Bianca.
Low. Rough. It hurt him to say it, and he couldn’t stop.
My fingers move faster. The heat builds in a tight coil at the base of my spine, and I’m breathing hard now, my face turned into the pillow, my free hand gripping the sheet. I’m close. I can feel it gathering, and I try to hold on to the image, but it keeps shifting. His hands. His voice. The crack in his expression when Chief went to me and he couldn’t explain it away. The way helooked back at me from the truck. The way seeing him look back made something inside me fracture with wanting.
I want him.
Not the way I’ve wanted things before. Not carefully, not with the measured consideration I apply to every choice I make. I want him in a way that terrifies me, a way that lives in my body instead of my head, and when I come it’s with his name between my teeth and my whole body curled tight around the ache.
Afterward, I lie in the dark and feel my pulse slow down.
The ceiling is still there. The quiet is still there. My hand is still pressed between my thighs, and the aftershocks are fading into something softer and sadder, the way they always do when you come alone and the person you were imagining isn’t there to hold you through the drop.
I roll onto my side and pull the blanket up.
I’m terrified.
Not of him. He’s been nothing but careful with me, and I don’t think he has it in him to be anything else. I’m terrified of wanting. Of the specific, catastrophic vulnerability of wanting someone who might not want you back. Of opening a door I’ve spent my whole life learning to keep shut, because every time I’ve opened it before, the person on the other side has walked through and kept going.
My parents walked through it. Every friend I made in LA who stopped calling when I stopped being useful. Every person who told me I was too quiet or too much work or so sweet but, and the but was always the door closing.
I can’t do that again.
I close my eyes and breathe. The mountains are outside my window, black and solid, and somewhere up in those mountains is a man with a limp and a scar and a dog who chose me, and I’m lying in the dark with his name in my mouth and the taste of wanting on my tongue.
“Rhett.”
I whisper it. Just once. Just to hear it in my voice, in the quiet of my apartment, where no one can see what it does to my face.
I hate how good it feels.
I say it again.
Chapter 6
Rhett
Chief won’t put weight on his front left paw, and that gets me out of my own head faster than anything else could.
I notice it at dawn, when he stands from his bed by the woodstove and takes two steps and stops. He doesn’t whimper. But he lifts the paw and holds it off the ground and looks at me, and the look says something’s wrong and I need you to handle it.
I’m on the floor beside him in three seconds, bad leg be damned. I run my hand down his foreleg, gently, feeling for swelling or heat. He lets me. He’s always let me. I find it at the wrist joint. Swollen. Warm to the touch. He flinches when I press, just barely, and pulls the paw back.
“All right,” I tell him. “All right. I’ve got you.”
I call Kellan Blackwood’s office before seven. He picks up on the second ring, which tells me the man sleeps about as well as I do. His voice is clipped and professional, the voice of someone who prefers animals to people and doesn’t bother hiding it.
“Bring him in at nine,” Kellan says. “Don’t let him walk on it.”
“He’s eighty-five pounds.”
“Then carry him.”
He hangs up. I look at Chief. Chief looks at me. Eighty-five pounds of German Shepherd who hasn’t been carried since he was pulled out of a blown-out building in Kandahar, and a man with a left leg that buckles on stairs.
This is going to be a problem.
I manage to get him to the truck by half-carrying, half-guiding him with his weight against my right side. It takes ten minutes and leaves me gripping the truck bed with both hands, breathing hard, the leg shaking so badly I can feel it in my teeth. Chief is in the passenger seat, paw lifted, watching me with patient brown eyes that say I know this is hard for you, and I’m choosing not to comment.
