Both of us—just breathing. His forehead dropped to mine. In the dim light with his face this close and his body inside mine he looked undone, and I understood it because I was undone in the same way and for the same reasons.
Then, he moved.
Long, deep, unhurried—building heat without rushing it, his hips finding a rhythm that was entirely his and entirely right, one hand at my thigh and one braced against the wall above my shoulder. I moved with him. Matched him. The arena roared somewhere behind the walls and neither of us was there.
He picked up the pace.
His mouth at my ear, rough words that I felt in my spine, about how I felt and how long he'd been—and I answered without words, honest and unedited, the sound of a body getting what it had been wanting since a bread stall at nine forty-five in the morning.
The second orgasm was slower, deeper, gathered from everywhere and arrived all at once, and when it did, I had myface pressed to his throat and his name in my mouth like the only word I knew.
He followed—rhythm fracturing, body pulling taut, a sound low in his chest that was private and real and mine in the way those sounds only ever belonged to the person who drew them out.
We stayed there afterward. Neither of us in a hurry to be separate things again.
The bulb stilled. The arena crowd roared in the distance, muffled and irrelevant.
After a while, he set me down, steadied me when my legs weighed in with their opinion. He handed me my top from the floor with a quietness that felt like care. While I dressed, he worked his buttons in order, retrieved the buckle from the table and threaded it back through with the same respect he'd set it down with.
We didn't fill the space with words. I was grateful for that. Some moments got smaller when you talked over them.
When I was dressed, he looked at me. The full look.
"You good?” he asked.
"Yes." I looked back at him steadily. "You?"
Something moved in his face—the slightly undone expression of a man who hadn't been asked that in a while and wasn't sure what to do with it.
He reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, his thumb grazing my cheekbone, and the gentleness of it after everything else undid something the rest hadn't touched.
"Yeah," he said. "I am."
I believed him.
We found our way back to the concourse, back into the noise and the heat and the last of the evening's events. Grant's hand was at my back again—the same placement, the same warmth,but landing differently than it had an hour ago. Not a question anymore.
Izzy was waiting at the base of the VIP stairs. Her bag across her body, her expression composed in the careful way of a woman who had very strong opinions she was choosing not to voice yet.
She looked at me. Looked at Grant. Looked at the general state of both of us.
"Well," she said.
"Don't," I said.
Her mouth curved. She looked at Grant.
"I'm Isabel," she said. "You can call me Izzy. Lou's friend.”
"Grant." He shook her hand. "I gathered."
"Are you two—" she gestured between us, a gesture that managed to encompass approximately everything that had happened in the last hour without naming any of it.
"We're going back to his hotel," I said.
Izzy's eyebrows rose a fraction. "The Palmetto Rose?"
Grant nodded. Something shifted in her expression—there and gone, the flicker I'd seen at the market when I'd asked about the Dominion Defense men, the careful management of something she knew that she wasn't going to say.
