Chapter 8 Wren
Wren
At first, I just listen to his breathing.
Slow. Heavy. Controlled—like everything about him. My head is on his chest, and every rise and fall rocks me the way the ocean used to when I was a kid and my dad took me out in the old aluminum boat. Back and forth. Safe and sure. Except nothing about this feels like a childhood memory.
It feels like teetering on the edge of a cliff and loving the drop.
His T-shirt smells like smoke and pine and something darker, something that belongs only to him.
My palm is splayed over his sternum, and beneath my fingers his heart pounds, steady but a little too fast. For a second I wonder if he knows how loud it is.
How loud I am. How everything inside me is thundering toward a decision I can’t walk back.
“You’re not sleeping,” I whisper.
“No.”
The word rumbles through his chest.
“Because of the noise?” I ask. “Because you heard something?”
A beat. “Because you’re in my bed.”
Heat unfurls low in my stomach. I don’t move, but I feel every inch of him, the breadth of his shoulders, the dense weight of his arm draped around me like a band of iron. He’s not squeezing, he’s just there, an unspoken promise across my waist.
“What was it like?” I ask softly. “Growing up.”
He doesn’t answer at first. Normally, this is where he would go quiet, change the subject, get up and find something to fix that isn’t broken. But he breathes out, slow, and lets the truth leak past his guard.
“Loud,” he says. “Small house. Too many tempers. Not enough money.”
“Brothers? Sisters?”
“Older brother. Left when I was fifteen. Haven’t seen him since.” A pause. “Should’ve left with him.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“My mother.” Another rumble in his chest, like the growl of an engine held just shy of redline. “She needed someone to keep the roof from falling in.”
“You did that,” I say. “You held it all up.”
His hand flexes where it rests on my hip, like he’s remembering the weight of things he carried.
“Why the military?”
“Because I was good at taking orders.” Dry. Self-aimed. “And I was better at giving them. It paid. It got me out. And the first time I followed a map into a place no one else wanted to be, something in my head got quiet.”
“Quiet how?”
“The kind that lets you hear your own pulse,” he says. “The kind that tells you where the danger is before it shows its face.”
My fingers curl against his chest. “Is it telling you something now?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
His chin tips, just enough that I know he’s looking down at me. “That I should put distance between us.”
I make a little sound. I don’t mean to, it just slips out—half laugh, half plea. “I don’t want distance.”
“I know.”
His voice is careful. The way a man handles a live charge.
“Tell me more,” I say, because if I stop talking, I’ll start moving. “About my dad. What was he like… with you?”
“The way he was with you.” There’s a warmth in his tone I haven’t heard before. “Better. He made me better, whether I liked it or not. He didn’t have room for excuses. Or fear.”
“He was always braver than me,” I say, the ache familiar and raw.
“You’re braver than you think.”
“Because I ran?” My laugh is thin. “Feels like the opposite.”
“Because you looked. And when you saw something no one wanted to see, you didn’t look away.”
The praise lands like a hand on the inside of my ribs. I swallow against it.
His heartbeat kicks just a little harder under my palm. Mine answers, a syncopation I can feel everywhere. I shift—just a tiny adjustment to get comfortable—and my thigh brushes his. The contact is small. The effect isn’t.
His breath stutters.
“Sorry,” I whisper, not sorry at all.
“Wren.” A warning. Or a prayer.
“I like when you say my name.”
Silence, heavy and charged, gathers above us like storm clouds. I tip my head back so I can see him. The shadows turn his features into angles and hollows, but his eyes are midnight clear, fixed on my mouth like it’s a compass point he can’t ignore.
“Tell me what you’re thinking,” I ask.
“That I should get up.” His voice is rough around the edges. “That you should sleep.”
“I can’t sleep.” I let my hand slide higher, over the steady drum of his heart, up along the strong column of his neck until my thumb finds the edge of his jaw. His stubble is grit and heat beneath my skin. “I keep thinking about how close your mouth is.”
He closes his eyes. Just for a second. When he opens them, they look like rain over dark water. “You’re younger than me.”
“I know.”
“I promised him.”
“I know that too.”
He swallows, and I watch his throat work. It steals my breath.
“What would you do,” I whisper, “if you hadn’t promised?”
His fingers tighten at my waist, enough to send a spark racing up my spine. His restraint feels like a physical thing in the room, hot and bright and coiled tight between us.
“Don’t ask questions you already know the answer to,” he says.
“I want to hear you say it.”
He holds my gaze for a long, breathless moment, and then the truth breaks out of him, low and molten. “I’d put you on your back and take my time.”
The words set me on fire. I feel them everywhere—skin, blood, the tender place just behind my ribs. My hips shift without permission, a slow, seeking roll that drags soft heat across the line of his thigh. The sound he makes is barely there and still manages to light me up like a match.
“Wren.” This time, my name is a promise.
“I’m not asking you to break anything,” I say, breath shaky. “Just—be here. With me. Let me feel you.”
His palm slides from my waist to the small of my back. He doesn’t pull me in; he anchors me, hand warm and heavy, holding me exactly where I am. The permission is all I need. I hover a heartbeat above his mouth, and when I finally brush my lips over his, it’s so soft, so careful, it almost hurts.
He doesn’t move.
I kiss him again, a little firmer, tasting the ghost of coffee and the heat of his breath. Another pass, slow, patient, like learning the shape of a word I’ve wanted to say for years.
“Please,” I whisper into his mouth.
That breaks him.
His hand spreads against my back and draws me in, and then he’s kissing me like he’s been starving under his own skin.
It’s not gentle, not after the first beat—his mouth opens over mine and the sound I make is shameless.
He swallows it, consumes it, answers it with a hunger that matches the worst of mine.
His tongue slides against mine and control shatters in the most beautiful way.
I’m straddling his hip without remembering how I got there, knees sinking into the mattress on either side of him, the thin barrier of cotton useless against what’s happening under my skin.
His other hand comes up, fingers threading into my hair, tipping my head so he can take more, deeper, until the edges of the room blur and there’s only heat and pressure and the clean, dizzying taste of him.
“Tell me to stop,” he says against my mouth, and the way he says it tells me how close he is to not being able to.
“I won’t.” My answer is breath and want.
His chest pushes into my palm with every hard beat. I slide my hand down, over muscle and heat, over the flat plane of his stomach where his shirt has rucked up, skin against skin. He sucks in a breath that punches straight through me.
He rolls, a controlled shift that puts me beneath him without pinning me.
He braces on his forearm so his weight doesn’t crush me, the other hand still cradling the back of my head.
He kisses me slower then, like he’s tasting a sunrise he didn’t think he’d live to see, like patience is the only way this can end without burning the whole mountain down.
“Wren,” he murmurs, as if my name belongs in the space between every kiss. “You don’t know what you do to me.”
“I’m learning.” I arch into him, not shy about what I want him to know. “Teach me.”
He huffs out a laugh that sounds like surrender and restraint braided together.
His mouth leaves mine to trace a line along my jaw, down the side of my throat.
Each press of his lips is deliberate, reverent.
When he reaches the hollow at the base of my throat, he lingers, breathing me in like I’m oxygen after a long dive.
My fingers curl in his shirt. I don’t want distance. I don’t want daylight. I want this, the heavy, honest weight of him, the way his self-control shakes and still somehow holds.
He lifts his head, eyes searching mine. “If we keep going, I won’t be the man I said I’d be.”
“You already are,” I say, meaning it. “You’re the man who keeps me safe. You’re the man who stops when I ask. You’re the man who stays when I’m scared. That’s who you are, no matter what else happens.”
He closes his eyes like it hurts to hear and then presses his forehead to mine. His breath is hot, his heart a fist against my palm.
“I need you so badly. Like I can’t breathe without you here with me.”
I couldn’t agree more. “I need you too.”
He moves on top of me, pulling his shirt off with one hand while holding himself up with the other. The moment his shirt comes off my eyes widen. I’ve never seen a man’s body like this before. So many muscles. Tanned skin from working long hours in the sun. He’s gorgeous.
I suck in a breath and let my fingers work their way over his strong body. “Wow,” I whisper.
He smiles down at me, his eyes staying connected with mine. He grabs my hand, and lowers it. “Feel what you do to me.” He positions my hand over his zipper. The hard ridge of his dick presses into my palm.
Another ‘wow’ escapes my lips. I suck in a breath, immediately feeling inadequate. Maybe he’s right. I am young. Sure, I’ve had sex before. But not like this. Not like him.
“You okay?” he asks when he senses my hesitation.
“Just nervous,” I whisper, trying to avoid his eyes.
He presses his dick further into my palm and suddenly the jeans feel too in the way. “You have nothing to be nervous about, Wren. I’ll go as slowly as you need me to.”