Chapter 25
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Adalynn
Miranda gets the kids settled with food and warmth and the kind of quiet authority that doesn't ask for anything back.
She doesn't make a production out of it—just steers Noah toward the kitchen table with a bowl of oatmeal, tucks Amelia into the corner of the couch with a blanket, and says something low to Carter that makes him nod and sit down instead of hovering in the doorway with his arms crossed, trying to look older than he is.
Dodge stands beside me in the hall. He smells like smoke and cold air and something underneath both of those things that's just him—that particular combination I couldn't have described before and now can't stop noticing.
I turn toward him. There are cuts on his knuckles.
A darkening bruise along his jaw I hadn't clocked from the driveway.
The split in his lip is small but fresh.
I reach up and touch the edge of his jaw without really deciding to, just two fingers, light. He goes still.
“How bad?” I ask.
“Not bad.” His voice is rough, worn down at the edges.
“Shoulder'll be ugly tomorrow. Nothing that needs a hospital.” I nod.
I don't move my hand. He covers it with his.
His palm is warm, which surprises me after everything—like he's been cold for hours and is only now remembering that he doesn't have to be.
“Come to my room with me,” he says. It isn't a question, exactly, and it isn't pressure either.
It's just an open door, and I walk through it.
His bedroom is the same as I remember. Heavy curtains, worn quilt, the way the room swallows sound the moment the door closes.
He shuts it behind us and doesn't reach for the light.
I don't ask him to. The gray morning pressing through the curtain gap is enough.
He sits on the edge of the bed and pulls off his cut, lays it across the chair in the corner.
His shirt comes off next, careful around his left shoulder.
The bruise has spread overnight, purple and deep, bleeding under his collarbone.
I cross to him without thinking about it and put my hands on his shoulders, light around the damaged side, just holding him for a second.
He exhales. Long and slow, like he's been waiting to do it since he rode out. “You're back,” I whisper.
“Told you I would be.”
“I know.” I press my forehead to the back of his neck and breathe him in, sweat and smoke and something underneath that's just him. “I know you did.”
He turns then, and I sit back, and he looks at me the way he does sometimes, like he's making sure I'm still real. Like the coming back mattered as much as the leaving. “You waited,” he says.
“Wasn't going to do anything else.”
He reaches up and tucks a piece of hair behind my ear, and his hand stays there, palm curved against my jaw.
I lean into it without deciding to. My body makes the decision before my brain catches up.
“Hey,” he says quietly. “Stop holding your breath.” I let it go and breathe normally.
His thumb moves slowly along my jaw, back and forth, and the last wall I've been holding up since he walked out that door comes down quietly, without a sound.
“I kept thinking about what I'd do if you didn't come back,” I tell him. “I had it all mapped out. I was going to take the kids and figure out the next thing once we were on the road.”
"I know you did."
"I didn't want to need the plan," I say. "That's the part I couldn't shake."
He leans his forehead down against mine and doesn't say anything, and that's better than any answer he could have given me. I close my eyes. His hand is still at my jaw and I bring mine up and cover it. "I'm here," he says.
"Yeah." When he kisses me it isn't desperate.
It's slow and deliberate, like he's got nowhere else to be and nothing left to prove, and I feel it all the way down into my sternum.
My hand moves to his chest without me deciding to, fingers spreading against warm skin, his heartbeat steady underneath my palm.
He pulls back just enough to look at me. "Tell me if you want to stop."
"I don't want to stop."
He holds my eyes for a beat, making sure, and then his mouth is back on mine and his hands are at my waist, sliding under the hem of my shirt.
His palms are warm and rough and they move up my back like he's memorizing the shape of me, slow and certain.
He spreads his fingers wide between my shoulder blades and pulls me closer, and I go without resistance, my chest pressing flush against his bare skin.
He breaks the kiss long enough to pull my shirt up and over my head.
I lift my arms and let him, and then his eyes move over me in the gray light, unhurried, and I don't reach to cover myself. I let him look.
"Come here," he says, low, and I go.
He draws me down onto the bed and I settle against him, and his mouth finds my jaw first, then my throat, lips pressing slowly and deliberate into the hollow just below my ear.
I tip my head back and he takes his time there, mouth open and warm, teeth grazing just enough to make my breath catch.
His hand slides up from my waist and cups my breast through the thin fabric of my bra, his thumb tracing a slow circle, and I arch into it before I can think to be self-conscious about it.
He reaches behind me and unclasps my bra with one hand, pulls it away, and then his mouth moves down from my throat and closes over me.
I make a sound I don't plan to make, fingers going into his hair, and I feel him smile against my skin.
"Good?" he asks.
"Yeah," I breathe. "Really good." I reach for his belt while he's still working his way down my ribs with his mouth.
He lets me. I get it undone and he shifts, standing long enough to get his jeans off, and then he's back, the length of him against my thigh, and the reality of him, of this, settles into my bones.
He hooks his fingers into the waistband of my jeans and looks up at me.
I lift my hips. He pulls them down and off and drops them over the side of the bed, and then he's looking at me again, all of me, and I reach up and trace the bruise along his shoulder with two fingers, learning the damage, letting him know I see all of him too.
"I've got you," I tell him, because I need him to know it's not one direction.
"I know." He says it without flinching, without qualifying it, and I believe him.
I press my mouth to his chest, just above his heart, and feel the way his breath catches. His hand comes up into my hair, not gripping, just resting there, and he says my name once, low and close.
"Adalynn."
"Yeah," I say against his skin.
He kisses down my sternum, his mouth warm and unhurried, and his hand slides down my stomach, fingers trailing slow past my navel.
I go still, waiting. His palm flattens against my hip for a moment like he's grounding himself, and then his fingers slide between my thighs and I stop pretending to breathe normally.
He doesn't rush. He learns me with his hand, slow and attentive, watching my face while he does it, adjusting to what makes me gasp and what makes me go tense and what makes my hips lift toward him.
I grip the quilt with one hand and his forearm with the other, and he doesn't take that as a cue to stop.
He keeps going, steady and deliberate, until my thighs are shaking and I'm pulling at his arm.
"Dodge." His name comes out rough.
"I've got you," he says again, and this time it means something different, and I let go. I'm still catching my breath when he moves over me, bracing on his good arm, his weight settling between my thighs. He looks at my face first. Not my body, my face.
"Okay?" he asks.
"Yes." I reach up and pull him down by the back of his neck. "Yes."
He reaches between us and positions himself and then he's pressing into me, slow and steady, and I exhale all the way out as he glides forward and fills me.
There's a moment where neither of us moves, where I just feel the weight of him and the fullness of it and the fact that he came back and he's here and this is real, and something in my chest cracks open quietly.
He drops his forehead to mine. "Hey," he says.
"I'm good," I tell him. "I'm really good."
He pulls back and rolls forward again, slow, setting an easy pace, and I wrap my legs around him and match it.
His mouth finds my throat. My hands move over his back, feeling the shift of muscle under skin, the flex and pull of him moving against me.
He isn't hurried and I'm not either, and there's no performance in any of it.
Just two people who survived something and chose to come back to each other.
He picks up the pace gradually, not all at once, and I feel the difference, the way the slow drag of it becomes something sharper, and I dig my fingers into his back and stop trying to stay quiet.
The sounds he makes against my neck are low and rough and honest, and I match them without thinking about it.
"Look at me," he says.
I do.
He holds my gaze and doesn't look away and I don't look away and something in my chest pulls wide open.
Not frightening. Not like loss. Like making room for something that was trying to get in.
He shifts the angle slightly and I feel it through my whole body, and I say his name and it comes out broken in the middle, and I feel him react to it, his breath going ragged, his hips driving forward with more intention.
I pull him closer and he goes, one hand gripping the headboard above me, and the steady controlled rhythm he's been keeping finally breaks apart into something urgent and honest. When I come the second time it rolls through me in a long, shuddering wave and I grip his shoulders and press my face into his neck and just ride it.
He follows me over the edge with his face buried in my hair, his whole body going tight and then loose, a low broken sound against my skin.
Afterward we lie still for a long while.
His arm is around me, my head on his chest. His heartbeat is slow and steady, and outside the window the birds have started, and the sun is all the way up now.
The curtains glow pale gold at the edges.
Neither of us moves.
"I don't want to go back to Colorado," I say eventually. It isn't dramatic. It's just true and I'm tired of carrying it by myself.
His chest rises under my cheek. "I know."
"The kids need somewhere settled. School. Routine. People who know their names." I pause. "Amelia needs someone real to talk to, not just me at two in the morning talking her back down."
"Yeah," he says. "She does."
I lift my head and look at him. "Say something that isn't agreement."
The corner of his mouth pulls up. "Come to Muscogee with me.
" I hold his eyes, trying to figure out if he’s joking or being sincere.
"Not because you've got nowhere else to go," he adds, voice level.
"Not because you need somebody to rescue you.
I know you don't." He shifts, adjusting so he can see my face properly.
"I want you there. I want all of you there.
I want to wake up and know where you are.
I want Noah asking me questions about motorcycles at breakfast. I want Carter to have somewhere to put all that energy that isn't fear.
" He pauses. "And I want you. Not as a problem I solved.
As a person I want in my life." I look at him for a long moment.
"There's a house two blocks from the clubhouse," he continues.
"Three bedrooms, solid yard. It's been sitting empty. It's not fancy."
"I don't need fancy."
"No," he agrees. "You need solid. You need a front door that locks and a school that won't ask too many questions and somewhere Amelia can use actual coloring books."
I exhale something that's almost a laugh. "She's going to need a lot of them."
He chuckles before announcing, "She can have every one in the store."
I press my smile against his shoulder. "I want to be there," I tell him, and I say it flat and clear because he gave it to me straight and he deserves the same.
"I've been telling myself it was too much, that I couldn't ask that of you, that the kids were my problem and not yours.
" I pause. "But I don't want to leave. I don't want to go somewhere else and start over and act like none of this happened.
Like you didn't happen." He looks at me, waiting for me to expand, so I do.
"I want to be somewhere you are," I say. "That's what I want."
He doesn't make a big thing out of it. He just pulls me a little closer and settles back, his jaw resting against the top of my head. "Then stay," he says quietly. "Come home with me."
"Okay," I say. A decision, not a wish. "We'll go home with you to Muscogee."
His arm tightens around me once, brief and solid.
Outside the door the house is starting to wake in pieces.
Footsteps somewhere down the hall. Noah's voice, low and sleepy, asking something.
The screen door opening and closing as Hulk makes his rounds.
I don't move. Neither does Dodge. This is what it's supposed to feel like.
Not the absence of hard things, because there are still hard things waiting, Carter still needs to grieve what he lost, Amelia still wakes up in the dark, there will be paperwork and questions and the long work of piecing a life together from whatever made it out of Colorado.
But none of that is this moment. This room. This specific quiet.
His heartbeat. The birds outside. My siblings alive down the hall.
I close my eyes and stay.