"Yeah."
"It's them? The family?"
He's quiet for a long time. "Sometimes. Sometimes it's other things. Faces I can't place anymore. Sounds that don't belong in Mississippi but show up anyway." His hand finds the back of my neck, warm and heavy. "I never told anyone the full version. Malachi knows I've got damage. Maggie knows I don't sleepright. But the compound, the family, the order I followed." He pauses. "You're the first person I've said it to out loud."
My chest aches so badly that I press my fist against it. "We're a pair," I say, hoarse.
"Yeah." His mouth brushes my hair. "We are."
We sit with it.
I shift in his lap, turning enough to see his face fully. The redness around his eyes has faded. He looks tired in a way that goes past sleep. But his gaze on me is steady. Present.
"There's one more thing," I say.
His hand stills on my neck. "Okay."
My face goes hot. This one is mine alone, lodged under my ribs since that first night.
"Chicago," I say. "The hotel."
His eyes sharpen. "What about it?"
"You were my first." Knox doesn't move. "My first everything," I whisper. "I'd never been with anyone before that night."
The silence stretches. His hand drops from my neck to my hip, grips once, releases.
"You were a virgin," he says, each word measured.
"Yes."
His jaw locks. I can see him replaying it. The door. His hands in my hair. Pinning me against the wall. The pace he set that rattled the frame.
"I wasn't gentle," he says, and his voice sounds as though it's been dragged over gravel.
"No. You weren't."
"Jesus Christ, Sloane." He drags both hands over his face. "I took you against a door. I pulled your hair. I had you pinned to the bed. If I'd known—"
"I didn't want you to know." I catch his wrists and pull his hands away so he has to look at me. "My father was going to sell that along with the rest of me, and I wanted it to be mine. Iwanted to choose who. I wanted to choose how. I chose you, and I chose hard, and rough, and real, because I didn't want my first time to feel as though someone was handling me."
His breath leaves him in a rush.
"You didn't hurt me," I say. "You wrecked me. There's a difference. I felt alive for the first time in my life. I felt as though I was a person who got to decide what happened to her own body."
His eyes are dark and wet. "You should have told me," he says, but there's no anger in his words. Just ache.
"I know. I was afraid you'd be careful. Treat me as though I was fragile." I press his palm against my cheek. "But I didn't want careful. I wanted you. Exactly the way you gave yourself to me."
He stares at me for a long time. His thumb traces my cheekbone.
"Mine," he says quietly. "You've been mine since that night. I just didn't know how much."
"Knox..."
"I love you." The words land in my chest with the force of a fist. "I love you," he says again, steadier. "I've loved you since that parking lot. And I love you right now, on this floor, after everything you just told me."
I can't breathe.
