Page 23 of My Girl to Take

He follows me over with his forehead against mine, saying my name once, like it’s been dragged out of him. I feel the warmth of his release as he stills completely, simply breathing, eyes still locked on mine.

Afterward, he doesn’t let go.

He rolls us and settles my head onto his chest, over the letters of his name. He puts one hand flat in the middle of my back and leaves it there. I can hear his heart going. It takes a long time to slow down.

I wait for the awkwardness. I’ve heard about the awkwardness.

It doesn’t come.

“You okay, baby?”

“Yes.” It comes out breathless.

His grip doesn’t loosen, and there’s something in that, something possessive, that makes my pulse pick up again even though I should be calming down.

“Say it,” he says eventually.

“Say what?”

“Whatever you mumbled forty seconds ago.”

“No.”

He laughs, low, and I feel it under my ear.

“Alright.”

Then, after a while, in a completely different voice, “This isn’t a one-time thing. I told you that on Tuesday.”

“I know.”

“I want to be clear about it.” His hand moves once across my back. “I’m not built for a version of this where we’re careful. I’ve spent seventeen years not wanting things, and I appear to have used the entire supply on you in a fortnight. I’ve got nothing sensible to offer you about that. So you should know what you’ve got hold of.”

I lie there against his chest with a dead woman’s name under my cheek, and I think about London, and a bag by the door that I noticed on Tuesday was still not unpacked.

He’s said he isn’t careful. He hasn’t said he’s staying.

And I’m not going to ask, because if I ask, he’ll tell me the truth, and I have exactly as long as I have.

“Okay,” I say.

He tightens his arm around me and takes it for agreement.

It is agreement. It just isn’t the whole of it.

Chapter 5

Logan

The office at the end of the fourth-floor corridor still smells like him.

It hits me every time I walk in. Subtle but there, buried under polished wood and leather and the faint trace of whatever cologne he used to wear. For a second, it pulls me back to a version of this place I never thought I would step into again. A version where I belonged here without question.

Kiera warned me about the desk, and I still wasn’t ready for it. It’s oak, and it’s the size of a small car, delivered the year I turned seventeen—when the plan was still college, then a graduate degree, then this room. Nobody has ever used it.

Now, I sit behind it.

Garth offered me his own office on the eighth. I said no. That’s the president’s chair, and I told him I wasn’t taking the chair, and I meant it. So I took the only room in this building I can occupy without agreeing to anything.