She stills completely.
Her eyes move over it slowly, taking it in.
“When did you get this?” she breathes.
“When I joined the club.”
She looks at me, and something moves in her expression, the complexity of finding someone familiar and discovering how much of them you missed. How much life had been lived in the space between.
Her fingers move from my jaw and trace the edge of one tattoo on my chest, slowly, carefully, following the line of it the way she’d followed the line of my beard, mapping me, finding the version of me she hadn’t known existed.
“Ryan,” she says. Not a question, just my name. Just the reality of me sitting beside her in the flesh and blood.
Her palm flattens against my chest, feeling my heartbeat, and confirming I am real in the most fundamental way, the solid certainty of a heart beating under a hand.
I look down at her hand and don’t move. Then my eyes find it, that small constellation of freckles on her left cheek, the one that has been there in every version of every light I’ve ever seen her in. The familiar thing that nothing can change.
There you are, I think.There’s the face I know.
She is looking at me the same way.
Both of us are reading the other in the low light, finding the familiar underneath everything the years have changed.
Her hand is still against my chest.
The distance between us is down to almost nothing.
The ocean moves outside.
Neither of us speaks.
And then, without warning, she turns and presses her lips hard against mine, desperate and immediate, nothing careful about it, her hands sliding up my chest and pulling my head down toward her. Her entire body leans into the kiss with theurgency of a woman who has been starved of something real for far too long.
Her mouth moves against mine, her hands grip my shirt, and she pulls back just enough to look at me, her eyes bright and shining, something raw and completely unguarded in them that she’d been holding back all evening.
“Ryan,” she breathes out. “I need you.Please.” Her voice breaks slightly on the word, the composure she’d held all night cracking at the edges. “It’s been so long since I’ve felt like myself. Since I’ve felt anything real.” Her hands are still on my chest, still gripping. “Give me this. Give me tonight. Make love to me like I deserve.”
I feel everything she is asking for, the months of it, the isolation of it, the desperation of a woman who has been performing intimacy without any real human connection for so long that the real thing has become almost unrecognizable.
And I feel the pull.
Because this is Riley, the pull of her is real, specific, has never entirely gone away, and some part of me has never let go of what we were.
Reaching up, I grip her shoulders and pull back.
Her eyes meet mine, shining, breath uneven, everything she’d been holding down right there on the surface.
I shake my head slowly. “I can’t.” The words come out rougher than I intended.
She stares at me.
“Ryan…”
“Not here. Not like this. Not inhishouse.” I keep my voice low and steady, even though my chest is doing anything but. “You deserve better than this, Riley. Better than a stolen night in a cartel villa where either of us could be dead by morning.”
Her jaw tightens.
The tears that had been threatening finally spill, just one, quickly wiped away, the way Riley has always cried. Fast, efficient, and furious at herself for doing it.
