Page 93 of Unruly

“Okay,” I say. “I can wait. I’ll wait as long as you need.”

She looks relieved and devastated at the same time.

I lean in, brushing my thumb across her cheek to wipe away a tear.

“But we’re still gonna fuck on this blanket,” I tell her, voice dropping. “Because you may think you have a choice in this relationship, but you don’t. Not anymore. You’re mine, Halle. And I’m done pretending otherwise.”

Her breath catches, and her eyes darken.

I don’t give her time to argue.

I pull her into me and kiss her hard, pouring every ounce of want and frustration and love I’ve been holding back into it. She kisses me back just as desperately, hands fisting in my shirt like she’s afraid I’ll disappear.

The food and wine get shoved aside, and the blanket is soft under us as I lay her down, my body covering hers. Her skirt rides up easily, and my hands are already under it, gripping her thighs, spreading them so I can settle between them.

She makes this soft, broken sound when I grind against her, and I swallow it with another kiss.

“Cash—”

“Shh.” I nip at her bottom lip. “You can say no to being my girlfriend right now. But you’re not saying no to this. Not tonight.”

“I wasn’t going to say no to you tonight.”

I reach between us, fingers finding how wet she already is, and she arches into my hand with a gasp.

“Or ever,” I correct her, the corner of my mouth turning upwards.

HALLE

The gavel cracks in the nearly empty courtroom. I sit there for a long second, staring at the judge’s retreating back, the echo still ringing in my ears.

Divorced.

The past week or so blur in my mind as I gather my purse and step out into the sticky Dallas humidity. After the date with Cash, I’d told Aria and Matt I needed to handle everything here.

The house. The lawyer. Loose ends that felt more like unraveling threads of a life I no longer wanted.

I’d decided to sell the house—that way I get half the money for it at least. I spent days boxing up what I wanted to take to Cedarbrook and separating Zach’s things into piles that took up more room than it was all worth. His parents could deal with that shit.

His abandoned clothes still carry the faint scent of his cologne, the smell souring the entire master closet. Then I had to deal with the realtor, walk-through appraisals, signing papers, nodding through market analysis while the walls of our old home echoed with every argument and broken promise.

The hardest part had been the nursery.

I’d sat on the floor for hours, folding tiny onesies and wrapping baby blankets around the few toys we’d bought before everything fell apart. But when I finally loaded everything into my car and delivered it to the women’s shelter, the quiet gratitude on those mothers’ faces had cracked something open inside me. Not fully healing me, but instead giving me a small fragile piece of relief.

Those blankets would wrap babies. Those clothes would clothe families who needed them more than my ghosts did. Two emotional, exhausting weeks in Dallas, and it all came down to Zach’s lawyer mumbling about “uncontested” and “lack of response.” The judge hadn’t even blinked. I got half of the profits from the house sale, and everything that was mine that I asked for.

It was all I wanted.

My phone buzzes with a text from Zach’s mother as I cross the parking lot.

Patricia:

We reported him missing three days ago. No one has heard from him. If you know anything⁠—

I don’t bother reading the rest. Instead, I pull out the credit card statements his lawyer reluctantly forwarded. One-way flight to Costa Rica booked the day before the first court date. I almost laughed.

I’m not sure how Dawson and Miranda pulled that off, but I know better than to ask questions.