“Stop saying my name like that,” he growls.
“Like what?”
“Like you still mean it.” The next second, he’s kissing me.
It’s not soft this time. It’s rough, desperate, full of everything we’ve been pretending isn’t still alive. My back hits the workbench, and the lamp flickers. His hand slides up my spine, the other fisting in my hair.
I taste whiskey, fire, and regret. He kisses like he’s starving for it. For me. For something that makes him feel alive again.
When I drag him closer, his breath catches. A sound that tears through both of us. His body cages mine against the wall, solid heat pressing through denim, restraint gone.
My fingers dig into his shoulders, nails biting through skin. He groans, low and broken, like the sound costs him.
“God, Aria…” His forehead drops to mine. “This is a bad idea.”
“Then stop.” Even my tone isn’t convincing.
He doesn’t. His mouth finds my throat, rough kisses trailing fire down my skin. Every inch of me aches for it, for him.
When he finally lifts me, setting me on the workbench, the world falls away. The fire pops, the storm sighs outside, but all I can hear is our breathing.
He kisses me again, slower this time, hands gentler but no less hungry. The kind of kiss that saysI missed you,andI hate that I did.
When we finally break apart, our foreheads still touching, the air between us hums.
The firelight flickers across his face, painting him in gold and shadow. Snow falls outside, quiet and endless, sealing us in a world that can’t exist beyond this night.
My chest heaves. “This changes nothing.”
He stares at me, eyes dark, voice barely a whisper. “Changes everything.”
His hands map territory they once knew by heart. The curve of my waist, the hollow at the base of my throat where my pulse betrays me. Each touch is a question asked in a language we both forgot we spoke.
The workbench is cold and unforgiving beneath my jeans, but he's furnace-hot, all lean muscle and barely leashed restraint. The storm outside grows again, throwing shadows across his face. Dark, then gold, then dark again. Like watching him flicker between the man he was and the stranger he became.
"Look at me," I whisper, and when he does, I see it all. The hunger, the hurt, the months of wanting what he thought he'd destroyed.
Steel’s breath comes ragged against my collarbone. My fingers trace the ridge of his spine, feeling him shudder, feeling the armor crack. Every exhale is surrender. Every inhale, a prayer he's forgotten how to say.
The fire snaps. Embers spiral upward like falling stars in reverse.
Fabric whispers. Skin finds skin. The world narrows to his weight, my heartbeat, the way we fit together like a wound and its scar.
"Tell me to stop," he breathes against my mouth.
"Don't you dare."
When Isaiah enters me, a sudden gasp parts my lips. The sensations flowing through me set my skin on fire, and my mind races. He’s home. I’m home. We’re home. Time unmoors itself. There's only awareness, the salt-taste of skin, the tremor in his shoulders, the way my name breaks open in his throat like something sacred, something ruined. His touch is reverent and desperate, gentle and consuming, like he's trying to memorize me and destroy the memory all at once.
I arch into him, and he makes a raw, guttural sound, entirely undone. It echoes through my ribs, rewrites something fundamental in my chest.
The lamp flickers. Our shadows merge on the garage wall, two silhouettes bleeding into one.
We move together like an argument finally won, like a confession that can't be taken back. Every rise and fall is punctuated by gasped breaths, by the quiet devastation of rediscovering what we thought we'd lost.
Steel’s forehead presses to mine, and I feel him tremble, not from cold, not from weakness, but from the terrible relief of coming home to something he burned down himself.
"Aria…" My name is a plea, a curse, a hallelujah.
