Chapter 7
June
The night before I testify, I don't want to spend it afraid.
I've spent four months afraid. I've been afraid in gas station bathrooms and afraid in rearview mirrors and afraid of my own reflection some mornings when I forgot for half a second which name I was supposed to answer to.
Tomorrow I stop being prey and start being a person with a future, and I decide, walking away from Ivy's kitchen table after the last strategy session, that I am done letting fear have the last word on how I spend my nights.
So I go to Rafferty.
I don't call ahead. I don't rehearse what I'm going to say, which is new for me — I've rehearsed nearly every conversation I've had in four months, weighing every word before it left my mouth, checking it for anything that might slip and reveal too much.
Tonight I just get in my car and drive the quiet road out of town, and it feels like the first unrehearsed decision I've made since March.
His place sits a little outside town, small and plain from the road, the kind of house you'd drive past without a second look, which I suspect is exactly the point for a man who's spent six years being careful about what he lets people see.
Inside, it's spare — clean lines, not much on the walls, nothing extra — but it's warm in the way a place gets warm when someone's lived in it deliberately, chosen everything in it on purpose instead of just accumulating it.
There's a single shelf of books by the window, worn spines, the kind you read more than once.
A photo, just one, of a group of people I recognize now as the club, younger, laughing at something outside the frame.
No clutter. No mess. Everything in this house says a man who's spent a long time being alone and learned to make that solitude feel deliberate instead of sad.
He opens the door before I even knock, because of course he does, because the man clocks a car coming up his own road the way he clocks everything.
"You didn't have to come out here tonight," he says, but he's already stepping back to let me in, already reading my face for what I actually need instead of what I might say I need.
"I know." I step past him into the warm light of his front room. "I wanted to."
He watches me take in the space, the shelf, the photo, and something in his expression shifts — a little exposed, a little pleased, like he's not entirely used to anyone getting this close a look at the parts of himself he keeps private.
"Not much to see," he says.
"I disagree." I run a finger along the spine of one of the books. "This tells me more about you than a month of careful conversation has."
"That mean you're staying long enough to read the room properly?"
"Depends what you're offering besides the room."
For four months I've let myself want nothing beyond survival — not comfort, not company, not anything that wasn't strictly necessary to staying alive and unseen.
Tonight, for the first time since March, I let myself want something purely because I want it, and the wanting itself feels like its own small rebellion.
Rafferty watches me the way he watches everything, but there's a difference tonight in how he's reading me. Not for threats. Not for exits. For what I need, specifically, in this specific moment, and it's the gentlest kind of attention I've ever had turned on me.
"You don't have to do anything tonight you don't want to do," he says quietly. "I mean that. Testimony's tomorrow. Tonight can just be whatever you need it to be."
"What I need it to be," I say, closing the distance between us, "is not alone. And not afraid. And with you."
He doesn't say anything clever back. He just reaches out, slow enough that I could step away if I wanted to, and brushes a strand of hair back from my face like it's something precious he's handling carefully, and something in me that's been braced for four straight months finally, finally starts to let go.
We stand there a moment longer than we need to, just looking at each other, the whole weight of everything we've survived to get here sitting quiet between us.
Outside, the spring evening is settling into full dark, crickets starting up somewhere past the porch, the particular hush of a small town going still for the night.
"You checked the locks already, didn't you," I say, half a question, already knowing the answer.
"Before you even got here."
"How many times?"
"Does it matter?"
"I'm building a data set," I tell him, and he laughs, low and surprised, the sound of it doing something warm and unraveling to my chest.
We move toward each other unhurried, the way two people move who've spent weeks handing each other small pieces of trust and are only now realizing how much they've already given away.
His hands are careful at first — reading me, the way he reads a room, checking for what I want instead of what threatens me — and when he finds it, when he finds the places I lean into instead of away from, the careful gives way to something surer.
"Tell me if I get it wrong," he murmurs against my temple.
"You won't."
"I might."
"You've been reading me correctly since the day you walked over with a coffee I didn't order. I don't think tonight's when you start getting it wrong."
He laughs, low, against my skin, and the sound of it does something to my whole body that four months of fear never once managed to override until right now.
I stop watching the door.
I don't decide to. It just happens, somewhere between his mouth finding the curve of my neck and his hands finding the small of my back, pulling me in like he's been waiting his whole watchful life for permission to stop guarding everything and just hold something instead.
For four months I have not once, not for a single unbroken minute, stopped tracking every exit in every room I've stood in.
Tonight I stop, because he's watching the door, because for the first time in longer than I can remember I believe, all the way down, that someone else has my back.
There's something almost dizzying in that — being fully present, for once, instead of half of me always somewhere else, calculating.
His hands are warm and unhurried, sliding under the hem of my shirt to find bare skin, tracing slow up my spine until I shiver and press closer.
Spring air drifts soft through the cracked window, carrying the smell of new grass and rain that never quite fell.
The house creaks once, settling, and I flinch, an old reflex, and Rafferty just pauses, patient, his palm flat and warm against my back, waiting for my breathing to even back out before he continues, no rush anywhere in him.
"You checked the locks?" I ask, half a laugh in it, because some habits die slower than others.
"Four times," he says against my collarbone, his mouth warm there, unhurried. "Before you even got here."
"That's either very reassuring or a little concerning."
"It's a whole thing," he agrees. "We'll workshop it."
That laugh, real and unguarded, is the last coherent thought I have for a while.
He undresses me slowly, like unwrapping something he intends to keep, his eyes tracking every inch he uncovers with a focus that makes my skin flush warm under his attention.
I reach for his shirt in turn, fumbling with the buttons until he covers my hands with his, steadying them, letting me finish at my own pace.
When his chest is finally bare against mine, skin to skin for the first time, I feel the breath punch out of both of us at once, a small, startled sound that turns into something softer.
We make our way to his room slowly, his hand laced through mine, pausing at the doorway, at the edge of the bed, like he's giving me every chance to change direction if I need to, and every time I don't, something in his eyes eases another fraction, like he's still not quite convinced he's allowed to want this as much as I clearly do.
The bedroom's as spare as the rest of the house, moonlight coming soft through a window he's left cracked despite everything, spring air stirring the curtain, carrying in the smell of new grass and something green and growing from the field behind the property.
He lays me back against sheets that smell like him, and the mattress dips as he follows me down, his weight settling over me careful and grounding at once.
His mouth moves from my lips to my throat to the curve of my shoulder, unhurried, thorough, like he's memorizing me one place at a time.
My hands find his back, the solid warmth of muscle shifting under my palms, and I arch up into him without meaning to, chasing the places his mouth has already claimed.
He notices — of course he notices, he notices everything — and comes back to kiss me deep and slow, one hand tangled in my hair, the other tracing a warm line down my ribs, my hip, the inside of my thigh, patient enough to make my whole body ache with wanting more.
"Rafferty." His name comes out half a plea.
"I've got you," he murmurs against my skin. "Not going anywhere."
When he finally settles between my thighs, propped on one forearm so he can watch my face, there's a question in his eyes even now, even this far in, and I answer it by pulling him down to me, by the way my whole body curves up to meet his.
He moves slow at first, giving me time to adjust to the fullness of him, his forehead pressed to mine, both of us breathing hard already, and when I nod, when I whisper his name again like permission and plea both, he starts to move in earnest, deep and unhurried, reading every catch of my breath and adjusting to it, chasing the exact rhythm that has my nails digging into his shoulders and my head tipping back against the pillow.
The spring dark outside grows deeper around us, crickets loud through the cracked window, and inside it's just heat and skin and his mouth finding mine again between broken breaths, his hips rocking steady against mine until the slow build turns urgent, until neither of us can keep the pace gentle any longer.
I feel it cresting low in my belly, spreading outward, and he feels it too, feels the way I go tight and trembling underneath him, and he holds himself there, deep, murmuring my name like a question he already knows the answer to.
"Let go," he says, low against my ear. "I've got you. I've got the door. I've got you."
And I do — fully, safely, for the first time in longer than I can remember — his name breaking out of me on a broken, astonished sound, something like relief flooding through every part of me at once.
He follows right behind me, burying his face in my neck, my name rough in his voice, his whole body going taut and then loose over mine.
Afterward, curled against his chest with his heartbeat slowing under my ear and the window still cracked to the cool spring night, his fingers tracing idle, absent patterns along my bare shoulder, I feel something in my body finally, fully unclench.
"I've slept with one eye open for four months," I tell him quietly.
"Sleep with both tonight," he says, pressing a kiss to my hair. "I've got the door. Literally. I checked the locks four times."
"That's either very reassuring," I murmur, already half gone toward sleep, "or a serious anxiety issue."
He considers this with the gravity of a man weighing actual evidence. "Both," he decides. "It's a whole thing. We match."
I fall asleep with both eyes closed, for the first time since I ran, wrapped in a warm house and a warmer man who spent a whole month making sure I'd have exactly this — one night, before everything changes, where the only thing hunting me is sleep, and it wins easily.
I wake once in the night, disoriented for half a second the way I always am in unfamiliar rooms, old instinct scanning for exits before my brain catches up to where I am and who's beside me.
Rafferty's arm tightens around me without him fully waking, a reflex, like even asleep some part of him is standing guard, and I settle back down against his chest, listening to his heartbeat slow and even under my ear, and let myself drift back under without a single scan of the room.
In the morning, sunlight comes soft through the same cracked window, and I wake to find him already awake, watching me with an expression I've never seen on his face before — something unguarded, something that looks almost like wonder, like he still can't quite believe I stayed the whole night.
"Morning," I murmur.
"Morning." He brushes a thumb along my jaw, light, careful. "Sleep okay?"
"Better than okay. I think that's the first full night's sleep I've had since March."
"Good." Something serious moves across his face. "However today goes, I want you to remember that. That you're capable of sleeping through the whole night when you feel safe enough. That's not nothing. That's proof the fear doesn't own you as completely as it thinks it does."
I don't have words ready for that, so I just kiss him instead, slow and unhurried, and let the morning light and the smell of coffee he's already started brewing somewhere in the house carry us both a little further from the fear and a little closer to whatever today's going to demand of me.