The same.
And not.
Nothing between us has changed, but everything around us has. It alters the feeling just enough to make it new, and I don’t mind that nearly as much as I thought I would.
I pull back just enough to look at her.
“It’s loud out there.”
“It is.” Her eyes flick briefly toward the curtains. “And this is our life now.”
Then she looks back at me, already reading me the way she always does. “Say what you’re actually thinking.”
I stay quiet for a second before answering.
“I don’t know how to do this. Out there.” I shake my head slightly. “When it was just us, I knew how to handle it.”
“You still do.”
“It’s different now. People are going to talk about how this happened. Whether it’s?—”
She presses her fingers gently to my mouth.
“Stop, Dane. None of them were there. They don’t know what we survived. They don’t know anything about us.” Her voice stays calm and steady. “Let them think whatever they want.”
I hold her gaze for another second before I lean down and kiss her jaw, her throat, the place beneath her ear that always makes her breathing catch. I let the rest of it go.
I move lower slowly, and she tips her head back to give me room. Her hands stay in my hair, softer now, following instead of holding on.
There’s no rush to any of this. No pressure. Just a real bed, a locked door, and nothing waiting for us outside this room.
I take my time moving down the center of her body, across her ribs, feeling the subtle changes in her breathing beneath my hands.
I’ve known every version of her. From the beginning until now. I feel it in the way she responds to me, the way she moves with me, the way nothing between us has ever needed explanation.
No one outside this room knows her the way I do.
That thought settles somewhere deep and solid inside me.
I move lower, and her breath catches harder this time.
Her fingers tighten in my hair.
“Mmm… Dane.”
Her thighs spread as I lower my mouth to her, slow and deliberate, my tongue finding her in one long stroke that makes her hips jerk beneath me.
I do it again.
And again.
Unhurried.
I flatten my tongue against her, and the sound she makes isn’t even a word anymore—just pure feeling.
I know how to read her after all these years. The rhythm of her breathing. The sounds she makes. The smallest shifts in her body that tell me what she needs before she says it aloud.
She’s never been quiet with me here.
