Chapter 23 #2
I asked him things too. About the band and how they'd started, about the years between graduation and finding the coast again, about Poppy's first drum lesson and what Micah was studying and whether Talia had ever forgiven him for anything in particular or just held it indefinitely as tactical leverage.
“Both,” he said, and the laugh that came with it was the most unguarded thing he'd produced since I'd picked him up from the hospital.
“She holds everything. She's an archive. She could tell me exactly what I said on the seventeenth of March three years ago and whether it was an apology or just an acknowledgement and why the distinction mattered.”
“She sounds terrifying.”
“She's the best person I know.” He said it simply, with the particular flatness of total truth. “After everything. The things she had to watch me go through, the things I put her through. She never once left.”
I held that for a second. “Neither did Poppy. Or Micah.”
“No.” He was quiet. “They didn't.”
He looked out at the ocean for a while, and I let him look.
“I'm going to get better,” he said eventually. Not a declaration. More like he was testing the sentence out loud to see how it felt.
“I know.”
“The appointments Dr. Lin wants me keeping, the follow-up stuff, all of it.” He turned his head and looked at me directly, and there was something in his face that was braced and honest at the same time. “I'm going to do it properly this time. Not just enough to get people to stop worrying.”
“Good.” I met his eyes and held them. “And I'm going to be here while you do.”
He held my gaze for a moment. Then he nodded, once, with the particular weight of someone taking something in rather than just hearing it.
The evening came in off the water and I made dinner — something straightforward, pasta, nothing that required me to concentrate harder than the company demanded.
He sat at the kitchen counter and kept me company while I cooked, occasionally stealing from whatever was within reach, and I let him and didn't comment on it.
After dinner we sat in front of the windows while the sky went dark and the ocean disappeared into the black except for the white of the breaking waves, and I put my feet up on the coffee table and he tucked himself into the corner of the couch at an angle that ended up with his legs across my lap, and neither of us made any remark about it.
He fell asleep there before ten. I felt his breathing slow and even out against my shoulder, and I sat very still for a long time so I didn't wake him, and watched the ocean move in the dark, and felt something inside my chest that I couldn't name but didn't want to put down.
The third morning he woke up looking different.
I'd been thinking about the gift since the hospital.
I'd swung by the shop on the grocery run the first morning, before he was awake, and the bag had been sitting in my bedroom ever since.
I'd picked it up and put it back down twice, second-guessing the timing, but something about watching him pour his own coffee and lean against the counter with the particular looseness of a person who was actually, genuinely resting — it felt right.
I got the bag from the bedroom and brought it out to the kitchen and set it on the counter in front of him.
He looked at it. Then at me. “What's this?”
“A present.”
He looked at the bag again. Then he opened it, and I watched his face as he registered what he was seeing. The confusion melted into surprise, then heat, then a smile that was all edge and want.
“You bought me lingerie,” he said, pulling out the lace stockings and holding them up to the light. “While I was being discharged from a fucking hospital.”
“I bought you lingerie because I remember what you like,” I corrected. “And because I wanted to give you a thing that was about feeling good instead of just surviving.”
He stared at me for a long moment, the stockings still dangling from his fingers, and then he laughed — warm and a little disbelieving, and it hit me square in the chest.
“You're unreal,” he said.
“Try them on.”
His eyebrows went up. “Now?”
“Now.” I held his gaze. “If you want to. No pressure.”
He looked at me. Then at the lingerie. Then back at me.
He took the bag and headed for the stairs without another word, and I stayed in the kitchen for a few minutes with my hands flat on the counter, making myself breathe normally. Then I followed him up.
The bedroom door was open, and I stopped in the doorway.
The stockings ran up his legs, the delicate pattern stark against his skin, held in place by the elastic at his thighs.
The underwear sat low on his hips, barely there, and the lace did absolutely nothing to hide how much he wanted this.
His tattoos looked even more vivid against the black fabric, and the late afternoon light from the window caught him in profile like he'd been designed specifically to ruin me.
“Fuck,” I said, because it was the only word my brain could access.
Soren turned to face me fully, and the smile on his face was pure confidence mixed with something softer that made my chest pull tight. “You like it?”
“Get on the bed.”
He obeyed without hesitation, climbing onto the mattress and settling back against the pillows. I crossed the room and stood at the foot of the bed, just looking at him, trying to commit every detail to memory.
I climbed onto the bed and braced myself over him, careful not to put my full weight down. My hands framed his face, and I kissed him slowly, thoroughly.
He kissed me back just as hard, his hands coming up to grip my shoulders, and when I pulled back to look at him his pupils were blown wide and his breathing was ragged.
“I'm gonna go slow,” I said, running my thumb along his jaw. “Gonna make sure you're okay with everything.”
“Rook—”
“I mean it. After everything that just happened, I need to know you're here with me. That you want this.”
He looked at me for a long moment, and then he said, “I want this. I want you. And I'm not going to break.”
“You're sure?”
“Stop treating me like I'm made of glass.” He reached up and gripped my shirt in both fists. “Come down here.”
I kissed him again, and this time I let myself mean it fully, one hand pressing flat against his ribs. I could feel his heartbeat against my palm, elevated and real.
He was warm everywhere. The lace was warm. The skin above the stocking tops where my fingers found the inside of his thigh was warm and soft over the muscle underneath, and when I pressed my thumb there his breath came through his nose in a fast, controlled exhale that I felt against my upper lip.
I pulled back from the kiss and looked at him properly.
The stockings ran from his feet to the tops of his thighs, the delicate pattern catching the light, and the lace border sat like a line I was going to take a long time reaching.
His chest was moving fast already. His hands had loosened their grip on my shirt but hadn't let go.
I slid down the bed.
He made a soft, questioning sound and then went quiet when I pressed my lips to the inside of his ankle.
The lace was thin enough there that I could feel the warmth of his skin through it, the faint give of the fabric against my mouth, and I stayed there a moment longer than necessary just to feel him go still with attention.
Then I kissed up the curve of his calf, slow and purposeful, my hands trailing behind my mouth — one wrapped around the back of his leg, the other running up the outside of it, palm reading the texture of the lace like it had something to tell me.
“Rook.” His voice had already dropped.
I didn't answer. I kept going.
I worked up the back of his knee with my lips and felt him shiver. The fine hair there, the tenderness of the skin at the crease — I pressed an open kiss to it and felt his exhale stutter.
“That's—” He stopped. Tried again. “That's unfair.”
“Mm.” I dragged my lips up the inside of his knee and kept climbing, hands following, thumbs pressing into the muscle of his inner thigh through the lace with enough pressure to feel the warmth of him but not enough to rush anything.
The fabric had a texture under my palms, a slight roughness to the pattern, and the contrast of that against the smoothness of his skin where I reached the border at his upper thigh stopped me in place.
I pressed my lips to the lace edge. Felt the faint ridge of the elastic. Stayed there.
The sound he made was soft and bitten-off, barely there, and his hand dropped to my hair without any force behind it. Just resting. Just needing somewhere to put itself.
I turned my face and pressed my cheek against his inner thigh, above the lace, and breathed him in. Warm skin and faint salt and something underneath that was entirely him, and the closeness of it made the hair at the back of my neck rise.
“You have no idea what you look like,” I said, my lips moving against his thigh. “You know that?”
A low sound from the pillow. Not a word.
“The lace.” I ran one thumb along the border at his thigh, tracing the whole circumference of it in a slow, deliberate circuit. “The way it sits on you.” I pressed my lips there again, to the inner seam where the lace met skin, and felt his whole thigh tremble under my mouth.
I kissed up the rest of his inner thigh, unhurried, hands moving to the outside of his legs and running back down toward his knee in long, even strokes.
I worked back up to the lace border on the other leg and kissed along it, following the hem from the outside of his thigh inward, and his hips lifted off the mattress just slightly before he caught himself.
“You're doing that on purpose,” he said.
“Yes.” I pressed my lips to the crease of his hip. “I'm doing all of it on purpose.”