The look he gives me is raw. Unfiltered. Like he’s letting me see the part of him he shows no one.
And God… it hits me big time.
I’m really his.
A shaky breath escapes me as his lips find mine again, slower now, deeper, like we’re both finally admitting something neither of us dared to say out loud.
If this is what falling feels like…I’m done fighting gravity.
Chapter 37
Ethan
Thewindcomesinsharp off the water, colder than it should be for this time of year, carrying that mineral bite that only exists here—iron, stone, and old ghosts. It slides through my shirt, raising every hair along my arms. The sun’s bright, high, mercilessly clear, but the wind wins anyway. It always does in this place.
The quarry spreads out below me, carved into the earth like a wound the world never bothered to close. A wide bowl of impossible blue, still and deep enough to swallow sound. Sunlight cuts across the surface like a blade, glinting in long, bright strokes that make me squint. It’s too bright today. Too clean. As if the earth scrubbed itself of memories overnight.
Like the world doesn’t remember anything that happened in it.
I stand at the edge anyway. I always do.
Hands in my pockets. Spine straight. Heels planted over ground I know far too well. It’s the same stance I used to take on uneasy perimeters in another life—when everything depended on being steady, silent, unshakeable. The stance I fall into when I don’t know how to stand at all.
Lily thinks I come here to “look at the pretty water.”
Lucky doesn’t yet know about this place.
This place has been my pressure valve, my graveyard, my confession booth. When my head gets too loud, when the quiet athome feels sharp instead of safe, when everything inside me crawls under my skin—I come here. Sit with the ghosts. Try to make sense of the parts of myself I pretend don’t exist.
Right now, those parts are deafening.
I inhale slowly, hold it, let the air settle into the hollow spots in my ribs. It tastes like dust and sunlight and the faint echo of who I used to be. Saltless. Sterile. Bare.
“Mara,” I say quietly.
Her name barely makes it past my throat. It scrapes out of me like a confession I’ve rehearsed in silence for months. My voice doesn’t shake, but my ribs feel too tight. Always the ribs—my body’s favorite place to store the things I never say.
The surface of the water ripples. A small shift. A shiver. Wind or memory, I can’t tell. Maybe both.
“I’m moving on,” I say.
The words drop between me and the water like stones. Heavy. Too heavy. Too late. Too much. I wait for the guilt to crush me, but it doesn’t—not all the way. It just presses against my chest, testing the seams, reminding me it exists.
My jaw clenches on reflex. It always does when emotion forces its way through the armor. My pulse picks up, that old familiar thrum—fight or flee or freeze. My fingertips curl inside my pockets. But I stay exactly where I am. Staying is the new battlefield. The braver one.
Lucky’s laugh flickers across my mind—sharp, messy, beautiful in a way that feels like chaos and salvation at once. The way she looks at me like I’m safe, like I’m solid, like I’m someone worth leaning on.
Her bruises.
Her stubbornness.
Her stupid courage.
Her choosing me, over LA, over the noise that feeds her, over the entire world she could go back to in a heartbeat.
Something shifts deep in my chest. Not soft. Nothing about this is soft. It’s the grinding of tectonic plates—slow, destructive, inevitable. A reshaping.
“I don’t know how to do this,” I admit into the empty air. “But I want to.”
