I roll my eyes. Full rotation. The gesture that has somehow become ours—the small, exasperated, deeply ordinary thing that exists between us outside the heat and the legal briefs and the biology. He almost smiles. The corner of his mouth lifts a fraction, and the almost-smile is worse than the smirk because it’s not performance. It’s real.
“What are we doing?” My voice is quiet. Not a legal question. Not a negotiation. The honest, exhausted inquiry of a woman standing in her enemy’s coat closet, adjusting the scarf that hides his mark, already knowing she’ll leave her door unlocked in two hours.
His eyes hold mine. The almost-smile is gone. What replaces it is something stripped down, something with no legal precedent and no closing argument and no escape clause.
“Surviving.”
One word. And it’s the most honest thing either of us has said sincefor now.
I leave. Walk down the front steps of the Vaughn family home into the night air, and the cold hits my face and my lungs and doesn’t clear my head the way I need it to. My car is parked on the street. The drive home is twenty minutes. In two hours, he’ll be at my door. I’ll open it. He’ll step inside and the door will close and the scarf will come off and the blocker will be pointless and we’ll fall into each other the way we keep falling—hard, desperate, swearing it’s the last time, knowing the wordlasthas lost all meaning between us.
What are we doing?
Surviving.
I start the car. Pull into the street. My hands are steady on the wheel.
Liam’s voice echoes:Logic over biology. Stability over chaos.
Grayson’s answer echoes louder:I hope you never have to learn the difference between choosing a partner and recognizing one.
The mark at my throat throbs in time with my heartbeat. His scent is on my skin beneath three coats of jasmine. His knee pressed against mine under a walnut table in front of his entire family, and the contact didn’t feel like a secret. It felt like the only true thing in the room.
We got this.
The words burn. I say them anyway. Because the alternative is admitting thatfor nowis a door I keep closing on a room I’ve already moved into, and the lock broke weeks ago, and the only person who doesn’t know I’m staying is me.
