I stand, which takes more coordination than usual because my legs have opinions about the previous forty minutes, and I become immediately and comprehensively aware of the cool air on every inch of me. Goosebumps rise along my arms, my thighs, the back of my neck — the skin asserting its exposure. I am bare in a dark forest with no idea where the car is or how to get there without him.
He watches me register this.
"Ready?" he says.
I look at the ruined silk on the ground, then up at him.
"Do I have a choice?"
"You always have a choice."
He turns and starts walking, and I follow.
I thought I knew how far I ran.
I didn't. The forest goes on and on — root systems arching out of the mud like ribcages, low branches I have to duck, the path narrowing and widening in patterns that mean nothing to me. Fifteen minutes in and I still can't see the road. My feet are bare and careful on the uneven ground, and the cool air has graduated from discomfort to something worse, raising goosebumps I can't seem to shake.
He moves through the dark ahead of me without hesitation. No pausing to check direction, no moment of uncertainty — he traces this path like he laid it himself, which maybe he did. Henavigates around obstacles before I've seen them, holds aside a low branch without turning so I can pass under it, adjusts his pace when the ground gets soft.
The cold works against me steadily. Each gust through the mangroves finds new skin — my shoulders, the backs of my thighs, the place where my hair is pushed aside by the wind and the air hits my neck. Walking naked beside a fully clothed man through a dark forest is its own particular vulnerability. Not shame, exactly — something more fundamental. The animal awareness of being unprotected while someone with better senses moves ahead of me through the dark.
He keeps glancing back. Brief, unhurried. Making sure I'm following, or making sure I'm still there.
The car, when it appears at the tree line, is the most welcoming thing I've seen all night.
The interior light blinks on when he opens the passenger door and I slide in, my bare ass on the cold leather. He comes around and settles into the driver's seat.
He doesn't start the car immediately.
He looks at me. Here, there's nowhere else to look, no pretense of checking the path. His eyes move over me in the fading interior light — slow, thorough. My bare thighs against his leather seat. The goosebumps still raised along my arms. The flush still in my skin, the loose, wrecked state of my whole body — all of it visible, all of it on display. His jaw does something controlled.
My nipples tighten under his gaze. I watch him notice.
Then he starts the car.
We drive. He keeps looking — every thirty seconds or so, his eyes move from the road to me, quick and involuntary, a man checking a fire to make sure it's still under control. I'm aware of every inch of bare skin, aware of the leather warming under my thighs, aware of the ache between my legs that his lookingdoes nothing to help. His gaze is not what it was in the bar that first night — the clinical assessment, the predator measuring distance. It's something else. Something the arrangement never had a name for.
After a few minutes, without taking his eyes from the road, he says: "Why did you stay?"
"In the penthouse?"
"You had the code from day one."
I look at his profile in the dark. "I know."
He's quiet for a moment, deciding whether to leave it there. He doesn't. "So why?"
The answer is simple and I've been not-saying it for weeks. "Because I didn't want to leave." A pause. "That’s new for me. Wanting to stay somewhere."
His hands tighten briefly on the wheel. He says nothing for long enough that I think that's all — and then, quieter, nearly swallowed by the road noise: "I can’t stay away."
"I noticed."
He glances at me. One long look before the road demands him back. Whatever he was going to say next, he doesn't say. But it sits between us anyway — enormous and patient, taking up all the available air.
We drive. The city rebuilds itself around us, neon bleeding across the wet pavement. He keeps looking at me. I keep letting him. Somewhere on the causeway, his right hand leaves the wheel and rests on my bare thigh, palm flat, not moving anywhere, just there — warm and certain and present — and stays for the rest of the drive.
He parks in the garage and comes around to my door before I've decided how to get out.
