He was still wrapped around me, limbs slung careless across my waist, chin burrowed into the mess of hair I’d let down at some point in the night. The heat of him radiated even in sleep, though the rest of him was carved in shadow. His chest rose and fell, unhurried, while my pulse banged against my ribcage like a trapped insect.
For a moment, I let myself believe in the impossible—that the night had changed anything, that the sum of two bodies pressed together could amount to more than a temporary ceasefire. Butthe dawn exposed everything. It always did. I’d thrown away my career for something that wasn’t possible.
The cold reached my feet first, then bled up my legs, sharpening every patch of skin not covered by the ragged blanket. I could see my own breath cloud in the air, a perfect algorithm of waste and output. His hand, rough and callused, lay inert across my belly, the fingertips brushing the crest of my hip. I stared at it. Each finger bore a scar or a burn, a catalog of past violence and lessons not learned. It would have been beautiful if I’d allowed myself to feel anything like beauty.
He woke without ceremony. One second dead to the world, the next fully aware, eyes open and locked on my face. For a beat, we stared at each other. The night’s residue hung between us, raw and indecipherable. I watched him process the new data—the light, the cold, the reality of my body curled next to his. There was nothing romantic in it, just the animal recognition of threat, hunger, and consequence.
“Hey,” he said, voice deep and so unguarded it made me ache. The corners of his mouth turned up, soft, the kind of smile that comes before you realize you should never have let your guard down.
“Morning,” I replied, voice hollowed out by everything it refused to say.
He shifted, pulling me closer, as if to restart the night where it left off. But I was already gone. My body lay against him, still warm, but the rest of me retreated behind perimeter fences and the familiar, sour taste of regret.
I rolled away, untangling myself from his arm. The blanket peeled off my shoulder, and I clutched it tight, drawing it around me like a shield. The chill hit instantly, raising gooseflesh along my arms. I sat up, eyes fixed on the dying embers in the pit, as if they might offer a code or solution.
He propped himself on one elbow, brow furrowing. “You okay?”
I didn’t answer at first. Instead, I watched the gray light bleed into the sky, watched the last of the fire die. My fingers dug into the edge of the blanket until they hurt. I tried to speak, but the words jammed in my throat, multiplying, choking out all the easy lies I could have told.
He reached for my back, and I flinched, just enough for him to notice.
“Doc?” he said. His voice had changed: less softness, more edge. The kind of edge that cut quick and deep, the kind that left you leaking out into the world before you realized you’d been hit.
I wrapped the blanket tighter and turned to face him. The look on his face was pure calculation, the same look I’d seen when he decided whether to trust or destroy a thing. I felt the click in my own head, the click that meant I’d already begun to extricate myself from whatever this was.
“I can’t,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
He blinked, once, and it was as if all warmth had been sucked out of the world.
“It’s the clearance review,” I blurted, not sure why honesty made it easier. “They’re watching everything. Every email, every step, every… They’re probably running an algorithm right now to flag my network activity, and the last thing I need is more variables.” I shook my head. “I’m supposed to be in control. That’s the whole point of the research. That’s the whole point of me.”
He sat up, swinging his legs off the blanket, naked and unashamed. He was all muscle and old injury, the burn on his jaw catching the dawn and throwing it back in my face.
“Last night didn’t feel like a variable,” he said. “It felt real.”
“Of course it felt real,” I snapped. The anger surprised me. “That’s what people like us do—we make things feel real. Then we burn it all down the second it becomes inconvenient.”
He laughed, but it was a sound without any pleasure. “You’re really gonna do this?”
“I have to,” I said, the words tasting like poison. “They’re already suspicious after the kidnapping. I can’t afford—” I gestured, helpless, at the blanket, at him, at everything. “This.”
He stood, not bothering to hide himself, and started pulling on his clothes with slow, deliberate precision. The way he dressed was like the way he fought—methodical, efficient, no wasted movement. Each item reclaimed was a layer of distance, a line drawn in the dirt.
I stayed on the ground, blanket wrapped so tight I thought I might split at the seams. My hands shook. I watched his back, the pattern of scars, the tattoo that marked him as both club and collateral. I wondered what it would be like to have a history you could wear on your skin, instead of one that gnawed you hollow from the inside.
He zipped up his jacket, the sound louder than it should have been, and walked outside. “You could have just said you weren’t interested,” he said, voice flat.
I stared at the dead fire, unable to meet his eyes. “I am interested. That’s the problem.”
He stood there, silent, for longer than I could stand. The cold was getting to me, or maybe it was just the absence of anything like comfort.
He leaned against the porch rail, lighting a cigarette with that battered old Zippo, the flame shivering in the wind. He inhaled deep, then blew the smoke away from me.
“I’ve made a lot of mistakes,” he said. “Usually, I see them coming.”
“This isn’t your mistake,” I said.
“Isn’t it?” He flicked ash onto the grass. “I thought you were different.”
