Itell myself I’m going to the restroom to calm down. That’s the lie I choose because it’s small and believable. I slip through the noise and heat of the party, past masks and glitter and the crush of bodies, and shut the door behind me on a hush so complete it rings in my ears.
For a second, I just stand there with my palm flat against the wood, feeling the bass thud through it like a second heartbeat. My own pulse won’t slow. The mirror is too bright, too honest. I look like I’ve run a mile with my flushed cheeks, eyes shining, a smear of pumpkin-orange light across my skin from the flickering jack-o’-lantern nightlight by the sink. I splash cool water on my wrists. It doesn’t do anything. The heat isn’t on thesurface. It’s deeper. It’s where his words landed and burrowed and refused to leave.
Don’t hide from me.By the end of tonight, you’ll be where you belong.
I bit my lip, hard. It should scare me more than it thrills me. It does scare me—my father is somewhere out there, a storm front rolling through the house, doing what he thinks is protection. But the thrill is heavier. It fills my lungs. I inhale it like it’s oxygen I’ve been starving for.
The fan hums. The light ticks in the fixture. I whisper to my reflection,get a grip,and watch the fog on the mirror bloom and fade with my breath. I’m not the kind of girl who sneaks out of parties, who lets herself be pulled into shadows by men she should avoid. I’m used to soft edges and easy laughter and safety. I used to be Andrew’s little sister, the one he looped an arm around, the one he kept in the bright parts of the night. Now I am someone else. Maybe I’ve been becoming her for a year and just didn’t see it. Maybe grief is a doorway you walk through and come out different on the other side.
When I open the door, the hallway breathes cold at me. I take one step and a hand finds my wrist—not a yank, not a question, simply a decision that includes me. The door clicks shut behind me and his body is there, the outline of him cut clean from the dark. My breath leaves me like it’s been waiting for permission.
I don’t say his name. I don’t have to. He is heat in a cold house. He is gravity in a world where everything else floats away.
“Come.” Triston says, low, and I go.
He doesn’t drag. He doesn’t hurry. He moves with that same patient control he carries on the ice, and I feel it. The way it steadies me even as it unravels me. He leads me past the end of the corridor into the kitchen’s edge where the music is louder, where laughter flares, then around the island and through the service door I’ve used a thousand times to take out trash, to stepinto night air when the rink’s chill felt too close. The latch gives with a small sigh and the October dark folds around us, soft and absolute.
The cold snatches at my cheeks. The yard is a black shape cut from the world, only the thin spill of party light laying a path across the grass. The shed is a darker rectangle at the edge of the property, familiar in daylight and newly foreign now. The door snicks shut. The party is behind glass and walls and a hundred bodies. Out here, it’s just the two of us and the scrape of a leaf skittering over concrete.
He doesn’t stop until the rough boards of the shed are at my back. He presses me into that cool, splinter-silk surface and the shock of it runs a line up my spine. His palm settles at my hip, heavy and claiming, and his breath finds the curve of my neck. My knees turn to water. The whole world seems to lean, aligning along the angle of his mouth.
“Say it.” He murmurs, the words a heat that licks my skin. “Tell me you want this.”
I open my mouth and all that comes out is a sound I don’t recognize as mine. A small, broken thing that might be a laugh or a plea. I’m not sure which is truer. He hears both. I know he does. His breath pulses against my throat and my eyes flutter shut like I’m bracing for impact.
“I want—” The admission scrapes free, softer than the night. “I wanted you to find me.”
A quiet, pleased sound rumbles in his chest. “Good girl.”
The praise slides under my skin and sets everything alight. I hate that it does, and I love that it does. I try to breathe evenly. The house is a lantern behind us; the dark is a curtain. I am an outline and a pulse. The wordmine, ringing in my head even though I’m the one who’s supposed to be thinking words likewrongandstopanddanger.They’re in there, too. They just don’t feel like they belong to this body, this moment.
His mouth finds the place below my ear. Not a kiss at first, more like a promise pressed into the thinnest skin. The promise becomes a kiss, and then another lower, and another, each one a slow brand burning my insides to peaking heat. I tilt without meaning to, creating a path for him. The night breaks on my exhale. The distance between my fear and my wanting narrows to a single breath.
“You hear them in there?” He whispers, voice edged with a dark smile. The bass thuds, a distant heartbeat. “None of them matter.”
“They could come out.” I manage, which is both a warning and a beg. If anyone steps onto the porch, they will see the angle of him, the arch of me, the outline of something that can’t be explained away.
“They won’t.” He answers, and the way he says it rearranges the physics of the yard. He sounds like the one who decides what does and doesn’t happen. I believe him because it’s easier than admitting I want to.
His hand leaves my hip and trails a line that maps me back to myself. Up the curve of my waist, flattening at my ribcage where breath stutters under his palm, then down again, slower, tracing a claim written in touch instead of ink. I feel everything. The cold through my jacket wherever he isn’t. The heat wherever he is. The rough bite of the shed against my shoulder blades as the only anchor holding me upright.
He doesn’t rush. It’s somehow worse, and better, that he doesn’t.
He finds my throat again. The press of his mouth is stronger this time, like a seal. My fingers curl into the fabric at his shoulders because there’s nowhere else for them to go, and because my body speaks a language I didn’t know I knew. A grip that means don’t stop, that means I’m falling, that means hold me or I’ll split into pieces and drift.
“Triston…” I whisper, because I need a word that isn’tplease. His name tastes like the dark.
He answers with a sound that is barely a word and mostly possession. “Sammie.”
The way he says my name undoes something inside me. There’s a version of myself who tidies snack counters and keeps lists and shakes hands and makes small talk in the lobby. She watches me from a window across the yard with a kind of distant pity. Maybe she’s the ghost in this story. Maybe I’m the girl who’s alive enough to do the wrong thing on purpose.
His hand slides lower, along the outside of my thigh where cold has made my skin hypersensitive. Cloth rasping, knuckles firm, the path upward so unhurried it is almost unbearable. He doesn’t touch anywhere shocking. He skirts borders like he’s tracing a map he’s already memorized and still wants to relearn by heart. Heat pools where the warmth of his fingers begin to explore. An ache that has no polite name. The night hears the small moan I make and holds it close.
“Listen to yourself.” He says, and there is satisfaction braided into it. Not mockery. Recognition. Like he’s listening for me as much as to me. “You crave what you’re afraid of.”
“That’s not fair.” I breathe, though it is, and we both know it.
“It’s true.” He says, and his fingers flex against my pulsing pussy, the smallest pressure that somehow says everything. “And there’s nothing fair about this. There’s just what is.”
