Something moved in his face. Not surprise—he didn't do surprise easily. More like a calculation arriving at a number he'd been hoping for.
"Yeah," he said. "Okay."
We didn't go far.
The crowd was thick near the main concourse and Grant moved through it the way I’m sure he moved through everything—direct, certain, no wasted motion—and I followed in thechannel he opened, his hand finding the small of my back somewhere in the press of bodies and staying there.
His palm was flat and warm through my top. I was aware of it the way you were aware of a lit match in a dark room—completely, immediately, with the understanding that something was about to catch.
He steered us left, down a service corridor that ran along the back of the arena. The crowd noise muffled as we moved, the announcer's voice fading to a murmur, the air cooling from the warm press of bodies to something that smelled of hay and motor oil and the metal tang of arena infrastructure.
We passed a tack room, a door marked ELECTRICAL, a door marked STORAGE.
Grant pushed the storage door open.
Inside: stacked bleacher pads, coiled ropes on hooks, a folding table, a single caged bulb overhead throwing warm functional light. Not romantic. Honest, which was better.
The door clicked shut behind us.
Grant turned.
I was already there.
I kissed him first—reached up with both hands and pulled his face down to mine before he could think or retreat or execute the tactical withdrawal I'd watched him run twice today. His mouth was still for exactly one second. And then it wasn't.
He kissed me back like something had snapped.
His hands found my waist, then my hips, gripping with a certainty that made my breath catch—not rough but absolute, the grip of a man who'd made a decision and had stopped arguing with himself about it. He walked me backward until my shoulders met the wall and his body followed, pressing in, and the full length and weight of him against me short-circuited every coherent thought I had.
I made a sound into his mouth I didn't recognize as mine.
He pulled back an inch. His forehead not quite touching mine, his breathing audible and uneven in a way that was enormously satisfying given how controlled he'd been.
"Lou." My name at that register. Rough. Stripped. “Tell me to stop.”
The words were calm. The grip on my hip was not.
"Don't stop," I said.
The corner of his mouth lifted—just a fraction, just enough to look dangerous. “Good.”
His mouth came back to mine—deeper, his tongue stroking slow and deliberate, one hand sliding up under my top to find bare skin at my waist. His palm was hot against my ribcage and I felt it spread outward from the point of contact, reaching places his hand wasn't yet, and the yet was doing something to me.
He kissed me like he’d been starving for the taste of my mouth since the moment we met. I made a sound I’d never heard myself make—half moan, half plea—and he swallowed it like it belonged to him.
I pulled at his shirt, working the buttons open by feel, and when I found skin underneath—the hard, warm plane of his chest, the density of a body that had been used hard for a long time—I pressed my palms flat against him and felt his heartbeat going as fast as mine.
He groaned. Low, involuntary, the sound of a man losing the last of a grip he'd been white-knuckling all day.
His hands moved to the hem of my top. He pulled it up and over and dropped it somewhere to our left, and then he looked at me—not a glance, a look, unhurried and complete—and something in his expression went quiet and fierce simultaneously.
"Christ," he said. Quiet. Like it escaped.
I reached back and unclasped my bra myself, let it fall, and watched his jaw tighten and his eyes go very dark.
He touched me with both hands—learning, thorough, his fingertips tracing slow circles over my nipples until they peaked under the contact and I stopped trying to be quiet about what that did to me.
He bent his head and replaced one finger with his mouth and I forgot the rodeo, the city, the notebook on my apartment floor, every single thing except his mouth and his hands and the wall at my back and the warm swaying light overhead.
