Her legs tighten around me and I feel her start to climb again.
The tension building in her body, the way her breath shortens, the way she grips my arms like she's afraid she'll fly apart if she lets go.
"Let go," I tell her. My mouth against her ear, my hand sliding between us to find the spot that sent her over before. "I've got you. Let go."
She does.
She comes with her face buried in my neck and my name on her lips and her whole body shaking around me, and the feel of it—the way she tightens, the sound she makes, the trust of it—pulls me right over the edge with her.
I come hard enough that my vision blurs and my arms shake.
I bury my face in her hair, hold her and I let everything I've been carrying go quiet.
Every wall, every locked box, every white-knuckled minute of holding it together.
I feelalive.
After, we lie in the dark.
Her head is on my chest. My arm is around her.
Her fingers trace slow, absent circles on my sternum.
Neither of us speaks for a long time, and the silence isn't the wrong kind.
It's the kind I've been looking for. The kind that's warm and full and breathing.
"Stay," I say. I didn't plan to say it. It just comes out the way things come out around this woman—bypassing every filter I've built.
She lifts her head and looks at me. "The girls?—"
"At Ellie's. Won't be back until tomorrow afternoon."
She searches my face. Looking for doubt, maybe. For regret. She won't find either.
"Okay," she says. "I'll stay."
She puts her head back on my chest.
I pull the blanket over both of us and hold her, and I listen to her breathing slow down.
My phone is on the nightstand. The cameras are running. The locks are changed.
The club rides on Friday.
The loan sharks are circling.
The pipeline is pumping poison into my town.
Haley Briggs is in the ICU.
My ex-wife's debt is sitting on my life like a boulder I can't move.
All of that is still there. All of it. None of it has changed.
But Leah Mercer is asleep in my bed with her hand over my heart and her scar pressed against my shoulder, and the house doesn't sound like a bunker tonight.
It sounds like a home.
