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“That’s it... I feel you coming.”
His hand held me against him while his fingers worked me through every violent pulse. Ryan’s thrusts became harder and less controlled, his breathing breaking against my neck before a shout ripped from him.
“Holy shit—fuck! Charm!”
He followed me forward, pressing my body flat against the mattress beneath his chest. His hips continued driving into me as he came, his hand locked around mine against the sheet while he filled me one final time before the day forced us out of bed.
We both lay breathless and spent in the silent room for several long minutes before he kissed my shoulder and withdrew carefully.
Ryan felt me stiffen. His arm tightened immediately, pulling my back against his chest before I could create distance.
“Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Turn me pulling out into Sunday.”
My eyes burned. He knew me too well. Even after fifteen months, Ryan found the fear before I managed to give it words.
“I wasn’t.”
“Liar.”
I turned inside his arms. His hair pointed in several directions, and his face remained soft with sleep, but caution had already returned to his eyes.
My hand rested against the small word beneath his heart that he didn’t know I’d seen when he ripped his shirt off in the middle of the night before rolling me onto my stomach and taking me roughly from behind.
Encanto.
My name in Spanish, permanently marked beneath his heart, and I had a thousand questions I had no right to ask. Ryan’s chest tightened beneath my palm, but he didn’t move my hand away.
“Last night wasn’t a promise,” I said before he could.
He paused, looking at me in a way that felt detached but present and I feel it too. “No.”
I nod once he answers, that no feeling like a knife to my chest because how could it not? “It still meant something.” I sigh and roll to face him.
His fingers traveled through my tangled hair. “Everything with you means something. That’s the fucking problem.”
I lifted myself and kissed him before either of us could turn the morning into another conversation we weren’t ready to survive.
Something changed before I left his room.
Ryan didn’t become cold. Cold would’ve been easier to recognize. He didn’t order me out, turn his back, or rebuild the brutal wall he had used to survive the last fifteen months. He remained close while I gathered my clothes, found my underwear, and tried not to think about the word under his shirt.
The distance arrived quietly. His answers became more careful. His expression settled into something controlled, and every time I caught him watching me, he looked away as though whatever he’d been thinking belonged somewhere I couldn’t reach.
I told myself the distance belonged to everything Lance had done the night before. Ryan’s lip was still swollen where Lance hit him, and faint bruising had begun spreading along his jaw. He had stood on that terrace while Lance dragged his mother’s murder, his father’s addiction, the foster homes, his race, and every person Ryan loved into a fight designed to humiliate him in front of hundreds of people.
Ryan didn’t give vulnerability away easily. He fought anyone who tried to take it from him and hated being watched while pain had him cornered. Last night, he had lost control in front of everyone, kicked over a chair, and admitted the attack had become too much. Then he had come to my room and asked me to walk with him.
I had folded my arms and told him fuck you.
The memory turned the contents of my stomach. I had apologized after entering his room, but apologies didn’t erase the fact that Ryan had approached me bleeding and I had made him prove I was allowed to matter before asking what he needed.
Still, I believed the distance this morning came from the exposure. Ryan had allowed me to see how deeply Lance’s words cut him, admitted he still loved me enough to feel destroyed by it, and then held me through truths about my illness I had never trusted him with before. Maybe waking beside me made every vulnerable thing he revealed feel more dangerous beneath daylight. Maybe he was rebuilding enough armor to walk downstairs and face everyone who had witnessed Lance tear through it.
The mirror, my confession, the other times we had sex after it, and the intimacy of waking tangled together became pieces of the same explanation. Ryan had come to this castle offering one weekend of everything we could’ve been, but last night hadn’t felt like an experiment designed to answer a question. It had felt real enough to threaten every reason he intended to leave.
