He didn’t argue. He didn’t give me a speech about the club handling it or the compound being safe. He walked past me into the room, pulled the chair from the desk, sat down, and rested his forearms on his knees. Settled. Like he’d arrived at a place he intended to stay.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Sitting.”
“I asked you to leave.”
“I heard you.”
I stared at him. He looked back at me with the same patience he’d shown across what felt like a thousand shop-counter mornings. Steady, unhurried, present. He was giving me space. He was also making it clear that the space had him in it, and he wasn’t going anywhere.
The anger came first. Hot, sharp. I’d made a sacrifice and he was sitting in a motel chair acting like it was negotiable. I’d left to protect them. I’d given up the only real thing I’d had since the day I walked into Forsaken.
“You don’t understand,” I said. “I’m not running from you. I’m running so nobody else pays for what I did. I testified. I did the right thing. And people keep getting hurt because of it. You got shot because of me.”
“Correction. I got grazed by a bullet because I chose to put my body over yours. I chose to protect you and that was my call.”
“And next time it could be worse. Next time it could be one of the women, or the baby, or...”
My voice cracked. A fracture that ran through the word and kept going. The muscles I’d been clenching since my placement, the ones holding everything in place, the discipline and the fear and the loneliness, gave out.
I sat on the bed because my legs wouldn’t hold me. I pressed my hands over my face and the breathing turned into something I couldn’t control, a sound coming out of me that I didn’t recognize. Something deeper than sobbing. The sound of a woman who’d been strong for so long she’d forgotten she was allowed to stop.
He didn’t rush to me. He let it come. Let me shake and gasp and fall apart on the edge of a motel bed, and when the worst of it passed he got out of the chair and sat beside me. Close. Solid. His thigh against mine. His hand on my back, broad and warm, holding me in the world.
“I’m tired,” I whispered. “I’m so tired of doing this alone.”
“Then stop.”
Two words. No speech, no romance, no ornamental promises. Just the offer.
I turned to him. His face was close, his eyes on mine, and what I saw there wasn’t pity. It was recognition. The look of someone who understood what it cost to carry a heavy thing alone for years and what it felt like when someone reached for the other end.
He lifted his hand from my back and put it on the side of my neck. His thumb resting against my jaw, his fingers curling into my hair. He held me there, his eyes searching my face, asking without words. And then he kissed me.
It wasn’t careful. It wasn’t the patient, measured kiss from the hallway at the compound. It was the kiss of a man who’d driven through the dark for two hours to find a woman in a motel room and was done pretending any of this was casual. His mouth covered mine and the force of it pushed the air out of my lungs and I grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled him closer because the alternative was drowning.
I pulled at his shirt. We undressed each other with hands that weren’t patient, weren’t gentle, buttons and zippers and fabric shoved aside because careful was something that belonged to our first time and this wasn’t that. This was need.
I needed to feel him against me with nothing between us.
He bore me back onto the bed, his body over mine, his mouth on my throat, my collarbone, the curve of my shoulder. I arched into him, hooking one leg over his thigh and pulling him closer. I reached between us and guided him in and the sound that came out of me was relief, raw and unguarded.
He stilled. Let me adjust. His breath was warm against my jaw.
“Okay?” he murmured.
“Yes. God, yes.”
He began to move and this was nothing like the first time. The first time had been discovery, two people learning the shape of each other. This was what happened when you’d held everything together for longer than your body could stand and someone finally gave you permission to let go. I gripped his shoulders and met every thrust, my hips rising to his, and the sounds filling the room were mine, unfiltered, the sounds of a woman who’d stopped performing.
He shifted, pulling me up with him until he was sitting on the edge of the bed and I was in his lap, my knees on either side of his hips. The angle changed, deeper, and I sank down with a gasp. This was mine. I set the pace, my hands on his shoulders, rolling my hips in deep, slow strokes that built heat from the base of my spine outward. His hands gripped my waist, steadying me, letting me take what I needed.
His face held me. The tension in his jaw. His breath catching every time I rolled forward. His eyes on mine, present, anchored. This man who’d walked into my shop every second Tuesday with flowers for his grandparents and a gentleness he thought nobody saw.
“Mia.” My name, rough, strained.
I moved faster. His fingers pressed into my skin and the restraint in him was palpable, the effort it cost him to let me lead. I kissed him hard, my teeth catching his lower lip, and the sound he made against my mouth sent heat flooding through me.
