Chapter 15 #2
I sit up straighter, leaning closer to her.
“I don’t fit anywhere you’re not. That’s not me being dramatic.
That’s just… fact. Some people wake up every day for their dream careers, or their families, or whatever the fuck else gives their life meaning.
I’ve been waking up every day hoping you’ll look at me the way you are right now. ”
“There has to be more you want.”
“You wanna know my dream life?” She nods, and something in her eyes tells me she’s been waiting for this.
“Financially, I’m set. I’ve made more than I should have, doing things most people don’t even know exist, but I like it.
I like digging through people’s shit, finding out what they really hide and what keeps them awake, wondering if someone’s gonna find it.
When you know the truth, you own the fucking room.
You control the play, and when you care about someone enough, that kind of control becomes protection. ”
“The way you’ve protected me.”
“Always you. Even when you probably wouldn’t have wanted me to.”
Her lips curve around the rim of her glass, but she doesn’t argue. She knows it’s true.
“Cain—Lucien’s twin—he’s a different fucking breed. He’s smart as hell, but he’s reckless, and he’s gotten himself into some dark shit that me and Lucien have had to clean up more than once.”
The memory claws its way up—sirens cutting through the night, red soaking the pavement, my hands stained with Cain’s blood while he laughed like he didn’t have a bullet lodged in him.
That pain in the ass raw-dogs danger like it’s nothing, and he’s had more close calls than I can count.
Stupid, stubborn fuck. I didn’t ask for him, but now he’s part mine, whether I like it or not.
“I’ve only ever really gotten my hands dirty for you, but I’d do it for them too.”
“How did you meet them?”
“Through my roommate in college. I got close with Lucien first, and he walked me through a door I’ve never come back out of.”
That first night, he sat across from me with a laptop open, lines of code streaming across the screen faster than I could follow, and the look in his eyes told me I was either in or I needed to forget I’d ever been there.
“He and Cain brought me in and taught me everything I know—how to break into systems people have spent millions protecting, how to pull information that could destroy lives or save them, depending on who was paying. Sometimes it was for people who deserved the help, people who’d been fucked over by someone with too much power.
Sometimes it was for people who didn’t deserve shit but paid well enough that we didn’t ask questions about what they’d do with what we found, and I went with it because I had nothing to lose. ”
“Will I ever meet them?”
“Yeah, baby, because that leads me into the rest of my dream, which has always been you. I wanna marry you. I don’t care where, as long as it’s you walking toward me, choosing forever.
I should probably invite them, or they’ll have my balls, especially since they’ve listened to me talk about you for the better part of a decade.
So you’ll definitely meet them then. Then one day, when you’re ready, I’ll give you two babies.
Two little pieces of us who get to grow up knowing what it feels like to be safe and loved every single day.
And we’ll move somewhere where we can look up at the sky again, somewhere the stars aren’t drowned out by city lights, and you can actually see the whole universe stretched out above us. ”
I look at her like it’s already real, as if I can see it playing out in front of me, moments away from happening instead of some distant dream I’ve been holding onto for years.
“It’ll be you, me, and them.”
“How long have you been thinking about this?”
“Parts of it started the day we met.” I reach out and wrap a strand of her red hair around my knuckle.
“I know we don’t need to rehash that day.
I know you know I had nothing to do with what happened, but I’m sorry for every way I failed you leading up to that.
Jesus, everything could’ve been so different if I hadn’t fucked it all up. ”
“I wouldn’t have what I do now if it hadn’t gone down that way.”
And that hits harder than anything else she could’ve said because she wouldn’t trade those years back. She wouldn’t undo what tore us apart, even if she could.
Not for us.
Not for me.
“You hurt me, Phoenix, and that doesn’t even scratch the surface of how broken I was, but it made me strong. It made me pull together a life I could’ve only ever dreamed about.”
“And now?” I ask, knowing there’s a chance her answer might gut me. But when she lifts her eyes, all I see is the girl who used to look at me like I could raise hell and she’d still stand there with her arms wide open, trusting me not to let her burn.
“Now you’ve really gone and shaken shit up.”
“I’m not sorry for that.”
“I didn’t think you would be.”
“So what about you? Dream life? You living it… or still chasing it?”
“Now that I’m not going to answer.”
“Why not?”
“Because first of all, I’m not even sure what that is, and secondly, I can’t tell you anything without you holding it against me.”
“Does it involve me? That’s all I’ll ask.”
“Hasn’t my entire life already involved you?”
I’m taking that as a fucking yes, but I hold back from pushing her.
“Can I ask you something?”
“I’m an open book, baby. You can always ask me whatever you want.”
“What happened to Greg?”
That prick.
“I just figured…” She shrugs, playing off her curiosity even though she’s dying to know if I buried that motherfucker in a shallow grave somewhere. “You kind of made your way around that group, and you never mentioned him.”
There’s a fantasy I play out sometimes when I can’t sleep, where I take him out into the woods, cave his smug fucking face in with my bare knuckles, and fling his teeth into a bag.
“Greg’s married to some rich old-money princess.
But as soon as she takes a girls’ trip to the Hamptons, Greg is in a hotel room, bent over for a guy he calls Daddy, begging to get his ass beat raw with a leather strap before making the guy finish on his wife’s face in the wedding photo he takes to every hookup. ”
She just stares at me, mouth open, blinking like she doesn’t even know how to process that.
“You asked, pretty girl… oh, and Cassie’s dead. Not my fault that one—that was a freak accident I wasn’t a part of.”
“Jesus… I can’t believe she’s dead—” She shakes her head, still trying to catch up. “And he’s gay?”
“I always figured he was at least bi. I caught him staring at my dick a few times, and not just mine.”
“Well… you do admittedly have a nice dick.”
I reach out and haul her into my arms, my body deciding for me that I need her closeness.
She lands in my lap, her legs around my waist, my hands holding her ass over her thick coat.
Her arms snake around my neck, and she looks down at me with that rare, maddening softness in her eyes that makes everything inside me ache.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I rasp, even though I’m clinging to every second of it. Because, fuck me, please keep looking at me like I’m not the worst thing that’s ever loved you.
My hands slide up her back, my fists twisting in her coat, pulling her down until our foreheads nearly touch.
I need her closer. I need her inside my skin.
Her fingers find the back of my neck right over the raw skin of the tattoo that hasn’t even finished healing, and I feel it everywhere. My body betrays me with a hard shudder, my breath stuttering as I’m barely holding myself together.
“God, you’re killing me here, baby.” I breathe, not even trying to hide how gone I am. “I’m trying to do this right, but if you keep looking at me like that, I’m going to do it so beautifully wrong, you’ll never forget it.”
The connection between us—fuck, it feels like it’s alive.
I never lost this feeling, not for a second.
But she did. She had to let it go to survive, even if some part of her kept reaching back for me in those beautiful, brutal letters I reread until they burned themselves into my head.
And now she’s here in my lap, thighs wrapped around my hips, staring down at me like she never really let go.
“If I hadn’t gone back to that reunion, would you ever have come for me?”
I hate that question because the answer isn’t simple. It’s shame and self-punishment and the way I knew—and still know—I don’t deserve her.
“Only when I felt like I had any right to be a part of your life.”
“I would’ve let you in, you know, if you’d shown yourself. I would’ve screamed at you the way I have been, sure, but it wouldn’t have lasted. Not after the shock wore off.”
She brushes a strand of hair from my face, and I close my eyes because I can’t look at her when she says things like that. I can’t face the way she’s just handed me this alternate universe where I showed up as her monster, and she welcomed me home anyway.
“Don’t,” I choke out, my hands dragging her body flush against mine until there’s no space left between us. “Don’t give me that version of us. I can’t—”
“Can’t what?” Her thumb traces my cheekbone, and I melt into it, craving the way she offers me her affection. “Can’t imagine that I would’ve chosen you anyway? Despite everything you’ve done.”
“Stop, Shannen.”
“No, you don’t get to decide anymore what I get to fight for. You don’t get to take that choice from me again, Phoenix.”
“Be real with me for a minute, baby. What do you honestly think would’ve happened if I showed up years ago? If I’d just walked back into your life as if nothing had happened? Do you really think you’d have been ready for me? Because the girl in those letters wasn’t writing me love notes.”
“Maybe, maybe not. But so much time has passed, and I wish…”
She stops talking as a single raindrop lands on her cheek. I lean forward and kiss it away, tasting the cold water and the salt of her skin beneath it. My lips linger there longer than necessary because I’m a greedy bastard who’ll take any excuse to put my mouth on her.
“I wish you’d come to me,” she whispers against my temple.
“I’m here now. But you have to stop pushing me away when you want me close, because I feel it, Shannen.”
More raindrops land on her face, and I know the sky’s about to break open. We both know this night is running out of time.
“If you know me so well, then you’ll know I’ve lied to you, Phoenix.” She smiles, and the rain is coming down harder now, plastering her hair to her face and running down her neck in rivulets I want to chase with my tongue.
“You have?” Her lashes lower, and rain beads on them like diamonds, and she nods, her teeth tugging at her bottom lip. “Can you tell me?”
But she doesn’t answer with words. Instead, her lips drop to mine, and the entire world ceases to exist. Her tongue slips past my lips, and the sound that rips from my throat is pure animal because, fuck, I love the way she kisses.
She takes what she wants like she owns me, her mouth greedy and demanding, and I’d unleash hell just to feel this for another second.
Fine, one date, but I’m not having sex with you.
The lie.
She was never going to be able to resist us.
She pulls back suddenly, her lips ghosting over mine. “Take me to your bed, Phoenix.”
Mine, not hers, because she knows what that means. She knows no one else has ever been in my bed and that my sheets haven’t known another body but mine. She knows it’s not just a bed. It’s a boundary, and now she’s asking to cross it.
My chest collapses in on itself, and my lungs stop working entirely from how much this means because it’s not about sex. It never was. It’s never been about the physical act of fucking, or scratching an itch, or any of that meaningless bullshit.
It’s about us, our fate, and the bond we built that will never break.