My hands grip his shoulders and he feels me come and he follows. Three more strokes, hard, the restraint finally breaking, and he buries himself in me. The sound he makes is my name and his body shakes above mine. I hold him through it the way he's held me through everything.
We come down together. He lowers his weight onto me carefully. Not all of it, he'd crush me, but enough to feel held, enough to feel surrounded and I wrap my arms around his back. His face is in my neck, his breath warm against my skin.
He lifts his head and looks at me.
"Are you really okay?" he asks. "Did I hurt you?"
"It didn't hurt," I say. That's what I need him to know first. Before anything else. "The only thing I felt was you. Just you. I felt so safe. The whole time. When you were inside me and above me, I've never felt so safe and loved. You felt perfect."
He kisses me. Softly. The kiss of a man who has more feelings than his body can contain and is trying to communicate them through the only means available.
He carefully rolls off me and pulls me against him. I settle into my spot built for my head.
"I want to do that again," I say after a minute.
"Oh my God! Right now? You gotta give me a few minutes, darling, to recharge."
I snort back a laugh. "No, not right now. But again. Regularly. I want this to be part of what we do."
"Stormy, I am enthusiastically, completely, on board with that. Top, bottom, sideways. I don't care who's where or who is doing what. I only care that it's me and you. We'll switch off. We'll do whatever feels right on whatever night feels right. Some nights you drive, some nights I drive—"
"Some nights we flip a coin?" I tease.
"Yes! That's perfect! I was just going to suggest a coin. It adds an element of suspense."
"Tex, I was joking. We're not flipping a coin."
"Why not? We could get a special coin made up. A sex coin. One side says top, the other says—"
"Tex."
"Okay, maybe not a coin flip, but we'll figure out something. You can always choose. I like you making decisions for me. Takes the stress off."
I settle back against him. His arm comes around me. The muscular arm that has carried me and held me and pinned a monster to the floor so I could hit him.
The rally is in two weeks and the trim isn't finished. The second floor is still a construction zone. The winter is coming and money is tight, but none of that matters right now.
Right now, the only thing that matters is the fact that I'm lying in my own bed in my own home with the man I chose and every single piece of me that was ever taken has been given back.
Because of Tex.
I close my eyes. The dark behind my eyelids is just dark now. Not a place where bad things live. Just dark. The quiet, safe, ordinary dark that comes before sleep for people who are not afraid.
And I'm not afraid anymore.
I'm home.
Epilogue: Tex
The October Bike Rally lands on Panama City Beach like a wildebeest migration.
The bikers come from every direction—east from Jacksonville, west from Pensacola, north from Atlanta.
Thousands of them arrive. The beach road becomes a river of chrome and exhaust and leather. The sound is a constant rolling thunder that starts at dawn on Friday and doesn't let up until Sunday night when the last pack rumbles out of town and the locals emerge from their houses blinking like they've survived a deafening natural disaster.
This is the weekend my dad built the bar for. Every decision he made—the location on the beach road, the open-air front, the oversized lot, the grill big enough to feed an army—all of it was designed for this weekend. The one weekend a year when the world comes to your door on two wheels. All you have to do is feed people, give them cold beer, and stay out of their way.
Big Tex's Roadhouse is as ready as it's going to get.
