It should be hands she tries first, but it isn't. It's wrists, her fingers finding his pulse beneath the cuffs of the gloves he wears all day. The skin is softer here, less calloused. Sometimes they touch for only an instant in a single night. His pulse throttling up, his breath choked into stillness. Sometimes it's long moments, while she eases and waits for his shuddering to quiet to her own steady rhythm.
Afterwards, she sleeps in his bed. Far to one side so she's a presence but not a challenge. Kaz doesn't protest it. First, because he'd never admit to being afraid of the consequences of her grazing him when he's unaware, unguarded. Second, because he wants those consequences, in a sick and reckless part of him. And third, the part that makes it possible, because Inej isn't the type to move one millimeter more than she intends, not even when she's unconscious.
He's afraid of her in those days. More than he's been of Pekka Rollins. More than he's been of nearly anyone, nearly ever. There are days when the shudders break into convulsions, into sweat and gagging and twice, to throwing up into the chamber pot in the corner.
It was when the touch of her slim hands went sideways in his brain into knowing what it would feel like if those hands were dead, bloated. Her corpse weighting him down with her gone and what was left, rotting.
His fault.
In those flashback instants to a past that never was, her death is always his fault.
Once, when that happened, she left. Trying to make it easier for him.
Once, she didn't.
He hates the weakness, hates this process. Hates that he can't do what others do so effortlessly. It makes it easier that they never speak of it. That when she sees him in the day, his face is hard and closed, and her eyes are like onyx. That the quiet respect in them has never wavered.
He never locks his window. It wouldn't slow her, bars nor locks nor a solid wall of bricks. She's the Wraith. But he doesn't lock it anyway, because that's the only way he knows to tell her that all of this is okay. No matter what it puts him through, he wants this.
Kaz is a crow who knows her face. Knows hers is a face who would never wish him harm.
Even so, it takes them thirty nights together to move past hands.
Hands are complicated things. He's done terrible things with his, but then, so has she. His moniker hangs between them, every time her fingers travel up his palm. Dirtyhands.
Hers so much smaller but even more deadly. His knuckles are thick, swollen from a thousand sleeting nights spent in dank Ketterdam alleys. Even now, when he sleeps with blankets and a fire and his own Suli assassin tucked quiet into his bed, his bones remember the cold they came from.
Her fingers are so slim and graceful by comparison, it's like she has fire running up through her veins. Her fingertips so sensitive, it's as if she can read him through each bump of scar and roughened flesh. His thumb has a catch to it, when he moves it the wrong way. An old break, and she knows that now.
There's a peace to it, his old fractures held inside her quick mind.
He's sleeping deeper these days.
It's after the month of Inej soothing his hands that he leaves his gloves in his room for the last time. Letting his fingers become inured to the texture of wood and metal, pen and ink. Blood and blade. The shining metal of his cane bears the marks of his fingers, for the first time.
He never knows what she's going to reach for, when she comes to his room in those different hours of the night. It's impossibly hard, every fucking time. His breath huffing until it all but cracks his ribs, straining at the edges of a wheeze. The long muscles in his fingers pulling taut like the high wires her toes once danced upon. It is quaking and muscles locked hard into spasms of memory.
It's cloud-still silence, while she waits for him to unwind for her. She never leaves, anymore.
Every night, their bodies dance together like a flame and the air that feeds it, but can also blow it out.
Advance, and then retreat.
Flickering.
Feet are a strange territory. Arches and crooked toes, a tapestry of ticklish places. Pale skin that's been locked into boots for so many years, it doesn't quite understand touch.
His ankles, strangely, become his favorite place to be touched. There's a velvety sensation to her circling his ankle bones. It's soft in a way that feels okay. He doesn't ask for more, not in words, but she comes back to the same place the next night. He lets her rest her head against his knee while her hands play.
It's so long, and not long at all, before they get to the parts of him that are covered by his clothes.
