She cries out, her back bowing.
“Give it to me,” I say, pulling her hair again, holding her in place.
Her body locks down. Every muscle goes taut, and then she’s coming hard, clenching around me in sharp flutters that make it almost impossible to keep moving. She sobs my name, her arms giving out as she collapses forward, face pressed to the bed, hips still tilted, and her body milking me like it’s pulling me down with her.
“Come inside me.”
My rhythm shatters. I bury myself one final time, and it tears through me. A sound rips out of my throat that I don’t recognize, and my whole body shakes. There’s heat and relief and devastation of finally letting go inside the only person who’s ever made me feel like more than a weapon.
When it’s over, I don’t move. I stay inside her, both of us trembling, still clenching in aftershocks.
I press my forehead to the space between her shoulder blades and breathe. Her skin tastes like salt and mine and something that I’ll never get enough of.
Eventually I pull out, and she collapses flat onto the mattress, boneless. I drop beside her, and she immediately rolls into me, throwing a leg over mine and hiding her face into the crook of my neck.
We lie there for a while. Her finger traces shapes on my chest. Letters, maybe. Words I can’t read but feel anyway.
Eventually, she drifts off. I’m exhausted, and sore, but I don’t want to miss a moment of having her here, just like this, so I watch her instead. Trace the freckles on her shoulder with my eyes. Count the seconds between her breaths.
The next morning, light filters through the blinds, and she’s twisted around me. Her hair is everywhere, copper against the white sheets and my skin, and her breathing is slow and steady against my chest.
Tomorrow is here. Boston. Her father Leo. Answers she’s owed and truths that will probably gut her. The real world, rushing back in like water through a cracked dam.
But right now, in this room, in this bed, with her breath on my skin and her hand over my heart and a floral bedspreadthat’s older than both of us, I’m not a weapon. I’m not Excalibur. I’m not a Calloway or a fighter or a murderer or a throwaway.
I’m just a man in love with a woman who chose him back.
“Half-Pint.”
She smiles and her arms tighten around me.
“Five more minutes,” she whispers.
I press my lips to her hair and close my eyes.
“Let’s make it seven.”
Chapter 40
Genevieve
My dad’s brownstone looks wrong.
It’s the same brick, the same black iron railing, the same window boxes my father planted with lavender every spring because my mother loved it and he never stopped. But the lavender is dead. Brown and brittle and leaning sideways in the soil like nobody’s touched it in weeks.
The curtains on the second floor are drawn. My father never draws his curtains. He says natural light is the only thing in life that’s truly free, and he refuses to waste it.
Lance cuts the engine and the silence is so thick I can hear my own pulse.
“This is it?” he asks.
I nod. My hand is on the door handle, but my body won’t move.
I’ve imagined this moment for weeks. Every night I couldn’t sleep, every voicemail I left that went unanswered, every time I pressed my phone to my chest and whisperedalways and in all wayslike a prayer to a God I wasn’t sure was listening. Iimagined running up those steps and pounding on the door and my father opening it with that expression he makes when he’s pretending he wasn’t worried, the one where his jaw is tense but his eyes are soft, and he’d saymon chouand I’d fall into him and count to seven and everything would make sense again.
But now I’m here, and the lavender is dead, and I’m terrified of what’s on the other side of that door.
“Hey.” Lance’s hand finds my knee. “I’m right here.”
