hours spent running around with him, the mystery of it all feels more exhausting than exciting. Marie wants a break from it—just for tonight. She wants to forget. She wants to make Jason stop thinking about anything at all.

She starts by shrugging her coat off onto the floor. Jason glances at it with what she thinks is disapproval, and Marie rolls her eyes, tugging the sleeves of her sweater up her arms.

“I’m going to take a shower.”

Jason nods. His eyes are darting around the corners of the room, scanning for threats that aren’t there. He stays swallowed up by it, that yawning question that their efforts today didn’t answer. Maybe didn't even bring them closer to answering.

Marie hovers in the small space, not moving beyond him to the bathroom. She waits, pointedly. Long enough that Jason’s gaze flits back to her with a sudden awareness she’s not heading where she said she would.

She meets his eyes. “There's probably not a lot of hot water in this place,” she adds hopefully.

Marie can see it happen: the way something changes in Jason’s face, his entire body. Like last night, when Marie ducked her head and waited for him to kiss her back, when Jason put his hand on her neck and finally, inexorably pulled her in—she felt something shift in the whole room. She can still feel it.

Tonight, Jason needs a little less instruction. The neglected shower isn’t a particularly alluring space to share, but he follows her into the bathroom just like he did the night before. Marie takes off her clothes while he does the same behind her, much more efficiently, tossing them carelessly to the shabby floor. She starts the water and Jason climbs in after her. He reaches for her.

The water does run cold.

Marie lies with Jason on the bed afterwards, cold, naked, trying to warm up. She hates winter; she’d avoid it the rest of her life if she could. She wants Jason's hands on her skin again. She places them on her body. He always feels so warm to her: something unnameable burning through him. He was pulled from freezing water mere weeks ago, he’s spent every day since then surrounded by snow and cold air, but Marie touches his skin and marvels at the heat that feels trapped inside.

When Marie crowds over Jason he looks at her with vague surprise. That she’s doing this, that she’s still there. In the back of her mind, Marie tries to remember exactly what pieces of the puzzle of his past they'd stumbled on that day—but the knowledge is already receding from her, drowned out by the sound of her pulse in her ears as it climbs. Still some small part of her wonders if it’ll be different tomorrow. If Jason will have his answer, where that will take him if he does—maybe even to some other woman. To a home that could be waiting for him now, just beyond his reach.

Marie tries not to think about that. It shouldn’t make her feel faintly nauseous, to think about Jason going home to someone else. It shouldn’t already feel like she has a claim on him.

But—when she touches Jason he lies back on the thin and faded pillows. He watches Marie like he’s waiting for her to tell him what to do next.

Wanting to try something she didn’t get to last night, Marie coaxes Jason to the edge of the mattress, gets his feet planted on the floor. The size of the bed keeps them cramped at odd angles; she thinks this will be easiest. She slides off the mattress and gets on her knees in front of him. Even like this, naked in bed with her, Jason is capable of remarkable, verging on unsettling restraint: she can only just hear the sharp way he breathes in.

Marie likes this; she wanted them like this. Kneeling with her hand wrapped around the base of him, her mouth at the tip. She closes her eyes. She makes little noises without meaning to as she sucks around the head of Jason's dick at first, before she takes him in deeper, shifting her bent knees further apart. Swirling her tongue around him, he tastes clean, new; she wants to know all of him even when there's so little to know.

Jason’s hands stroke her hair. Too hesitant, nearly doubtful—before his fingers start tugging in a way that means stop.

Marie pulls her mouth away. She opens her eyes to him. She doesn’t know what she was expecting to see in Jason’s face, but she’s not surprised to see nothing at all.

She tries not to take it personally. She swallows, wipes at her mouth. Jason’s eyes track the movement of her hand. Marie asks quietly, “Not your thing?”

He's silent as he drifts a hand to her cheek. For some reason she can’t identify, Marie keeps herself from leaning into it.

Bit by bit, Jason’s face changes. Apologetic; stoic mask puncturing to let humanity bleed through. He shakes his head. He admits to Marie openly, honesty approaching vulnerability, the way he first spoke to her, “I don’t know.”

Jason offers her a slight smile, not like some of the toothy grins she’d provoked from him that day. Something about it marks a concession Marie is willing to accept.

It relieves some of the tension. Marie smiles back, shy but encouraging. “That’s kind of the point of this.” She runs the tips of her fingers over his cock, slowly, mostly so she can watch his neck jump with a quiet gasp as she adds, “Finding out what you like.”

Jason keeps thumbing her cheek, too haltingly to be a caress, but Marie lets herself turn her face into his touch. He surprises her by asking, quietly but matter-of-factly, “Can you come again?”

She only has once. In the shower, Jason didn’t let her touch him; it was almost annoying. He acted like he was making up for the fact that Marie had been the one to initiate the night before, the first time. But maybe also like he was desperate to touch her. Like he had been all day, or even since they met. Jason shoved her face against wet tiles, he kissed in a near-frenzy all over the back of her neck, her shoulders, he moved one hand over her chest and the other between her legs until Marie was shaking, crying out and slumping backwards into him. Only then did Jason turn her around. He kissed her so aggressively while she was still catching her breath that she felt faint.

The water ran cold on their skin not long after that and Jason didn’t like that at all. He dragged Marie out of the shower before she could do anything to him in return. He brought them back to bed.

It’s strange, hearing those words the way Jason says them. Like he could be talking to anyone, about anything. Marie has been with men who hardly put in any effort in bed. But this isn’t that—Jason just doesn’t know how to talk about it. Sex another landscape he's navigating as unknowingly as any other.

Bearing witness to that total lack of recollection pulls unexpected things from Marie. Sympathy, for one. Too much, maybe; the things Jason’s told her should make her frightened of him. She isn't. She’s scared by what she’s seen, what Jason has had to rescue them from—but alone with him now Marie feels perfectly safe. Like last night, when she fell asleep with Jason's arm draped over her waist: a line of solid heat through the thin fibres of the tourist t-shirt he made Marie put on before she slept. Like this morning, when she woke up to him watching her.

It gives her a sense of purpose, too. Marie wants to be the one to teach Jason how to connect with someone else. She feels a kind of pride about it. That Jason chose her, that she gets to be this—the only person he knows.

Getting back into bed, Jason follows her immediately, swinging his legs so they’re laid out on the mattress. The worn sheets scratch against Marie’s knees, barely more comfortable than the floor had been. She gets closer to him, gets her hands in his hair and Jason looks at her the whole time as if drawn by some magnetic force. Marie ends up half-sitting in his lap and his arms circle around her, keeping her there. She can feel him hard against her thigh.

Marie hasn’t answered his question. She strokes her thumb over his forehead before lightly dragging her nails at his hairline. “Yes.”

Jason twitches beneath her. His eyes are locked on hers resolutely, inescapably. When Marie moves to kiss him, Jason freezes like he did the first time. He keeps his eyes open for a long moment before he threads a hand through her wet hair again, finally responding in kind.

Marie kisses him deeply, open-mouthed. Her hands drop to his shoulders, fingernails leaving half-moon marks on the skin as she clutches at him, claiming. She’s not the only one. Jason kisses back like nothing she’s felt before; like he’s trying to crawl inside of her. With so much of the world still lost to him, he seems set on knowing Marie completely.

As they kiss, Jason starts to move himself against her. Restrained, tight rolls of his hips against hers, like that’s all he’s getting from her tonight. Marie wants him to know that he can ask her for more.

She stops kissing him. She puts her lips by his ear and licks at the hot skin behind it. Jason's restraint is ebbing away; his breaths are harsh against her chin.

Before she can stop herself, Marie murmurs into his ear, “So that’s it? You only want to come if it’s inside me?”

She flushes as the words leave her lips. Keeping her mouth at Jason's ear, waiting for the burn of embarrassment that doesn't arrive. Marie knows she can be blunt—but this level of openness, this early on, is new to her. Something about him means she can only ever be entirely honest. Like he has been with her, even about unbelievable things.

Jason jerks up against her. A hard movement, flaring heat along her skin. It pleases Marie, whenever he does something just because she made him do it. She lets that feeling coalesce into an enveloping rush of pleasure and lust, lets it overwhelm any doubt or hesitation or chance of self-recrimination—just like she did last night.

Pulling back to see Jason’s face, he’s looking at her like he can’t believe she’s there.

Jason swallows thickly before he says, “Yes.” Immediately, he corrects himself. “I mean, tonight. Now.”

Marie knows Jason isn’t couching himself because he’s thinking of the possibility of other women but because he isn’t. Left without a past, she knows equally that he can’t envision any future beyond the next few days at most—and in all of them Jason sees Marie with him. He’s thinking that there will be time then, later, to explore what they can do together.

But tonight, he only wants what they’ve already done. What he’s just experienced for the first time in his memory, because she was there.

Marie wants it, too. She presses her forehead against his. She nods, inhales shakily and starts to adjust herself into the right position, spreading her knees apart as she raises herself up off Jason's lap. Jason helps. His hands grab at Marie's thigh, her shoulder as she moves her legs, her body to where it needs to be. Already, Jason's flushed, arching. Marie pulls herself back a little. Steadying herself with one hand splayed on the mattress, she guides him inside of her with the other.

Jason digs his fingertips into the skin of her shoulder as Marie sinks down onto him. Wet and open for him, they fit easily together. Pleasure coils in her tightly and pushes sharp gasps from her throat.

Marie keeps her eyes open. She watches Jason as the day melts away from him at last. Slackening against the wooden headboard, head tilted back and eyes fluttering shut, his lips parting open on a rough breath. Jason lifts his hand from Marie's bent thigh but keeps it pressed to her. Curving up along her side in a long and slow path, almost like he doesn’t realise he’s doing it. He groans her name and Marie relishes the sound of it: torn from him, guttural; already she clutches the memory of it to herself, tight and possessive. Marie bears her hips down and thinks, in a fleeting moment of insanity, that maybe Jason doesn’t need to learn any others.

 

 

ii. rediscovery

Mykonos

Over two nights in that hotel room Jason didn't ask Marie for anything. He only responded. He watched for what she wordlessly demanded of him, he listened to her sounds when he complied. He only crowded into the spaces Marie made for him to fill.

At her stepbrother's Jason wasn't so assured anymore. He was afraid. By then, they had his answer. They'd found out who he was, who he had been before her—and Jason worried it was unforgivable. That it meant Marie wouldn't ever let him touch her again.

Certainly she gave him reason to assume it. Marie spent their silent drive through barren, snow-covered countryside sat tightly drawn into herself, trying to establish a distance she couldn't anymore. Something that felt futile even in its first instances; pointless to pretend that she could sever their link that easily.

Jason didn't pretend. He didn't really know how. Barely believable: the role of some hapless boyfriend he imitated for Eamon's benefit. He couldn't help himself—when he felt too guilty to sleep he stood in the childrens’ bedroom like he was supposed to be there. Like his attempted protection was penance for what he'd been putting Marie through.

And yet—Jason asked her, then. He was honest. He turned to Marie in a dark room bathed in blue moonlight and put a voice to what she'd been witnessing whir in his mind.

Jason asked her to run away with him. To choose it, beyond merely following the circumstances that had forced her hand—both of theirs—until now.

The next morning that possibility already felt beyond them. As if shrugging off an impossible dream, something he shouldn't have thought to even imagine. Snow drifting onto their hair, wettening it, face flushed with freezing air and how unreal it all felt—Marie watched Jason beg her to get away from him.

For the first time with him, she felt like she had no choice at all.

Marie spends six months of separation waiting for Jason to find her again. She doesn’t even really try to stop herself. She becomes resigned to it, those long weeks watching winter end. Marie devotes herself to painstakingly piecing together a new life—somewhere else, somewhere unfamiliar, somewhere she’d never been before—yet still the same series of inescapable thoughts taunt her. Unsuppressed by the novelty of the town she chooses, the steady routine of habits she adopts in them. Every night, Marie looks at the same ocean Jason surfaced from as she recites to herself: she probably won’t ever see him again. He might easily be dead.

But he could come back.

Jason returns to her as summer’s dawning. Greece in springtime is already warmer than many other places she’s lived, but Marie welcomes summer: the intensifying heat that means she can move around in sundresses, always craving as little fabric as possible, as much exposure to sunlight. The days are just starting to lengthen when Jason shows up at her door, clad only in loose linen like he’s carrying the summer with him.

Jason looks nothing like he did when he sent Marie away from him. He looks open, uncaged, as if finally freed of something.

When Marie throws herself into his arms he’s as warm as she remembers. But Jason beams at her like she’s never seen before. Unbridled and wide-open, joyful, his eyes crinkled and his grin pulled tight at the corners of his mouth. Every time Marie manages to break away from him, the sight of that smile sends her into the tightness of his hold again.

They don’t eat that evening. Marie’s never really seen Jason all that hungry—and she feels too jittery anyway, disbelief leaving her light-headed and reeling. Still they sit in her tiny excuse for a kitchen as the daylight begins to dim outside. Marie holds Jason’s hand over a little wooden table, the paint stripping where she’s spent months idly working her fingers into its crevices. He keeps rubbing his thumb on her wrist, over and over again, catching against her turquoise bracelets, stretching the thin wire beneath the bright beads. Marie tries to ask him things (where have you been, what have you been doing, what did you have to do to find me again) but she finds she doesn’t really want to know the answers.

Getting up from her chair, Marie only makes it halfway to Jason before he reaches for her first. He skims his hands up her waist, her sides. His touch isn’t firm but it’s sparking, exhilarating, even as it keeps her at bay. He’s delaying this, he can do that; wait and watch and plan and reason around anything, including what Marie’s ready to let engulf her.

Jason keeps her away from what they both want. He only just brushes his mouth over hers as he murmurs, “You haven’t locked up the store.”

She’s never done it faster.

The sun sets. Her little bedroom glows orange, scattered spills of fading light making their way through the tattered white curtains, lightly shifting in the sea breeze from the half-window above the bed. Jason kisses her as he takes off her dress. In the warm room, Marie goes weak at the knees.

Jason unties the knot of her halter dress with one hand, cupping her face with the other. A broad palm Marie felt the imprint of for months, here now for her to turn her cheek against. He does it blindly; their eyes are closed, she’s almost swaying in place, dazed and dreamlike. It’s nothing like before. This time Jason kisses her slowly, deliberately, no longer with a desperate urge to block out their surroundings—but equally overwhelming. Only a few minutes of it and Marie feels like she can hardly stand up.

Jason lays them both down on her bed, mouth barely breaking from hers. He hasn’t touched his own clothes but he stays like that, laying half on top of her, linen soft against the bare skin of her stomach. His shirt is long, trailing; the bottom edges of it brush against the dampening cotton of her underwear. Marie lies flat on back on her light blue pillows and kisses Jason back until she has to turn her face away to breathe.

His shirt flays open at the neck and Marie gets a hand inside it to touch his chest, immediately seeking out the scars she remembers. Jason runs his own through her hair, down to where he can fiddle with a plait, learning how it feels beneath his fingers just like he did the haircut he gave her. Six months ago, spent waiting.

Marie freezes on the thought with her hand halfway up Jason’s back. He notices; he always does. He kisses down the column of her neck, rubbing his face into the skin of her collarbone. Marie feels him draw in a deep breath there and her heart seizes—but when she stays stock-still Jason comes up, he comes back to her, he cups her face again and murmurs questioningly against her lips.

Marie doesn’t want Jason to think she doesn’t want this again. But something sits heavy in her throat she can’t swallow past.

She lifts herself off the pillow. Holding Jason’s jaw in her hand, she asks him something she doesn’t want to.

“Do you remember?”

Marie says it very quietly, soberly—enough so that Jason knows what she means. Not the nights they spent together. But the years behind them, his lost near-decade, the horrible things that littered that instantly-forgotten time. The ones Jason told her he wanted to forget. To walk away from forever so he could be with her instead.

Jason’s face shifts under her touch and Marie sees it for the first time since he came back: the punishing weight of his self-condemnation. His remorse at bringing it to her door—this time, with full knowledge of what it was that he was bringing to her.

His hand slides from her cheek to hold the back of Marie’s head, in reassurance and in reclamation, as if drawing a line between them that he hopes can keep the past definitively behind it. Jason tells her, "No.”

Marie nods. The stirrings of nausea that brewed in her stomach recede a little. She tries to smile, though it feels unconvincing.

She strokes Jason's face, steadying herself in him the way he has in her. Aiming to bring them back to safer ground, Marie says softly, “Only me, then.”

It takes a second for Jason to realise what she’s implying. He grins, the euphoria they’d been idling in washing back over him in waves. His body loosens everywhere he’s pressed himself against her.

“There were a few other things,” he says.

Jason starts to kiss her again. Not for long—he seems determined, suddenly, taken up with an impulse to move his mouth instead all over her body. He starts with her jaw, trailing his mouth to the line of her neck, leaving soft sucking marks as Marie tips her head back on the pillow. Jason caresses her side, her navel, drifting unfaltering fingers slowly across her skin. It’s new, the way he’s touching her. No longer vacillating between obvious and eroding restraint, nor the urgency of claiming something he thinks will only belong to him briefly. Jason moves his mouth and hands over Marie like he’s not in any hurry. Like he’s finally sure that he can.

Marie closes her eyes against her swooping stomach, the lightness that already feels like she’s lifting off the mattress. She breathes in sharply when Jason’s fingers ghost between her legs and stroke lightly at the damp fabric there. Only faint pressure before he pulls his hand away, gripping firm around her hip.

She swallows past the dryness of her throat. The room feels much hotter than it did in the middle of the day. She murmurs to the ceiling, “But you remembered this.”

“I did.” Jason lays the words warm and wet, confessional, at the hollow of her throat.

Jason moves his mouth down her chest, tracing an erratic path with his lips. He lifts his fingers to rub and twist at a nipple while fitting his mouth over the other, laving it under his tongue until it’s stiff enough to suck. Marie arches into it. She tilts her head, trying to look at him. She gets her hands in Jason’s hair, she sounds breathless already to her own ears when she asks, “Just the memory? You didn’t imagine it?”

She’s curious if he let himself. If Jason kept himself firmly grounded in merely the week he had to remember her by—or if his composure weakened as the months went on without her. As Marie became more of a fragment he might maybe, someday, forget. If she had started to feel unreal, like Jason had dreamed her up; if that had then allowed him to imagine Marie in a million ways he didn’t get to have.

Jason doesn’t respond, but he keeps touching her, taking her over. He's a solid weight on her body, pinning Marie where she can't get out from under him, making her wet, making her writhe against his hands. Marie wants to do more, touch him back, but for now Jason isn’t letting her as he eventually kisses a long, wet path down her stomach. Still unhurried—even when he fits his fingers into the side of her underwear to start peeling them off, even as Marie shifts above him, bringing her legs together to make it easier. Jason remains calm, self-possessed, as though he waited this long so that he could take his time with her. He lays his palms on her thighs. Strong grip pushing them apart on the mattress, spreading her how he wants her. Marie lays locked immovable in anticipation as Jason sweeps his mouth even lower—and she realises that he’s saying something.

Lips only just hovering over her skin, Jason whispers his answer: all the things he thought about doing to her, all these months apart.

Jason makes a start on his intentions. He lowers his mouth to her, tongue tracing shifting shapes like no one else has before. Novelty stemming not from the act itself but the way Jason does it. Too assured for his first time, certainty mirrored in the way he wraps his hands around the backs of Marie’s thighs, pulling her against his face in one smooth movement as if along a taut string running between them.

His expression too is singular amongst anyone who’s ever touched her. That returned relief, almost awe, of having again what he couldn’t make himself believe was his to take.

Marie wants to make him believe it. It’s uncomfortable, craning the way she is to keep her hands in Jason's hair. But she wants them there, to burn her hot palm flat over the back of his head, rubbing it back and forth encouragingly as he makes her breathe heavy and deep. Legs splayed, knees bent, she trails the bare sole of a foot against the soft fabric still covering Jason’s back. He stays single-focused on her, devoting attention that she can't return.

She lets him. She lets Jason do what he wants: bring her off like that, pushing her over the edge with just his tongue and his fingers before he slides back up to her on the mattress. Trembling against the solidness of his body, trying in vain to reshape herself against it, a thought repeats in Marie's mind ceaselessly: that this too is another first for him, shared with her. Jason had never done that to Marie before—or by lack of recollection, anyone else. This time, Jason planned for it, he thought about her and he’d thought about them together with all the weight of his executable intent.

The first time he touched her—Marie had pushed him, she started it—Jason only gave her what she asked to take. But now Jason presses himself against her soundly. She can feel the sincerity of his conviction in every purposeful brush of his mouth against her own.

It sparks a frenzied greed in her, that newness. A sharp longing to feel all of his skin against hers. It feels like she never got enough of it: barely three nights in a real bed together and in all of them they slept clothed at his insistence.

She tugs fruitlessly at Jason’s shirt again, making him laugh. Warm breath pools over Marie's lips as she keeps pulling at white linen, too tight to get it off his shoulders the way she’s trying to. She huffs at him, near-pouting, complaining that he made this a lot easier before, lifting his arms to her wordlessly in that hotel bathroom. In a low and lazy voice, Jason tells her there's no rush this time but Marie ignores him. She pulls at it, that thread of self-discipline she knows is beginning to unravel, she curls her fingers firmly around the edges of fabric and she doesn't let go. She knows already: there are limits to Jason's self-restraint that only she can unearth. And she does; Jason relents at last, he raises his arms to Marie's efforts so she can get his shirt off completely.

Still Jason tempers his compliance. Immediately, Marie finds herself wrapped in a tight cage of bare arms, kissed forcefully enough to distract her from how Jason’s still half-dressed—at least until his fingers gradually drift between her legs again, testing her, scissoring soft pressure until she says please.

At the very least, Jason doesn't make her wait.

When he pushes into her at last he lets Marie see it: how much he wants this, too. All that control finally leaving him a little as he leans their foreheads together, tilting his head down to look down the lines of their bodies, watching himself entering her. The sound Marie makes only just leaves her throat before Jason’s smothering her with his mouth, finally, finally giving into her the way she wants him to. Letting himself be overtaken by it; stripped bare of anything else that could come between them and this.

Jason asks something of her. An unexpected vulnerability. He breathes into her mouth you remembered, too and Marie’s chest constricts with how urgently she wants to tell him yes, she did. She nods her nose vigorously against his face. On the back of her shoulder, Jason’s fingers are running exactly over the lines of a tattoo he's barely seen. He stays like that, stretched out on his side grinding into her, his eyes are shut. Marie tucks her face against his cheek, whispers into his ear I was waiting and now it's him who starts to shake against her.

Afterwards, she lies with her head on Jason's chest, listening to the steady beat of his heart. As predictable as the pattern of the waves she can hear from the little window above their heads. Something stable and strong, returned to her, no longer the bookend to what would only fall away again the next morning. Closing her eyes, Marie turns her face fully into sweat-damp skin and inhales deep. She doesn’t want to disrupt this measure of peace. But there’s something she wants Jason to know.

Steeling herself, Marie says quietly, "There hasn’t been anyone else." Jason stops his hand where he’s been stroking her hair. Marie’s breaths picks up a little—until he kisses her forehead, murmuring reassurance that he wasn’t going to ask.

Marie pulls away. She mourns the loss of closely-held warmth immediately, but she wants this: to look Jason in the eyes as they both shift up on the pillows. The sight of him makes Marie's own heart stutter wildly in her chest. She’s never seen him this relaxed: face slack and open, eyes soft, bordering on unfocused—like for once he might not be thinking about anything else.

Swallowing is an effort against the stickiness in her throat. She hasn't drunk enough water; she needs to go to the kitchen for a glass but she doesn't want to get out of bed. Irrationally afraid—that if she turns away from Jason for even one moment he'll disappear from her life again. As suddenly as he came back into it.

Marie presses her palm over his chest, splayed where her head had been. “I know you wouldn’t. That’s why I’m telling you.”

Jason nods. Sheepish, he says like he shouldn't have to admit it, “Well, me neither.”

“I thought so. You only kept thirty thousand." She feels the corners of her lips quirk up. "Hardly more than the going rate for getting women into hotel rooms with you.”

At that, Jason laughs, mouth wide open and grinning and Marie can’t help but return it, like she had in the doorway, like she can’t keep her face from doing it. She reaches for him again, she feels Jason’s smile with her fingers until she puts her mouth over it instead. She kisses him for a long time.

—

The next day Marie asks him, “How long have you been looking for me?”

They’re in bed again. She didn’t open the store today.

Marie only made Jason eat, let him shower, made him fulfil the tasks he’d agreed to the night before, the end-of-day duties she had neglected in her haste to get him into her bedroom—before bringing him back here again. Hours ago. She sits across from him now on the mattress with her legs tucked under herself, staring at Jason lying back against the white wooden posters of her bed, catching his breath.

Jason doesn’t want to tell Marie what he might confess eventually. What it was like: all that time without her. Deprived of her. Wondering whether or not he should go after her—or let her get away. From him, from everything he put her through: the things Marie had agreed to in theory but that no one could meaningfully agree to at all.

When he first approached her—bereft of any memories, trapped in an infinite blankness; Jason had no path to follow except the one he carved by blind instinct. He ended up imposing that same total reinvention on someone else. Someone innocent. Someone who didn’t deserve to have their whole world wiped away from them. Because when Jason later learned the truth of who he’d been, all he wanted was to leave it behind—but Marie hadn’t abandoned her own life of her own volition. Only at Jason’s insistence. His doing.

He doesn’t know how to admit that to her. Jason’s bitter knowledge of his own culpability—and that he was eventually selfish enough to ignore it. Finding some rationalisation to enable him to seek Marie out again, caught in a path that had been long and winding but could only ever end in one place. As inevitable for him as it was threatening to her. Jason knows he carries danger everywhere he goes and always will—yet Marie could walk away from it. She already has.

But finding her again doesn’t feel like a mistake. It feels right. Like following the only point of light that could exist for him, no longer merely through circumstance or coincidence but by choice. And not only his. Marie may not have set out to break so definitively from her own past—but she made choices, too. She followed Jason into that unknowable, empty apartment. She didn’t run after they were attacked there, she didn’t get out of the car Jason bundled her into again even when he told her she should, even when they had an idea of what danger lurked if she stayed by his side.

But she did. Marie stayed. In a dank and dim hotel bathroom, she stood still and stared at Jason unblinkingly for unending minutes, letting him cut her hair while he steadied himself with a hand on her jaw and tried not to notice the way she was looking at him. Marie didn't let him ignore it. She kissed him, she opened herself up to him, she did it again the next night; in the end she only walked away from Jason when he pleaded with her to do it.

And now—she was welcoming him again, into her bed and her body. Despite everything she now knew about him—and what both of them still didn't.

Jason swallows, focusing on meeting her gaze. Marie's frowning a little now at his protracted silence; his stillness bringing to mind other, darker times he went quiet on her suddenly. She nudges her knee against his leg, smiling unsteadily. Soft and distracting, she asks him again how long it took him to find her.

He tells her the truth. "A few weeks."

Shadows of disappointment edge into Marie’s face. Self-admonishment for something she’s far less responsible for than he is. "I guess I didn't do such a good job hiding," she says wryly.

Jason lifts his hand, fingers splayed and reaching for her as though touch alone can suppress any second-guessing. In either of them. He starts caressing from the top of her thigh down to her knee, an imitation of earlier movement. Both naked, the sheets they need to change lie rumpled. A sea of light navy rippling around her suntanned skin. Marie widens her bent legs a little further apart as he speaks, seemingly unaware she’s doing it.

“It’s not that. I’m good at finding things. I have to be. And I know you pretty well, so…”

“You do, huh?”

Marie only just smiles, shy, teasing—but Jason can’t help but grin unreservedly at her again. It’s working: turning to what’s recently reclaimed between them to suppress any lingering doubts or recrimination or dread. Jason’s losing count of how many times his face has split open—but he knows it’s never happened this much before in his short and renewed life. And Marie keeps beaming back, happier than he’s ever seen her, aglow with it. The undeniable vividness of that joy keeps lighting sparks in him, as sharply and brightly as the first moment she threw herself into his arms.

In this moment, in bed with her, with his hands on her skin, with her contentment humming warmly between the space of their bodies—this is something he could justify anything to have.

Jason strokes his fingers over her leg. “Well, I’m getting there.”

Marie touches his face. She can’t stop doing that, either.

Suddenly she says, in an odd voice, “You never asked me what I use instead.”

Jason knows what she means. In Paris, braced over her for the first time, Jason told her that he didn't have any protection. He ran his fingers slowly across Marie's stomach when he said it. He spoke haltingly, unsure of what it was exactly she wanted from him, even as determinedly as she was going about getting it. Marie pulled him close with an arm at the back of his neck, she asked, what, you didn’t buy any with the dye? It took Jason a long moment, eyes darting over her face, to realise she wasn’t serious. Marie was teasing him. She did that; Jason had tried then to show her he enjoyed it, the flushed feeling it brought him. He kissed her for only a moment before huffing a laugh against her skin. The first one all night, breaking some tension. Marie smiled up at him from the mattress. She dragged her painted nails bluntly over Jason’s collarbone and said we don’t need them. She was impatient now, her voice throaty and dark. She pulled him back to where she wanted him to be.

Jason brought it up again last night, unsure after six months’ separation. Marie had only nodded against him, a little frantically, to say that it was fine.

He gazes at her levelly. “You don’t take a pill every day.”

“You’re sure?” Voice flat; she’s not really asking.

“I’m sure.”

“Just because you’ve never seen me do it yourself, that means I don’t?”

Marie doesn’t give him a chance to reply. All of a sudden she lunges at Jason until she’s half on-top of him, legs crowded against his hip, face hovering so close he can’t clearly make out the smile playing on her lips. She asks, “Tell me everything that’s in the bathroom.”

Jason does so immediately, tonelessly, listing labels he’s looked at only a handful of times, most of them in a language he doesn’t really speak. He tells Marie where everything is in relation to each other, that they’re not arranged in any discernible order to him—he thinks maybe she’s misread some labels herself; he knows enough words to know that things aren’t all where they should be—and Marie grins at him, animal-wide and baring her teeth. She moves so she’s straddling Jason fully, laying her hands on his bare chest. Leaning in to kiss him, she whispers hotly, promisingly against his mouth that he doesn’t know everything.

 

 

iii. recognition

Mediterranean

Jason takes her to different cities but they're always warm, always by the ocean. It's what Marie initially suggested, the first time he asked her to run with him. She laid on top of him in a cold room at her stepbrother's and she made him talk about what it would be like to hide out together. She asked Jason where they might go. He listed some options, but even as he did, they all sounded the same to him. All their distinctions ultimately meaningless; what mattered is if she went.

He doesn't know what he was hoping for, when he first asked Marie to go with him. It must have been something like what he has now—but he can't believe he ever really hoped he'd get it. An endless stretch of time together where he can focus on learning her completely. And he has been; Jason’s sure there's nearly nothing about her he still doesn't know.

But he keeps at it. Now, the bedroom they’re in is theirs, temporarily but completely. It’s hot with trapped air as Marie lies underneath him, spread out and sweating on the sheets. Above her head, their fingers are not quite laced together; skin too sweat-slick to clasp fully. Marie’s fingernails cut into his palm instead, sharp little marks he barely feels.

Jason’s not sure how long they've been like this. He knows he's been dragging it out, maybe a little unfairly; Marie can't commit herself to self-denial the way he can.

But Jason has limits, too. He couldn't let go of this. He couldn’t let her get away.

He moves his hips suddenly just to catalogue the hitch in Marie’s breath, the flutter of her eyelids. She's trying to keep them open. She's looking up at him, gaze hooded but perceptive all the same. She bites her lip. Jason lifts the hand not in hers to rub his thumb over her mouth, making it part open, pushing his thumb just inside so her front teeth bump against it. Marie breathes out shakily, her throat sounds dry but her lips are wet around his finger as she murmurs, You like this best.

She’s been following him for three months. She's learning, too.

Jason’s only answer is a slow rocking into her. This time her eyes slip shut.

Still, she speaks. She mumbles, almost to herself, So you can watch my face.

Jason doesn't need to see her face to know what she’s feeling. He knows how to measure Marie’s exhales when her back is to him, when she’s balanced in his lap and he tucks his face into the sweaty skin of her neck. Laying out on their sides, mouth pressed into the back of her hair where it’s damp and falling over the pillow, he can watch her fingers furl and unfurl in the sheets. Out in the world, apart from her, he can find her in any crowd. He can hear her steps, long yards away: whenever she returns to him he's always already waiting.

—

Jason asked her what she wanted and she told him like this and pushed him down onto the bed. He watched her do it; he was always watching her. Marie kissed him hard so he’d stop, so he’d wrap his arms around her and close his eyes, let go a little. Let her do this. She got a hand between them, around him, she moved her grip slow and tight over his cock until Jason arched up into her. Breaking her mouth away from his, Marie murmured let me ride you and Jason was already nodding, his hand grasping her shoulder, he was pushing them upright.

Once Marie’s settled on him Jason starts rubbing her clit with the heel of his hand. Painting slow circles, not enough to get her off, he knows that; he doesn’t want her to yet. She’s good for it more than once, usually—but he wants to keep them like this.

The gesture gets to Marie, still. She breathes out heavily as she keeps bearing down onto him. Jason’s other hand is halfway up her back, fingers fanned against her skin. Marie braces herself with her hands on his shoulders, palms so sweaty it’s hard to hold on, and Jason thrusts up into her, his face unchanging but for a minute tightening of his jaw. He’s watching her again, waiting for her to break.

It can drive Marie crazy, that control. She knows that she makes Jason break his own rules more than anything else; that he wouldn’t live a life anything as routine as this if she wasn’t with him. One where he lets Marie pretend, lets her try to build a home in all these different places. Jason lets her do it because he knows—they both do—that he’ll never have a home apart from her.

Yet Marie wants more. She never thought of herself as particularly greedy before. She made do with very little for a long time—but now, she thinks Jason could never give her enough. Marie has learned to take whatever she can get, whatever he can give. But staring down at Jason as she works herself onto him, she selfishly wants for him to belong to her completely. Wants to be rid of the dark forces that wake him in the night and send him running: on beaches for long hours that don’t make him feel any less cornered, to all these different cities that don’t make him feel any safer.

But this, Jason can give her. Wholly, and uniquely. No one else has ever even touched him, not that he remembers. Marie isn’t glad of it—but she’s only human; she closes her eyes sometimes and indulges in her total ownership of the only love Jason’s ever known. The only love she thinks he might ever be able to give back.

Marie makes Jason give it to her; his body and his heart. She works harder, she rocks her hips down more forcefully, she does it until she’s dragging low and involuntary sounds from his throat. She sets the pace like that, thighs shuddering from the effort it takes to maintain it, her heart hammering, and Jason gives in. He collapses into her a little. He presses his face against her neck. His mouth half-open, he breathes Marie against the skin there like she knows he’s never said anything else.

—

Sometimes when Jason’s inside of her he can tell what Marie wants him to say. She tips her head towards him so Jason’s mouth is at her ear, a silent demand like he owes it to her. He does. He thinks, all the time, of everything Marie’s doing for him, the unspeakably dark things she accepts. Because of what she feels for him. What he’d never hide from her that he returns.

Jason can barely believe he has this. Marie’s love, and everything that comes with it: his only chance of any kind of life. A real life. He’d asked her to hide with him but it’s more than that. Marie makes it more. He sets restrictions but there’s only one reason she ever follows them.

He doesn’t know if it’ll always be enough. Jason worries every time she’s underneath him that it might be the last time. That they’ll take her away from him—or that she’ll leave on her own. That Marie will finally decide, one day, that she’s had enough of the life he makes them live. He thinks he could accept losing her if it was for the sake of her happiness, but not any other way. He couldn’t—

Jason stops himself. Judging by the way Marie’s looking up at him—the breathless anticipation of her parted mouth, laying wide open to him and waiting—he hasn’t shown her anything on his face to cause concern. Any doubts, any unthinkable fears that Jason won’t let come true. He’ll keep her safe. He’ll give her what she wants. He does then; he lifts Marie to him, raw and rough at the shell of her ear, he tells her what she wants to hear.

 

 

iv. remaining

Goa

Jason’s on the way back from a run when he sees the pendant. It’s small. Easy to miss, grouped as it is with so many similar objects, but something about this one catches his eye. The colour, maybe. A strikingly saturated green set in a silver frame, too light to be jade. None of the wares in any of the roadside stalls are ever precious, just cheap stone carved and set in an endless and eye-catching variety to ensnare passersby, tourists. Jason might pretend to be one of them, sometimes—but only ever for Marie’s sake. Right now, he’s alone.

Of the two of them, she’s much more likely to indulge in anything. Her wrists, fingers, and neck all already bear the decorations she seeks out in stalls just like this one.

And yet. On a long bridge replete with stalls on either side, cars trudging through near-standstill traffic, he stalls on the pavement with one foot in the road.

From their front porch, Jason knows what Marie’s doing inside before he even opens the cottage door. She always neglects to close the bathroom door when she showers; he can hear the harsh pattern of the water resound against the tiles as he gets out his keys. Once inside, the scent of the steam rises to greet him.

He needs one, too. His shirt is sticking to his skin with sweat. He goes into the bedroom and places a small parcel on the bedside table.

Jason backs away. Listening to Marie turn off the water in the ensuite, old tap whistling with the high-pitched noise it makes. She comes into the bedroom a minute later wrapped in a colourful towel, she's tying up her wet hair and her hands stay steady when she sees him. It’s something she had to get accustomed to early on, after six solitary months: that Jason could now loiter anywhere she looked, arrival sudden and silent.

“You're back already?”

Marie sounds relaxed. She doesn’t wait for a response, eyes pulled immediately to the sweat soaking the fabric stretched over his chest. Reaching Jason, she pauses. Quickly kisses his cheek, touches his arm in passing as if to balance herself. Her palm lingers on his bicep over the shirt. Leaving a faint damp handprint on the thin cloth when she moves past him, telling him the shower’s all his.

Jason peels the shirt off the moment he shuts the bathroom door behind him, but he feels the echo of her touch on his skin the whole time he washes.

When he comes out again, Marie’s found the necklace and she’s wearing it. She’s let down her hair. She's sitting naked on the end of their bed, her knees together, feet on the floor near the wet towel she's let slump down onto it, careless like she’s never the one who does any of the laundry—which she isn’t. Both of her hands grip the edge of the mattress. Marie looks at him: expectant, waiting. It’s always humid wherever they are, always by the water. Jason can see her wet hair starting to frizz at the edges as it dries.

As Jason approaches the bed, Marie tosses her hair back over her shoulder so there’s nothing but the necklace displayed on her naked skin. She smiles at him, arching a little to show it off. The green pendant sits high on her collarbone. Jason keeps his eyes focused on it like he’s not allowed to look at anything else, even though in the corners of his vision he can see Marie languidly part her legs.

He lifts his eyes to Marie’s face when she starts to speak. The unbridled pleasure in her expression mixes with faint amusement, lifting the corner of her mouth.

“Most guys make a bigger deal out of giving their girlfriends jewellery,” she says pointedly. It could be an accusation that Jason’s trying to downplay the act—but it’s not. There’s a fondness to her smile, an understanding that’s growing all the time.

“Uh-huh.”

Jason keeps his own towel wrapped around his hip. He kneels down on the wooden floor very carefully, not letting it fall. This close, he can see Marie’s breath quicken in the rapid in-and-out movement of the outline of her stomach.

Marie reaches for him immediately, a reflex reaction, fingers scratching the back of his head and half-pushing him towards her.

There’s no need. Jason’s moving in already, lowering his mouth, turning slightly to start kissing the inside of her thigh. It’s the middle of the day. Their bedroom is warm and bright. There’s a breeze coming in through the window, gently billowing the long curtains around the bed; Marie’s skin is already dried beneath his lips. He leaves a line of wet, sucking marks along her inner thigh that draw out a soft sigh above him.

Marie moves her hand so her palm is flat against Jason’s hair, running it back and forth over his scalp. She only ever buys bars of soap—fragrant blocks she collects from innumerable stores, varied in their colour, their scents: Jason smells patchouli now as he noses into damp curls left faintly tacky with it.

Marie sighs again. She brings her legs together over his shoulders, heels coming to rest lightly on the backs of his calves. When Jason starts to stroke her with his tongue she digs her heels into him, she gasps, she drifts one of her thumbs down to his ear and rubs almost aggressively, impatient for what she’s already getting.

After a few minutes of having his mouth on her, Jason looks up at her through his eyelashes. Marie’s eyes are closed. She’s touching herself, rolling a nipple between her thumb and forefinger. Her head is tipped back. From this vantage point, Jason mostly sees the long line of her neck, tanned like all the rest of her. He wishes for a moment that he could press his mouth to it: the pendant of her new necklace. Feel the flat metallic taste of it under his lips, contrasted against her warm and sun-kissed skin.

He uses the hand that’s gripping Marie’s thigh to spread her apart a little more. His thumb digs into the flesh there and she moans. The sound is quiet, drawn-out; Jason lets go of her leg to start rubbing circles over her clit with the same thumb, pressure harder than his tongue had been, and Marie gets louder.

He licks at her again, inside and around her. He wants to hear her. Marie knows he does. There’s very little she hasn’t dragged out of Jason, made him admit to her in bed. Gaining that knowledge has been a mutual effort: Jason slips his forefinger against his tongue, pushes the length of it slowly into her the way he knows she wants. He moves it steadily and unrelentingly back and forth until Marie starts to squirm a little, pushing herself against his face. She says his name. Pleadingly, begging for what she doesn’t need to.

Still, she hasn’t let go completely. Seventeen months; Jason thinks he’s left his mark on her. It takes longer to draw her out, like every day she learns a little more of his control.

It’s not something Jason wants to think about too closely. He focuses on taking Marie apart instead. Moves a hand away to curl around the small of her back, pulling her in where she’s pushing herself against him. Jason keeps his arm wrapped there as he starts sucking her clit. Sliding another finger inside of her, crooking them as he thrusts them, bent together in a hard line Marie can move herself against. Her thighs are trembling now. Squeezing against his temples as she starts to unravel.

Marie comes with her hands spread out on what she can reach of him. The side of Jason’s face, his shoulder; he feels the dull prodding of her nails in her shaking grip, hardly noticeable against the backdrop of the long sound she makes. Jason wrings as many noises from her as he can. Until they quiet down to low, throaty exhales, until he hears the sharp intakes of oversensitivity. He pulls his fingers from her. He kisses her stomach. Marie’s own fingers scrabble over his head weakly in a vain attempt to bring him up to her.

The circle of her legs is still too tight to get away from. Jason pushes them apart, gently, shifting so he can get up off his knees.

Spreading herself back out on the mattress, Marie tugs at Jason's towel where it’s fastened. She makes an annoyed huff when it doesn’t fall away instantly. Jason smiles. She never wanted to wait—even like this, even after already coming, laying there with hooded eyes, gaze as heavy as if she’s about to fall asleep.

Jason reaches down, hand covering hers, helping her undo the towel. Marie pulls immediately to unfurl it. Shoves it away artlessly to join her own on the floor. Free of obstruction, she wraps a hand around Jason immediately, giving his cock long and lazy pulls.

Jason breathes out slowly into her touch. He tries to let go, enough that Marie can hear the harshening timbre of his exhales as she keeps moving her hand. For her gratification, if not in guidance—Marie knows what she's doing. She knows him. She's learned. She tightens her hold and looks up at familiarity through lidded eyes.

He feels awkward like this, hovering above her. He lowers himself so they’re more level. When he settles his hips onto hers, Marie shifts automatically, legs opening a little. Jason starts to move like that, shallow thrusts between her thighs, still wet with her.

She makes a soft sound. He doesn’t stop. Marie wraps a hand around his shoulder, dragging him down so their faces are close together.

Her voice is thick. “Just give me a few minutes, then you can—”

“This is good,” he interrupts.

Marie looks surprised, like she’s going to argue. She bites her lip and Jason wonders if she’s disappointed; if she was holding out for him inside her.

But there will be time later. They have all day. Every day.

“Okay.”

Marie positions herself better for it. She squeezes her thighs tight around him. She runs a hand down his chest in a slow trail.

She tilts her chin up and Jason realises this whole time he hasn’t kissed her. When he leans down she surges up to him, she kisses him forcefully, open-mouthed, at odds with the idle pace of her hands on his skin. Marie sucks on his tongue. Makes a high-pitched whine in the back of her throat, a reflexive response to tasting herself in Jason's mouth. It sends heat shooting straight through him as he grabs a loose fistful of her hair where it’s splayed out on the pillow.

Jason focuses on kissing Marie as he grinds between her thighs, progressively slicker with sweat and precome. All while Marie keeps touching him, her hands drifting all over his back like the very first time, seeking out scars she has memorised, now.

Suddenly Marie breaks her mouth away from his to kiss the side of his jaw. Licking the skin against the shell of his ear. She starts whispering into it, voice hot and muffled and inescapable. She tells Jason that she's been waiting for this, even before she found the necklace, she was thinking about it in the shower when he was gone, that whenever he leaves her here she’s always waiting for him to come back to her, to this, to home.

Jason comes with a long, deep groan that he buries into the skin where her neck meets her shoulder. Beneath his mouth, Marie’s pulse feels almost as fast as his. The necklace cord catches against his bottom lip. He lets himself lie there for a long moment, half on top of her. Her breaths come in unsteadily against the side of his face. She hasn’t stopped the slow sweep of her palms on his skin.

He pulls away from her, ignoring her mumbled protests as he bends over the side of the bed. With one hand, he roots around for one of the towels on the floor. His hair clumps wetly to his forehead with sweat: he’ll have to shower again before bed.

Jason comes back gripping one of the towels. He uses it to wipe off what he left on her thighs before it can dry in the warm room. Marie wouldn’t care if it did—he knows that and she knows he does. But she lets Jason do it. She watches him, her eyes are dark, that same mix of fondness and amusement colouring them. She reaches out to grasp his jaw weakly, only momentarily. Letting go, Marie stretches the tips of her fingers to trace the skin there. She murmurs a gentle, half-hearted reproach.

With the final swipe of the towel, Jason’s wrist brushes heavily against her and her eyes immediately slip shut on a sharp intake of breath. He pauses before repeating the movement instinctively. Marie breathes out again. This time fading into a near-moan, quiet but undeniable. Jason stills. He gazes at her for a long moment, listening to the already-slowing beat of his heart in his ears.

Jason tosses the towel somewhere behind him. He lies down, coaxing Marie onto her side with an arm draping around her shoulders, fixing them so they’re facing each other. He starts touching her again. He presses just the tip of his thumb into her, only to leave it wet for when he pulls back and strokes her clit with it. Marie’s eyes stay closed, but she arches in a way that brings their faces closer together, her mouth hanging open on her harshening exhales. She spreads herself. Lifting her thigh so she can twine a leg around him, propping her knee against Jason's hip, leaving herself wide open to his fingers. Jason kisses her. He kisses her the whole time, he loves her like this: warm and laid open, already overtaken by what he can make her feel and still asking for more. Nothing but boundless trust he can’t believe he gets to have—discernible in the way Marie curls herself into him, the way she won’t open her eyes, just lets Jason kiss her softly, rub at her until she comes apart against him again, panting when she says his name for a final time.

Disentangling herself, Marie lets her head loll back onto the pillow. She swallows. She blinks like she’s trying to wake up. Head in his hand, Jason props himself up so that he can look down at her. He keeps his elbow on the mattress so that he doesn’t lay down and flat, pull her to him and fall asleep. It would be easy—but he’d pay for it later if he did: just another item in the long list of what made it hard to sleep at night.

Marie’s fiddling with the necklace compulsively. Jason thinks of her biting her nails, the speed she can speak when she’s nervous that he doesn’t hear often anymore. He lays a hand over hers and she stops.

She looks up at him. Sounding more awake when she says, in idle commentary, “You don’t buy me a lot of things.”

Jason hesitates before he responds. “Well, we don’t keep many.”

“I know. But—why this time? What about it?”

He lifts his hand. He stretches to brush strands of hair off Marie’s forehead where they’re falling into it. Her face flushes with warm contentment. “It just made me think of you.”

Her mouth quirks, only tentative. “Does that happen often?”

Jason's face doesn't change. He tells her honestly, “Yes.”

Marie smiles. She smiles slowly, softly, so different from her exuberant beams in the beginning. Their real beginning: so many miles away in a blue doorway bordered by the ocean, so many months ago. Now what graces Marie's lips is more private, more hard-won—witness to deeper sentiment than Jason could have shared back then. She was always the only idea Jason had of home. But now, he knows. He's sure. He shows her.

It’s such a relief whenever he can share a truth that makes her happy. Though the tally still rests firmly on the side of all the things Jason wishes she didn’t have to know, that he wishes he could keep from her. He only has one good truth to counter the weight of all the bad—but Marie reaches for him like it’s the only one that matters.

-

Lately every time Marie wakes, she looks for Jason. She looks to see if he’s still there beside her. If he isn’t hiding from her again, sought out by nightmares he can’t control, that haunt him more and more. The urge keeps Marie on edge every night. Climbs into her own dreams and makes it harder for her to sleep, despite Jason’s intentions otherwise. He found her, he asked her to go with him and she agreed. He’d given her a choice and she’d taken it, she doesn’t regret it—but Marie knows there’s things Jason never let himself really anticipate. That she’d still be there, still sharing his bed all these months later. That he’d ever keep her awake without meaning to at all.

It’s been getting to her, the nightmares. The sick black half-visions of things she tells Jason might not really be memories but that he asserts must be, have to be; every time he speaks with a grim inevitability. Jason’s confident of so little, he still can’t remember so much—but of this, he’s certain. That the horrible things that visit him at night are things he really did.

Marie’s not so sure. She can’t think like he can. Always, she has to believe in something better.

It’s been two weeks. Two weeks since the last time she found Jason shaking in the ensuite, burning up with what he couldn’t repress. Sometimes it helped for him to try and write it down—but it hadn’t then, or at least Jason had refused to even try to let it. He wouldn’t come back to bed no matter what Marie said. Despite all the things she recited to him, her careful and complex web of justifications and mitigations that allowed her to be with him. Jason didn’t want to hear any of it. He acted like he hardly wanted Marie there. As though she could never understand this, so she shouldn’t bother to try.

Marie knew he was doing it deliberately. Depriving himself of her, as if in atonement for acts he couldn’t remember committing. She couldn’t bear Jason like that: she hated it more than anything else he had ever made her do. She told Jason over and over—he couldn’t shut her out. That she didn’t deserve it, not after everything she’d done for him. That if he wanted to push her, she could leave.

That brought Jason back. Away from whatever dark corner he was shutting himself into, locking himself away where she couldn’t touch him. He came over to Marie, he said he was sorry, he clutched her jaw tightly and he told her that she was right, he was sorry; he gave in. He kissed Marie in a way he hadn’t in a very long time. He never took her as a given, but he’d started to trust all these months—that she loved him, that she would stay. That he could count on her to stay.

At that moment Jason didn’t believe it. He kissed Marie with a desperate fear. She could feel it in every line of him, everywhere he’d pressed himself against her. Something he never told her about and didn’t have to. He didn’t want her to know: what it would do to him if she walked away.

Jason did come back to bed, then. He took Marie to it. He was still shaking. He couldn’t stop. His hands trembled as they unbuttoned the long shirt she’d been sleeping in. Marie put her hands over his but she only squeezed, she didn’t push him away. She didn’t want to. She felt so different from the first time they did this but not enough; still that same urge to soothe Jason, to push everything else aside. Even the things he’d done. Especially those.

Marie thought Jason might be rough with her but if anything he was too gentle. She tried to tell him that made it worse, more unbearable, but she didn’t think he could hear a word she said. But she heard him; Jason wouldn’t stop telling her things. His voice a rasping shudder against her cheek: Jason said that he was sorry, that he loved her, that he needed this, that she was the only thing. Jason said things he’d never said to her before and never would again—things Marie knew were true as much as she knew he didn’t want to voice them. He did then only because that night, he’d seen it—peered across into an abyss where he woke shaking every night in an empty bed. Every awful memory only making the threat more vivid, like the more he remembered the higher the likelihood that Marie would walk away. The more Jason would think that’s what he deserved, anyway. The more he’d push her to leave.

Marie wouldn’t. She didn’t want to. Jason never saw it that way—in such simple terms. She stayed because she wanted to stay. She slept in his bed, she opened her body to him because she wanted him there with her.

She stayed open to him that night. It was too much, hearing Jason like this, but Marie endured the weight of his words. When her eyes got wet Jason kissed them, he moved in her so slowly, like she could break. Marie could just manage to wrap her mind around the violence Jason came to her from but his tenderness was too much, sometimes. So much more singular than the monotony of the horrors he left behind. Something no one else could unlock the details of, that no amount of external research could outline. Only Marie would ever know—could ever believe—that Jason was capable of touching her like this.

Tonight—Marie wakes in the dark and she lifts her head off the pillow immediately, staring next to her. Jason is there. He’s sleeping—or at least he was. When Marie looks down at him he stirs instantly; he always does that now. She remembers back when Jason didn’t know who he was at all, when he slept in her car all night and told her that it had been the first time he slept in weeks. Marie didn’t yet know—neither of them did—what they do now: he could sleep because she was there.

Jason’s calm when he wakes up to her. He reaches out, he shushes her; Marie didn’t realise she was making any noise. She’s been saying his name. Jason gathers her to him. Tells her he’s okay, he’s fine, he caresses Marie’s forehead like he means it. She buries her face in his neck. Over and over, he cards a hand through her hair, mouth at her temple, he’s not saying anything now but he doesn’t need to, either.

It takes Marie a long time to fall asleep again, long after Jason’s own pulse grows sluggish under her lips.

—

They don’t overlap outside that often, not without intention. Marie doesn’t let herself adopt the same strictness of routine Jason does. She refuses. He might be driven from their home every day by endless and inescapable coercions—but Marie will only let herself live like she wants. With Jason, but only as herself: she drifts to markets, to beaches, whenever she wants, wherever the mood takes her. She makes what passes for friends even if she lies every time she speaks to them.

She smiles. Every day, Marie smiles at anyone she can.

Today, a sudden storm arrives without warning on her way back from buying groceries, nearly soaking through to her skin by the time Marie's approaching their cottage door. She has to squint through the rivulets dripping down her face to make out the fact that Jason’s there, too, only just back from wherever it is he went. Marie woke up alone. She hasn’t seen him all morning. Until now, colliding on their own shared threshold.

She'd forgotten the tote bag she meant to bring with her to the market. The paper bag she’s clutching to her chest is so wet it rips open, everything she’d bought tumbling at their feet.

Marie laughs but Jason doesn’t. Wherever he’s been, whatever he’s been trying to run away from, it’s left him so far-removed that he seems almost surprised to see her again. The incongruity lifts the corners of Marie's mouth; faint delight at the little things that can catch Jason off-guard, so much more banal than the unimaginable knowledge he makes his peace with every day.

Or at least—he tries to make peace with it. Lately, he’s been running more and more.

When the door’s shut behind them, Jason finally smiles. But only just, only faintly. Marie hasn’t seen anything more than that in weeks. It builds something in her, a nagging dread rolling thickly in her stomach that she tries to ignore. She’s been trying for months, and every day it gets harder.

Marie wants to reorient them. To bring them back to the beginning. She pushes Jason against the doorframe and his hand comes out immediately, hovering over her shoulder, still caught in that state of uncharacteristic surprise.

She licks a long line of trailing rainwater out of Jason’s throat. His hand settles then, his fingers thread into her hair tightly; Marie feels that whole-body shift, even lightly pressed against him. When she lifts her mouth from Jason’s neck he’s already chasing it with his own.

Marie hasn’t seen him all day. She woke up in an empty bed. She kisses Jason eagerly, lapping at the rainwater beading on his jaw, leaving a faintly mineral taste under her tongue. She moves her hips to crowd him against the door, Jason responding to her fully now: he makes it easy for her to take the few things that are easy for him to give. His arm comes up around her back and presses them so tightly together it almost hurts.

Jason could have her right there in the entryway if he wanted. He has before, holding Marie against the front door they’d scarcely shut behind them, one hand braced on the wall at the side of her face, her knee knocking over a rattan floor lamp as she wrapped her legs around him and he ignored the crashing sound—carrying on like the rest of the world had ceased to exist. It was rare, getting him to that point of narrowed desperation. But Marie has always been determined.

That doesn't appear to be what Jason wants, now. Slid onto her tiptoes, Marie feels Jason push down her shoulders before he starts tugging her away from the door and she realises he’s taking them to the shower.

Jason pulls Marie under the spray in that cramped space where there’s barely enough room for one of them. He keeps her close. The autumn rain wasn’t cold, the water from the showerhead even less so, but when he touches her Marie shivers all over. Her clothes, already mostly soaked, get there completely soon enough. Jason didn’t wait for her to undress. Even though that makes it harder for him now. He fingers at her collarbone before he tries to push the straps of her tank top down her shoulders. They don’t give, sticking to her skin under the futile swipe of his fingertips.

Never easily deterred, Jason works his fingers under the straps to pull them up instead, lifting them off her shoulder so he can yank them down Marie’s arms. She holds them aloft as he refocuses on shoving the wet, clinging fabric up her chest, her splayed arms, her neck. It doesn’t go easily, it clutches at her—uncomfortably so when Jason lifts it over her face. The sodden material steals her breath as he slides it over her mouth, her nose—before finally lifting the top off of her completely. Marie gasps, a delayed reaction to the temporary breathlessness. Jason’s fingers scrabble at her chin, drawing her in, he kisses her so vigorously she can’t breathe again.

Marie pushes at his chest a little. Just enough so he breaks the kiss. Jason's hands are on her hips now, aiming to remove her skirt. Their hands meet over it as they both try and open the clasp, Marie laughs and Jason doesn’t seem to hear. She almost trips when it pools around her feet—but Jason keeps a firm grip on her waist with one hand, the other prying her underwear down her legs to accompany the wet fabric on the shower floor.

Pressing her lips to his cheek, Marie murmurs, “That was easier.” Jason doesn’t react at all.

She switches tactics. Marie loops her arms around Jason's neck, pulling him in. She tries to slow him down with soft brushes of her thumbs along the top of Jason’s spine. She nuzzles into his face with her own, leaving the barest distance between their mouths as she whispers his name, looking up at him through wet lashes.

It seems to bring him back to her, a little. Jason shakes his head slightly under the water, as though dislodging something. Marie lowers a hand to his chest, palming over his heartbeat, fast enough that she can feel it through the skin. She leans in again. This time Jason’s gentler, more deliberate when he takes her bottom lip between his.

But it doesn’t last. Sometimes he’s like this: a circuit that can only flip between two binary states. Jason only kisses Marie languidly for maybe a minute before he becomes more aggressive again, making her gasp into his mouth, before his hand on her waist moves to hook under her thigh, pulling her open.

Stopping short on a heavy, questioning exhale against her lips, Jason gazes at Marie unblinkingly from under the curtain of the water. Even with his heart beating under her hand, something about him still seems very far away.

Marie barely nods against his face before Jason pushes into her roughly, drawing sharp breaths from them both. She digs her fingernails into his collarbone.

Jason isn’t remotely gentle with her, but he keeps her upright. He kisses her, that same frenziedness until it’s too much and Marie has to lean back and away from him, suspended in his hold. Tightening his arm where it’s wrapped around her back, Jason presses his face against the side of hers, breath harsh and staggering in Marie's ear as he moves in her. It sends pleasure rolling through Marie in mounting waves, pinning her lax in his unyielding grip, forcing broken sounds from her open mouth.

Pressed vice-tight together, her hand on Jason’s chest begins to feel uncomfortable trapped between them. She lifts it to his face.

Marie wears jewellery every day, but some days—today—she only wears one ring. It can be a shield: something to lessen the intensity of the stares she sometimes gets, to slot her into another adopted, imitated category in the minds of everyone she encounters outside. Though mostly, it has little effect.

Usually, Jason pretends, badly, not to notice it—but not right now. Marie splays her fingers on his jaw, holding their faces too-far apart as she leans back, kept upright only by his arms—one wrapped around her waist, the other still lifting her thigh where he wants it, helping him thrust easier, deeper. Jason turns his mouth into her hand, he licks at her; her palm, the bottom inner knuckles, up to where his tongue fits against the metal band on her ring finger, swiping over it along with her skin. Jason’s eyes stay open, locked onto hers and Marie finds it’s too much—that her own slip shut as she moans with an intensity that startles herself.

Jason shoves Marie against the wall of the shower so he can keep her propped up that way instead. Getting his hand free to touch her. He runs a hot, open palm down from the dip of her collarbone to cup her breast, thumb roughly tweaking the nipple until she whines. Jason lets go. Lets his fingers trail down remembered marks of Marie's body: from the scar on her lower ribcage to the small tattoo at the top of her thigh. He traces the shape of it with the tips of his fingers before lightly dragging them to the side, moving through fine curls, lower still until he's rubbing her clit with firm strokes of two taut fingers. Tucking his face into her neck, mouth moving irregularly over her heartbeat.

Marie misses the feeling of idling in his arms, of his strength being the only thing keeping her from falling over—but Jason runs wet, practised fingers over her and moves unbrokenly inside of her until she’s falling apart instead. It ripples up through her from the balls of her feet, lifting her against the patterned tiles, choking off any sound but a long, unintelligible cry that's too high pitched to fully leave her throat.

The throbbing pressure between her legs is only somewhat eased by the onset of relief. But Marie feels taken away; trapped in some faraway blissful state she can only gradually climb down from. Only distantly does she note Jason's subsequent whole-body shudder where he’s burying himself inside her. She can feel herself tightening around him on the aftershocks, drawing groans as Jason's hips stutter. His mouth stays open against her skin, he seems senseless to whatever’s falling out of it: sounds only in the shape of words, her name.

Marie tips her head back on the wet tiles, trying to catch her breath. She waits—for Jason to still against her, for her to seep back into her own body. She keeps her eyes closed. She seeks blindly in front of her until her hand presses firmly into warm and wet skin. Slowly, she becomes aware of the sensation of water still beating down steadily against her scalp, her shoulders.

Jason’s lips haven't left her throat. As if taking a careful measure of the pounding pulse beneath them. Marie doesn't think it's settled any before he suddenly lifts his head and cups her jaw, pulling her mouth to his.

He’s calmer than he was—but there’s still something urgent, approaching desperate in the way Jason kisses her, at odds with how he should be winding down after coming inside of her. His fingers mark a different pace: still digging into Marie’s hip but less aggressively, pressure softer as he brushes them rhythmically over the impressions he left.

She can hear Jason’s racing breaths, barely subdued from before he came. Marie doesn't ask him if he’s okay. She knows what it looks like when he isn't. But it always surprises her: the things she can bring out in him, sometimes without meaning to, especially when they’re like this.

Still off-balance, it takes Marie moment to realise Jason’s asking the question of her instead—pulling his mouth away from her to look at her, gaze wide and expectant when she opens her eyes to it.

Marie stares back at him. “Do I not seem like it?”

Jason’s lips are flushed, he bites them. It's unfamiliar, only seeing hints of guilt in his eyes. “I just mean—felt like I got a little rough.”

Marie stops herself from laughing, but only just. Only by the floating feeling still keeping her reactions on a slow enough delay.

Jason’s hand stays on her face as he turns off the water. He rubs his thumb at her cheekbone as Marie swallows, loosens her grasp on his shoulder. She lets go of it completely and watches blood flood colour back into the white marks her fingertips leave on the flesh.

"Jason." She can hear affection roll through her voice, still soft with light-headedness. She lets herself smile, fondly, as water beads on the strands of hair on her forehead, dripping down to her lips. “Sometimes you really worry about the wrong things.”

Jason stares at her until the sentiment seems to sink in. He nods just slightly, ducking his head.

It hurts when he pulls out of her; Marie’s breath hitches with the approaching ache of it. Jason keeps thumbing at her cheek, asking as if to distract her, “What were you doing outside?”

“The same things I always do.”

His eyes snap back to hers. “Are you bored?”

“Why, are you asking me to leave again?”

She knows he will; it’s the only inevitability they really have. Lately, he seems to be keeping that particular inevitability at bay—if nothing else.

Glancing away at their feet, Jason swallows. Marie watches him stare at the crumpled pile of sodden clothes he left, forehead furrowing like he doesn’t remember doing it. Eventually he says, “No. Not yet.”

“I like it here.” Marie tries and fails not to sound defiant.

Jason looks up again immediately, some harshness entering his body as though poising for a fight. His mouth opens. “Marie—”

Marie doesn’t want to have it. Not right now. She interrupts him with a finger on his lips.

Mollified, Jason gazes silently back at her until Marie adds, “I like it here, but I'll go. If you ask me.”

Jason’s only response is to sag into her a little where their bodies are still pressed against one another. When Marie leans their foreheads together, he closes his eyes and breathes in.

“I'm trying not to.”

Marie touches his jaw, rubbing her fingers gently against the tense skin. “Okay. Keep trying.” She tries to change the subject. “Are you going to cook?”

“You dropped everything.”

She wasn’t sure Jason even noticed, but of course he did. She huffs against his mouth. “That wasn't my fault. And you're resourceful.”

Finally, Jason laughs. He laughs like he’s been doing more and more lately: only barely, half in disbelief. Marie spends a moment missing the way he used to laugh. Both more uninhibited, and more certain she'd be there to see it.

Her fingers are still on his face. She brushes them over his lips. Wide-open, wholly there with her, Jason looks back at her as though he’s waiting for her to walk away.

Marie touches his mouth more firmly. “I love you.”

Jason swallows again and she watches the slow movement of his throat. He sags into her a little more. He nods. He kisses her. Just a brief and reciprocal press of lips before he’s pulling away again, out of the shower, telling her, “I'll cook.”

—

There’s little fresh but Jason makes do with the rest he finds: frozen spinach; canned tomatoes, coconut milk and chickpeas; some spices and oils from the rack Marie had fixed herself to the kitchen wall months ago. Five months. Jason had promised her a long time in this place, but not forever. The only thing he ever really promised her was that they’d always be running.

Today, they remain. Jason listens to the rain through the kitchen window while tossing chickpeas in hot and spiced oil. He had found he liked cooking: a routine, mundane way to use his hands, to be methodical, measured and patient. Marie claims she has little interest and ability herself—but he catches her sometimes when he’s been gone all day, sitting down to eat the result of her own efforts. Jason thinks maybe she just wants him to feel like there’s normal things he can give her.

He brings a bowl over to where Marie's stretched herself out on the couch that lines the kitchen island, languorous the way she only ever gets after sex. She's studying her fingernails as though contemplating what colour to paint them next. When she sees Jason near her she readjusts herself, sitting upright, planting her elbows into the green and blue throw cushions behind her as she reaches out for the meal he made her.

She leans in to kiss his cheek, gratefully, as she takes it. "Thank you."

Picking up the roti he'd toasted, Marie nibbles at the edges before she dips it in. Glancing up, she sees Jason still standing above her as she chews. She frowns, half-covering her mouth with her hand. “None for you?”

“I have to go write something down.”

The words don’t leave Jason easily. He can see their impact immediately: the way it diminishes the light Marie always carries with her, the flatness it brings into her eyes and face.

Jason turns away from it. He leaves her there.

He’s still sitting at his desk when Marie finds him a little while later. The floorboards are soundless under her tentative footsteps but she knows anyway: that he can still sense her as she approaches. Jason doesn’t look up until she’s right there next to him, invading his space, leaning her hip against the smooth edge of the wood.

She stares down at him. “Are you finished?”

Jason nods. He’s shut the notebook but he hasn’t put it away. He opens the drawer it lives in so he can hide it again, out of her sight. He slides it shut firmly enough that the sound of the wood slotting into place seems final, conclusive.

Moving to get up, Marie stops him with a hand on his chest. Jason pauses and she surprises him—she crams herself onto him. The chair’s hardly big enough—but Marie lowers herself delicately until she’s balanced in Jason’s lap, arms looping around his neck.

Automatically, Jason grabs onto her waist. She’s gazing at him with that same baleful look as when she finds him in the bathroom at night.

Her hair is still damp. He reaches up to tuck it behind her ear.

Marie scans his face without a word and Jason isn’t sure if he should speak. He doesn’t know if she wants to hear what he’s been writing. If she asks him, he’ll tell her, he doesn’t keep anything from her—sometimes he wishes he did. But he knows she deserves it—any truth she can stand to hear him recount.

He doesn’t think that’s what she’s after.

Abruptly, Marie reaches for his face. She strokes her thumb over his cheek, his lips. Jason parts his mouth against her touch, he starts to say something but he doesn't get to find out what. Marie shushes him with a firm press of her fingers, and the reverberations of whatever he was going to say die in his throat.

Marie stays like that for a long moment, expression unreadable. When she speaks, she only says very quietly, deliberately, “We’ll figure it out.”

Panic starts to clog in Jason’s throat, stiff and unexpected. Marie might mean to reassure—but it does nothing to downplay what suddenly seizes him. An urgency to make Marie understand—that he knows this is the only thing he has. That he could ever have.

He tries to tell her. “I want to. That’s all I—”

Marie shushes him again. She drops her hand. She moves her face closer towards his, but she doesn’t kiss him. She sits still, only breathing against his mouth, just like she did in a hotel bathroom a long time ago.

Gradually, Jason realises that Marie's started to rock her hips down onto his lap. The gesture is slight: slow and repetitive, controlled, careful. Jason tries to focus on it—something to drag them away from this room and what he writes in it.

He asks her, a little disbelievingly, “Are you still…”

Marie runs her fingers through his hair, nails sharp against his scalp, quickening his breath. She does kiss him then, only for a moment, chastely, pulling away as Jason’s head tilts in vain after her, sparking a small smile. She murmurs, “Well, it was over quickly.”

Jason huffs a laugh against her face. She brightens.

He flattens his hands against Marie’s sides. She’s put on one of the long, cool shirts she wears to bed. Airy and thin; he can feel the heat of her skin underneath it. Tailing his palms up over the hemp fabric, Jason tells her, “You know, you're pretty hard to wear out.”

Her face stays pleased. “Lucky for you, you mean.”

He knows what Marie wants him to read in her response. Between them, she lives life more fully than he ever could. Insatiable in more ways than one. Always eager to discover—what they can do together, what they can see, where they can go. An inexhaustible appetite that Jason curtails. Sets limits she has no choice but to abide by. Wears her down.

It claws at him, that knowledge. All of a sudden Jason wishes with a futile and aching desperation, something deeply-pitted in him he tries every day to suppress—that he could stop it, all of it. Give Marie only what she deserves, instead of what she accepts.

He tries to offer what he can. What might not be enough.

Marie’s still braced slightly above him; with one hand Jason gently tips her face down closer to his. He holds her in place. He kisses her slowly, restrained, nothing like earlier. Simply and quietly feeling the softness, the warmth of her lips and tongue moving against his. The door to the back porch behind them is shut, but Jason can still hear the rain beat steadily behind it.

Pulling away, he tucks Marie’s hair behind her ear again. “Yeah.”

Jason gets up from the chair while lifting Marie with him. She likes it when she does, she wraps her arms and legs around him and buries her smile in the collar of his shirt. She looks a little smug. There’s things she wants that Jason can’t give her and might never be able to—but this, he can. He will.

When he lays her down on their bed he thinks of the first time. Marie pushed against him more then, she pushed back, she was grasping and demanding and inescapable. She wouldn't let go. She had been so set on it, determined to make Jason give her what she wanted from him—but it was more than that, too. Marie had known already: if she hadn't touched him that night then they never would. She was intent, even then, that Jason didn’t deny himself what she was willing to commit to offering.

What began in that hotel room had felt fleeting, at first. Something Jason would break as quickly as it had come to him. Something he didn't deserve to keep, even as willingly as she gave it. Impossible to imagine—that Marie might stay. A future as undefined as the blankness of the past. Jason didn’t dare, then, to hope for this.

Marie isn’t as animated now as she was then. She rests reassured of the trajectory she instigated. Nearly two years she's spent teaching Jason, letting him relearn his humanity through the pathway set by her touch.

She isn't touching him now. She just lies back and waits, hooded eyes lingering on Jason's hands on his clothes as he unbuttons his shirt. Her face is utterly calm, safe in the knowledge of what's going to happen.

It’s still raining outside. It won’t stop, pounding down against the rooftop. The humidity hangs heavy in the room. They shut the window above the bed too late; it left a damp misting on the pillowcases he’ll change later. After.

When Marie turns her head on the mattress towards where their hands are threaded together, she whispers so quietly the sound of rainfall drowns it out. Jason watches her mouth shape the syllables of his name instead. He knows it can't be real, just another identity created for him to adopt—but she's the first, and only, person he ever told it to. Unuttered to him for years by anyone else. In Marie's voice, in her mind, in her body, Jason's someone he could only ever be here. Only with her. Marie kisses the skin of his wrist and closes her eyes.

Keeping one hand in hers, Jason holds her jaw with the other. Turning her face back towards him, so that he catches every other noise Marie makes. Jason makes her listen to him, too. He tells Marie what she already knows, burying it against the side of her face. Above them, the rain resounds, ceaseless and enduring.