“I’m sure.”
He relaxed a little more against me.
I pressed my face into his chest—warm, smelling of sleep, sex, and him—and let the next words come before I could overthink them.
“I enjoyed it, Finn.” Muffled against his skin, but honest. Completely honest. “More than enjoyed it.”
His hand stilled in my hair.
I drew a slow breath and pushed through the vulnerability before it could close my throat.
“When—I mean—if this happens again,” I hesitated, heat climbing my neck. “I might want it rougher. If that’s… something you’re okay with?”
He pulled me back from his chest, gently but deliberately, tilting my chin up until my eyes met his.
The panic had vanished, replaced by something warm and steady. One eyebrow lifted fractionally.
“When this happens again,” he said, his voice dropping low, certain, with an undercurrent of heat. “Not if, Libby.”
My breath caught.
“We are doing this again,” he continued, his thumb tracing the line of my jaw with a patience that contradicted every urgent thing he’d just done to me. “And again. And probably again after that.” The corner of his mouth shifted—not quite a smile, but closer than I’d ever seen from him. “Whatever you need. However you need it. Rough, gentle, anything in between. I don’t care, as long as you trust me.”
The almost-smile faded into something more serious, more deliberate.
“And I promise you—if you ever need me to stop, I stop. No hesitation. No questions. That’s not negotiable.”
He held my gaze long enough to let every word settle into the bruised and uncertain places inside me that had never once heard a man say that and actually mean it. Then he kissed me—slow and tender, his lips lingering against mine as if he’d forgotten entirely about the world waiting outside these walls.
When we broke apart, I tucked myself back against his chest without a word, and his arms closed around me with a quiet certainty that made my eyes sting.
“Sleep a little longer,” he said against my hair. “We’ve still got some time before night watch.”
His hand resumed its slow, steady pass through my hair. His chest rose and fell beneath my cheek, and I let my eyes close, letting myself believe, for a little while longer, that the world outside would wait.
Twenty Four
No Storm. No Cover. No Break -Finn
Aweek.
Seven days of watching the sky.
No storms. No cover. No break in the stillness that had settled over the city. Just more of them, and less of everything else.
I stood at the window, my eye pressed to the narrowest gap in the boards, gaze locked on the Suburban. It sat three houses down, exactly where it had been since the first day—untouched, unmoved.
The street had changed. The eerie quiet of the first couple of days had given way to slow, directionless movement. Shapes drifted up and down the road as if they’d stopped searching for anything specific and simply claimed the space instead. It felt like we were the ones who no longer belonged here.
We should have moved sooner.
But we’d made the right call. We’d worked with what we had, and what we had hadn’t been enough. No amount of replaying it would change that.
Behind me, the house was quiet. Fiona and Lily had finally crashed after their watch. Libby was on the couch downstairs, sleeping lightly, or trying to. Seven days into this now—nights belonging to Libby and me, days to Fiona and Lily. Nobody fully slept. Nobody fully relaxed. We just endured.
I shifted my eyes back to the street.
Then—
