The word. The one that costs her everything.
"Ask me again."
"Please. Damien. Please."
I give her what she's asking for. She shatters—a full-body convulsion, her back arching off the mattress, her cry ragged and uncontrolled. I feel her pulse against my mouth, wave after wave, and I ease her through it—softening, slowing, holding her hips as the aftershocks roll through her.
When she's still, trembling, I move up the bed. Reach for the nightstand. She watches me through heavy lids, her chest heaving, and when I settle between her thighs she pulls me toward her with her legs, demanding, urgent.
I enter her and the world narrows to the place where our bodies meet. Her eyes fly open. She looks at me and I look at her and the eye contact is almost unbearable—too intimate, too exposed, two people seeing each other without any surface left to hide behind.
I move slowly. Watching her face. Reading the shifts—when to deepen, when to pause, when to pin her bound wrists harder against the headboard and feel her body tighten around me in response. She fights the restraint and yields to it simultaneously, the push-pull that defines her, the woman who wants to surrender and can't stop resisting, and the resistance makes the surrender sweeter for both of us.
She's building again. I can feel it—the rhythmic tightening, the breath catching faster, her legs locked around me. My hand finds the place between us and she gasps and the gasp becomes a moan and the moan becomes my name, spoken with a rawness that breaks something in me.
"Look at me," I say.
She does. And I watch the moment she lets go—her eyes wide, her mouth open, her body clenching around mine with a force that pulls me over the edge with her. I bury my face in her neck and let it take me—the release, the fall, the obliteration of everything I am except the man who is inside this woman, holding her, being held by her.
Silence. Our breathing. The silk loose around her wrists.
I untie her. My fingers are trembling—every time, every time my hands shake after, the hands that never shake for anything else. The silk falls away and I press my mouth to each wrist. The tender skin. The fading marks. Her pulse against my lips, slowing.
She puts her hands in my hair. Fingers threading through, gentle, and the tenderness after the intensity is the thing that undoes me. I press my face against her chest and breathe her in and her hands hold my head and neither of us speaks.
She runs her fingers through my hair. Slow, rhythmic. I close my eyes and feel her heartbeat against my cheek and her fingers in my hair and the warmth of her body beneath mine and I think:whatever this costs me, it's worth it. Whatever I lose when the truth comes out, this was worth it.
"Stay," she says. My word, returned.
I stay. She falls asleep against me—quickly, deeply, the sleep of a woman who feels safe. Her head on my chest. Her crooked finger resting against my ribs.
I don't sleep. I lie in the dark and hold her and feel the weight of what I am pressing against the inside of my chest like something trying to get out.
She breathes. The city hums. The apartment is dark and warm and full of her.
I hold her tighter. I close my eyes.
The crooked finger rests against my ribs like a question I don't yet know how to answer.
Chapter 21 - Jess
I see him on a Monday morning.
I'm walking to the studio, coffee from Hector's in one hand, my head full of the new sculpture and the yielding forms and the problem I've been trying to solve with the angle of the second piece. November cold on my face. The usual route, the usual rhythm. I'm thinking about steel and Damien and whether Nish is right about the solo show and all the things that have been filling my days since my life became something I almost don't recognize—full, warm, a life with a person in it.
I almost walk past him.
He's on the sidewalk across from my building, half a block from the studio. Not doing anything. Just standing, hands in his jacket pockets, looking at the building the way you look at an address you've written down and are confirming. Average height. Heavy through the shoulders, heavier than he was at seventeen. Reddish hair cropped close to his skull. A face that fifteen years have thickened and coarsened but not changed in any way that matters.
My body knows him before my brain does. The coffee cup locks in my hand. My feet stop. My stomach drops—not gradually, not a slow descent, but all at once, the floor vanishing, the world tilting on an axis I thought I'd welded shut years ago.
Kyle Purcell.
He turns his head. Sees me. And he smiles.
The smile. Fifteen years and the smile hasn't changed. Easy, warm, the kind of smile that made the caseworkers trust him. The kind that made the Voss family believe he was the good one, the helpful one, the older kid who looked out for theyounger ones. A smile that disarms the room while the hands behind it do whatever they want.
"Jess Rowe," he says. He takes his hands out of his pockets and opens them, palms up, a gesture of friendliness so practiced it looks natural. "I thought that was you."
