The adrenaline wasn’t even about the pain anymore.
It was about him.
I wasn’t fool enough to think Jo didn’t know it. He could see me clear as an x-ray, bruised and sulking on his floor, staring at him in the mirror like a kid who’d been left at the wrong bus stop.
If he cared that I was wearing his shirt and nothing else, he didn’t show it, but the way his gaze hovered on the curve of my shoulder or the strip of thigh below the hem made my breath go sharp, like the air was too thick to swallow.
He let the silence stack up until it was a wall between us. Then, all at once, he dropped to a squat in front of me, one handbraced on the floor, the other dangling loose from a fist so big it could have cracked coconuts.
He wasn’t touching me, but his presence was a gravitational force. I felt it press down on my chest and pulse low in my gut.
He said, “I think we need to talk about what this is.”
I picked at a splinter in the floor, not meeting his eyes. “What, like a state of the union?”
“Bodean.” Just my name, flat as a tire. He waited, and when I didn’t speak, he ran a hand over his jaw, beard rasping under his palm. “You want to tell me why you’re really here?”
I started to laugh, but it came out like a cough. “You ever try to get a motel room at the end of the world on short notice?”
He didn’t smile. “That’s not what I mean and you know it.”
I leaned back against the bed frame, pretending it didn’t dig into my spine. “I needed a place to crash. You picked me up. End of story.”
“Try again,” he said. He said it gently, but it hit me like a sledgehammer. “Because you don’t show up broken unless you want someone to see you that way.”
I wanted to tell him to fuck off, to mind his own business. I wanted to say it didn’t matter, that nothing mattered. But instead, I curled tighter, arms banded around my knees, and stared at his boots.
He shifted forward, closer. I could see the tattoos climbing out from under his sleeves—sharp lines, geometric patterns, the edge of a wrench inked into the meat of his wrist.
“You’ve been running for a long time. Since Yreka and Portland and long before you ever left the valley. You think I don’t know what that looks like?”
I blinked hard, vision starting to swim.
He let out a breath, a low rumble that vibrated the floor. “I’m gonna ask you something, and I want you to be straight with me. No games, no bullshit.”
I tried for a shrug, but my voice came out thin. “Fine. Ask.”
“Do you want to stay here?” He leaned in, voice a rasp just above a whisper. “With me?”
The words rang in my ears, heavy as chain links.
Every smart, safe answer fluttered in my chest like moths: It’s just a pit stop. I’ll be out of your hair by morning. Nobody wants a stray hanging around.
I’d built my whole life around those lines, said them so many times they felt like gospel. But none of them fit here. None of them worked with him staring through me, waiting for an answer that wasn’t a fucking punchline.
I tried to say yes.
The word jammed behind my teeth.
He must have seen the panic, because his hand closed, slow as a glacier, over the fist I’d made in the hem of his shirt. The pressure wasn’t painful—just enough to remind me that I was real, that the world was still solid beneath me.
“It’s not weak to want this,” he said, thumb circling my knuckle, callused skin catching on the scab at the base of my finger. “You need someone to set the rules. Someone to keep you from burning out.”
I wanted to hit him, to bite, to spit in his face just to break the spell. But all I could do was stare at the place where his hand swallowed mine, the contrast so stark it made my pulse rabbit in my throat.
He let go, just like that, and stood. He was a wall, blocking the lamp, the whole room gone soft-edged and golden behind him.
“Is that what you want?” he asked, not moving.
