Chapter 21 Graham #2
Not the silence of absence. The silence of arrival. Of finally being exactly where you’ve been trying to get for six weeks, and the relief of it so enormous that your body doesn’t know what to do except go still.
Rose’s eyes found mine.
They were wet.
Not from the orgasm. Not from the physical.
From something deeper, the thing that lives underneath want and need and sex and skin.
The thing that had been sitting in both of us since she talked to me sitting on Maggie’s fire escape and said I loved you in the barn and I’d stood by the loch in the rain with my chest cracked open and known I was going to cross an ocean for this woman.
“Hey,” I said. My voice came out wrecked. “I’m here.”
“I know.” A tear slid from the corner of her eye into her hair. She didn’t wipe it. “Don’t stop.”
I moved. Slow. Not the urgency of before, not the frantic reunion pace. Deep, deliberate strokes that let me feel every inch of her, let her feel every inch of me, nowhere to hide, nothing between us.
Another tear. Then another. She wasn’t sobbing.
She wasn’t falling apart. She was just letting it happen, the way you let rain happen when you’re already soaked and there’s no point fighting it.
Her eyes stayed on mine the whole time, and that was the part that destroyed me.
That she wouldn’t look away. That she let me see her crying while I was inside her and didn’t flinch from it.
“Rose—”
“Don’t stop,” she said again. Quieter. “Don’t you dare stop.”
I pressed my forehead to hers. Kept the rhythm. Slow and deep and relentless, her hips rising to meet mine, her hands on my face, thumbs tracing my cheekbones, wet fingers from wiping her own tears.
“I thought about this every night,” I said against her mouth. “Not just the sex. This. Your face this close to mine. Being allowed to see you.”
She sucked in a sharp breath. Pulled me tighter, legs wrapping around me, ankles crossing at the small of my back, and the change in angle made us both gasp.
“Harder,” she whispered.
I gave her harder. Braced my weight and drove deeper, and her nails scored lines down my back that I wanted to keep.
She met every thrust, her body answering mine in a conversation that had nothing to do with words and everything to do with the six weeks we’d spent pretending we could survive without each other.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I told her. Not dirty talk. Not a performance. Just the truth, said into the hollow of her throat while I was buried inside her. “I’m right here, Rose. I’m staying.”
She made a sound I’d never heard from her before. Not a moan, not a cry. Something between a laugh and a sob, like her body couldn’t decide which release it needed more. Her hand went to the back of my neck and gripped hard, holding me against her throat, and I felt her legs start to shake.
“Graham, I’m—”
“I know.” I got my hand between us, thumb finding her clit, pressing, circling, keeping the rhythm matched to my hips. “Let me feel it. I want to feel you come while you’re looking at me.”
Her eyes locked on mine. Wet, open, every wall demolished. Not the Rose who checked locks twelve times. Not the Rose who armored herself in competence and sharp words. Just Rose. The woman underneath everything. The one she’d spent her whole life keeping behind locked doors.
She came with her eyes on me and tears on her face and my name in her mouth, and it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever witnessed. Her whole body tightened around me, pulling me deeper, and the sound she made was raw and broken and triumphant, all at once.
I followed her over. Couldn’t have held back if I’d tried.
Buried myself deep, forehead pressed to hers, my own eyes burning because somewhere in the middle of this, in the middle of her tears and her honesty and the way she kept her eyes on mine through all of it, I understood something I hadn’t before.
She wasn’t crying because she was sad.
She was crying because she was safe. And safe was so unfamiliar to Rose Gracen that her body didn’t know how to hold it except by letting everything out.
We stayed like that. Tangled, breathing, foreheads touching.
Her tears wet on my face because she’d been holding my cheeks when she cried, and I wore them like they were mine.
They were mine. Everything about this woman was mine, and I was hers, and the simplicity of that felt like the hardest thing I’d ever learned.
I eased out. Dealt with the condom. Came back and pulled her against me, her back to my chest, my arm around her waist.
She laced her fingers through mine.
For a long time, neither of us spoke. Her breathing slowed. Mine followed. The room was quiet and the city was doing its thing outside the window, sirens and traffic and all the noise that Rose hated, and none of it could touch us.
“I ruined your shirt,” she said.
“You ruined it hours ago. The button’s gone.”
“I meant with my face.” She wiped her cheek against my arm. “I got mascara on you.”
“I’ll survive.”
She turned in my arms to face me. Her eyes were swollen, her nose was red, her hair was a disaster, and she looked like everything I’d ever wanted and been too afraid to name.
“I cried during sex,” she said, like she was reporting a weather event. “That’s a new one.”
“You were perfect.”
“I was a mess.”
“Those aren’t mutually exclusive.” I brushed the hair from her face.
“Rose, you spent six weeks being strong. You did an interview on live television and accused your best friend of a crime without a shred of proof. You flew across the country and rebuilt your life in a city you hate. You earned the right to fall apart.”
“In bed? While you were inside me?”
“Especially then.” I kissed her forehead. “That’s the whole point. Falling apart with someone who’s not going to let you hit the ground.”
Her eyes softened in a way I’d never seen before. Unguarded, unhidden, every wall down.
“Stay,” she whispered.
“Wild horses couldn’t move me.” I pressed my lips to the back of her neck. “Pun intended.”
She groaned. “You’re the worst.”
“You love me.”
“I do.” She turned in my arms to face me. “I really do.”
I kissed her forehead. Her nose. The salt-track on her cheek where the tears had dried.
“Then that’s enough,” I said. “That’s everything.”
Morning came in through the window, pale, tentative, the kind of New York light that looks like it’s asking permission.
Rose was propped against the headboard, wearing my shirt, the one she’d ripped a button off of, and drinking coffee from the room service tray I’d ordered while she was in the shower. Her hair was damp. Her feet were bare. She looked like everything I’d ever wanted and had been too afraid to name.
“We need to talk about the future,” she said.
“I know.”
“The channel. Your career. What you’re going to do now.” She sipped her coffee. “I watched some of the response to my interview last night while you were sleeping. Things are shifting. People are starting to defend you. Comments are changing.”
“I don’t care about the comments.”
“You should. It’s your livelihood.” She set the coffee down.
“Graham, I didn’t go on camera to save your career.
I did it because it was the right thing to do.
But the result is that people are seeing you differently now.
Not Fraser Kincaid, but the man underneath.
And that man is worth building something around. ”
I looked at her. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that when you go back to the channel, if you go back, do it as yourself.
Honesty. That’s what people responded to.
Not the stunts.” She pulled her knees up.
“And I’m saying that I can handle being adjacent to fame.
Not the subject of it. I don’t want cameras in my life.
But I can handle knowing that the person I love has a public existence, as long as his private one belongs to us. ”
“It does,” I said. “It always will.”
She nodded slowly. “Okay. But I’m not going to pretend I have all the answers. I’m going to be anxious about it. I’m going to have bad days where I want to hide. That’s who I am.”
“I know who you are. I fell in love with who you are.”
Her eyes softened. Then she narrowed them. “Now tell me what you’re hiding.”
I blinked. “What?”
“You’ve had a look on your face since last night. The same look you had when you were planning the filming deal at the ranch, like you know something I don’t and you’re enjoying it.” She pointed at me with her coffee cup. “What are you planning?”
I tried to look innocent. Failed spectacularly.
“I want to take you somewhere,” I said.
“Where?”
“Colorado.”
Her face changed. The softness tightened into something wary, a flicker of the old Rose, the one who flinched at hope because hope had always been the setup for devastation.
“Why?” she asked.
“Because I want to show you something.” We locked eyes. “Trust me.”
She studied me for a long moment. I watched the war play out behind her eyes, the part of her that wanted to say yes fighting with the part that was afraid of what yes might cost.
“Okay,” she said finally. “Show me.”