Her eyes hold mine. “Yes.”
I kiss her slowly.
It costs me. My body wants fast. Wants to burn through the fear, the hospital, the headlines, the memory of her on the floor outside my mother’s room. But Peyton deserves better than being taken by panic and called desire.
So I go slow.
My hand at her jaw. Her fingers in my hoodie. Her mouth opening under mine with a small, helpless sound that nearly breaks every good intention I have.
She pulls back first, only far enough to say, “You are overthinking.”
“I am trying not to be an idiot.”
“Admirable. Unsexy, but admirable.”
A laugh comes out of me. Short. Surprised.
Then her hands slide under my hoodie, and I stop laughing.
“Still overthinking?” she asks.
“Less.”
“Good.”
She pushes the hoodie up. I help. Shirt next. Hers. Shoes kicked toward the chair. Jeans opened with hands that are not as steady as I want them to be.
When I see the mark on her hip from the night after the Pearl, faded but still there, I go still.
Peyton follows my gaze.
“Ryan.”
“I left after.”
“You did.”
“I hurt you.”
“You did.”
No softness. No absolution she does not mean.
I nod once.
“I am sorry.”
Her hand comes to my face. “Then stay.”
I kiss her again.
This time the slow does not survive. It turns deep and hungry and honest, weeks of distance collapsing into the few feet between the door and the bed. We make it there badly, half-laughing once when my knee hits the frame, then not laughing at all when she pulls me down over her and I feel how much I have missed the plain fact of her skin.
I learn her again like I have been starving for it. The place below her ear. The sound she makes when my hand moves between her thighs and stays there, the way her breath snags and her hips chase it. She arches and swears and drags me closer by the back of the neck, and every bit of the control I wear like a second jersey comes off with the rest of it.
My hand finds the condom in my wallet on the nightstand. One short pause, deliberate, the single careful thing left in a night that has given up on careful everywhere else.
“Tell me,” I say against her mouth, because quiet is the thing that broke us and I am done with it.
