I nodded, my hand still stroking her back, fingers tracing patterns I didn't have names for. "You said you were done with counseling?"
"Yeah." She bit her lip, thinking, and I wanted to lean up and kiss it, bite it myself, claim that nervous habit for my own. "I think I went into it for the wrong reasons. To understand my own stuff. To fix what happened with Jonesy, in some roundabout way. But sitting in a room all day, absorbing other people's pain ... it started feeling like drowning. Like I was taking on water I couldn't bail out fast enough."
My hand stilled on her back for a second. I knew that feeling. Knew it intimately.
"So, what's next?" I asked, genuinely curious, wanting to know every piece of her future even if I wasn't sure I'd be in it, even if the sunrise would bring decisions that might tear us apart.
She shrugged, a small smile playing at her mouth. "I don't know. That's the scary part. And the exciting part. Maybe travel. Maybe something creative. Writing, or photography—things I loved as a kid but set aside because they didn't feel practical."
She paused, her fingers tracing a scar on my shoulder absently—shrapnel, Baghdad, a story I'd never told her. "What about you? What's your life look like these days?"
I tensed without meaning to, my hand stilling on her back for a fraction of a second before I forced myself to relax, to keep stroking like nothing had happened, like she hadn't just asked the one question I couldn't answer honestly.
"Same as always. Work. Travel. Repeat."
She propped herself up on one elbow, looking down at me with that tilt to her head that said she wasn't buying it, that she could see straight through me the way she always had. "That's vague."
I grinned, trying to play it off, keep it light. "Mystery's part of my charm."
She didn't laugh. Just watched me, eyes narrowing slightly, reading me like a book I'd tried to keep closed. "You're dodging."
"Am I?"
"Yes." She poked my chest gently, right over my heart. "Why?"
Because if I tell you about Dominion Hall, about the decision hanging over me like a guillotine, about Klein showing up like a ghost from my past with threats I don't understand yet, it'll shatter this bubble we've built. It'll drag the real world in beforeI'm ready, before I can figure out how to keep you safe from all of it.
Because telling you means admitting I've been lying by omission since the moment we met on that dock.
Because the truth is, I don't know what my life looks like anymore, and I'm terrified that whatever it becomes won't have room for you in it.
But I couldn't say any of that. Not yet. Not when all I wanted was her, here, now, without complications bleeding in from the edges and ruining everything.
I pulled her down instead, rolling us so she was under me again, my weight braced on my forearms. "Because tonight's about us," I murmured against her neck, pressing a kiss there, feeling her pulse jump under my lips. "Not work. Not the future. Just ... this. Just us."
She arched slightly under me, her hands sliding up my arms, tracing muscle and tendon. "Wyatt ..."
"Shh." I kissed lower, trailing my mouth down her throat, across her collarbone, tasting salt and sweetness and Sophie. "Let me show you what I mean."
She sighed, her body softening under mine, but her eyes stayed sharp when I looked up, stayed knowing. "This isn't over."
I grinned against her skin, even as guilt twisted in my gut. "Promise?"
She laughed—a soft, breathless sound that turned into a moan when I nipped at the curve of her breast. "You're impossible."
"Guilty." I captured her nipple between my teeth, tugging gently, feeling her hips buck under me, feeling her respond to me like she always had, like she always would. "But you like it."
Her hands fisted in my hair. "Maybe."
We talked more after that—meandering conversations that drifted from our past to her dreams, from silly memories to deeper ones, from the way Valentine had shaped us to the ways we'd outgrown it or thought we had.
She told me about her apartment in Austin, about the balcony where she drank coffee every morning and watched the city wake up in shades of pink and gold. About the bookstore she loved that smelled like old paper and possibility, where she'd spend hours getting lost in other people's stories because her own felt too heavy. About the friends who'd become family when her own had fractured, who'd held her together when she couldn't hold herself.
I listened. Absorbed every word like it was water in the desert, like I was starving for details of her life, for proof that she'd been happy without me, that she'd built something beautiful from the ruins I'd left behind when I disappeared into the Army and never looked back.
And when she asked about me—about my work, my travels, my brothers scattered across the country doing God knows what—I dodged. Playfully at first. Then gently. Redirecting with kisses or questions or touches that made her forget what she'd asked, made her moan instead of push, made her body distract her mind.
At least, for a while.
