Page 36 of Main Event

“Yeah, baby.”

“I need tonight to just be this. Just us.”

I look at the yard. At the gate that still needs fixing. At the sky going dark over Atlanta.

“Then that’s what it is,” I say.

We stay on the deck until the coffee is gone. Then we go inside.

ANDI

The bedroom is ours in the way rooms become yours—not just the furniture and the photographs, but the quality of the dark, the sounds the house makes at night, the low hum of the AC unit that kicks on at intervals and has become as familiar as breathing.

At this moment, I need him. I need to feel loved in the way only he can give.

I reach for him in the dark at the exact moment he reaches for me, our hands finding each other as if neither of us ever really let go. The air feels warmer where he’s close, the quiet deeper, like the room itself has agreed to hold still for us. Our desire for each other isn’t dampened by the trials and tribulations. This—the feel of his skin against mine, the warmth of his touch, the silky sensation of his tongue sliding against mine—anchors me in the present. And this moment is ours and ours only.

Luke is everything I need him to be. He isn’t rushed. He never is, and he knows this is what matters. Us. Our bond. Our connection. When he speaks, his voice is low—steady, textured with restraint—and I can feel the care in it as clearly as the warmth of his body against mine.

What he gives me isn’t urgency. It’s attention. Chosen. Sustained. Whole. This is the intentional attention of a man who loves me with all that he is, who is fully present, and who is pouring all his love into me.

There’s no weight from the day in the room with us. No Evelyn. No Deja. No file, no documentation, no evidentiary thread waiting to be pulled.

Only this.

Us, held together in the quiet, creating something that belongs only to this moment.

Afterward, we lie in the dark, and he has his arm across me, and his breathing slows toward sleep. I’m almost there myself—the earned exhaustion of a day that held too many things and is finally releasing them.

The last thing I think before I go under is, This is what it’s for. All of it. This is what we’re protecting.

LUKE

I wake at three in the morning for no reason I can name—the body surfacing from somewhere deep, from the alarm system training built long before I ever asked it to.

Something is different in our bedroom.

Andi is asleep beside me, steady and deep. I stay still and begin to catalog the room on instinct: the window closed the way it should be, the door standing open exactly where I left it, the familiar house sounds of three a.m. settling into their usual places. Everything reads as normal, except for the quiet tension running underneath it.

My phone.

I left it on the nightstand when we came to bed—right side, screen down, charging cable connected. Habitual. Automatic. Years of muscle memory.

It’s on the dresser instead. Four feet away. Screen up. Not charging.

I didn’t move it.

I get up without waking Andi and move through the house the way I move through gyms after closing—familiar enough to navigate in the dark, careful enough to notice what doesn’t belong. I check every room. Every door. Every window.

There’s nothing. No sign of entry. No sign of presence.

Just a phone that moved itself four feet while we slept.

I stand in the living room and let the meaning of that settle. This is a man who can enter a secured gym, a house that was swept clean, and a hospital pharmacy. A man who doesn’t take or use things because that isn’t the point. He moves them to say: I was here. While you slept. Your measures don’t stop me. They don’t even slow me down.

I go back to the bedroom and sit on the edge of the bed.

Andi opens her eyes immediately.