I look at him from between his legs, eyes heavy, want growing larger in my pants. “Say it again.”
“Really?”
I suck one of his balls into my mouth, toying with it with my tongue. I pressed a third finger into him as an answer.
“I love you, Mags.”
I think I black out for a moment, because one second I’m worshiping this beautiful man and the next I have him bent over the arm of the couch fucking him like he’s a dirty whore.
Fuck, he’s so fucking vocal. I love it. He’s perfect. He’s everything. He’s mine.
My cock spears into him. His hole clutching me like he needs me to survive.
“Harder, please,” Alaric whimpers.
“Say it.” My voice doesn’t sound like myself.
“I love you. I love you! I love you!” He keeps saying it until he’s drained every drop from me and made a mess of himself.
When we finally break apart, we’re both breathless. His forehead rests against mine. The world feels small, simple.
“I love you, too,” I whisper.
“You better,” he says, voice rough.
He leans back, eyes searching my face. “Now drink the rest of that, or I’ll pour it down your throat myself.”
I laugh, taking the bottle from the table. “There’s that fierce love again.”
He grins, cheeks flushed. “Get used to it.”
I do.
Because for the first time, I believe him. And for the first time, I believe I deserve it.
EPILOGUE
Three Months Later
The meeting runs long, which is a mercy. It gives me more time to sit in that church basement light and let the words settle—words I used to spit at the ceiling at three a.m., but now hear like a map: honesty, amends, one day at a time. When the leader slides the little wooden chip across the table, it feels smaller than I expected, but the weight it carries isn’t in size. It’s the weight of three months, of mornings I didn’t wake up to vomit and shame, of nights I told myself to hold on. My fingers take it before my head gets too full.
“There you go, Flint. Three months.” There’s a round of claps. A woman I barely know squeezes my shoulder. I catch her eye and she gives me a look that saysyou earned this. For a second, my face betrays me—gooseflesh, a little wet at the corners of my eyes—and I have to swallow hard to keep it from sounding like a sob.
Outside, the evening air is cold and clean, the way the world always smells after rain. I breathe it in like I’m learning to fill my lungs again. The chip rolls in my palm, and I press my thumbagainst the number glued to it—a tiny, shining marker that says I kept a promise. To myself more than anyone else. God, I needed that.
My phone vibrates in my pocket as I cross the parking lot.
Alaric is a patient driver, and that’s useful tonight. He waits while I settle, glances sideways with that gentleness of his, hand resting on the stick shift like he’s grounding us both. “You good?” he asks, the question loose and real, not the cavity-seeking kind my old life asked.
I nod, and I mean it. “Yeah.” My voice is quiet, still rough from the meeting and from the echo of three months of not drowning. I turn the little wooden chip in my hand and feel the grain. “Well worth the badge, huh?”
He laughs, the sound soft, quick. “I’m proud of you. Three months is huge.”
It’s enormous to me. It’s also terrifying—like balancing on a narrow ridge I can’t slip from without consequences. But for once I let the terror sit next to the pride and not drive me. I can hold both.
The drive to Molly’s takes us through the neighborhoods I used to hate—rich, stern houses, lawns trimmed like currency. For years I thought I’d never belong in that landscape. Now I’m heading to one of those doors with Alaric at my side and the civic pride of the place feels irrelevant. What matters is the family waiting on the other side: Molly, who leaked a story that saved me; the dinner she said she was hosting that night to celebrate small things; a living room that remembers me as a person, not a headline.
When I let myself look back at the last season, it still feels like a blur stitched from headlines and late-night calls. Alaric’s father had done everything in his power to bury me—leveraged sponsors, whispered to the right people, started a push to get me cut from the Wolves after the season finished. It should havefelt like a war. It was, but it was also the starting signal for something I didn’t expect: the rally that followed.
