Chapter Twelve #2
Three years of chasing names, dates, and funding trails, pushing herself harder every time another door gets slammed in her face.
She tells me enough to keep me from worrying.
She thinks I don’t notice the rest. The second coffee she never finishes.
The extra glance over her shoulder before she unlocks her apartment.
The way she reaches for her phone whenever it buzzes, even when she’s trying to pretend she isn’t expecting it.
Now she’s asleep at her own kitchen table because somewhere between one spreadsheet and the next, her body finally decided it was done arguing with her.
I keep looking at her longer than I should before I get up quietly. There’s no way I’m leaving her folded over a kitchen chair all night, so I slide one arm beneath her knees and the other around her back before lifting her against my chest.
She stirs, a sleepy sound catching somewhere in her throat as her head falls against my shoulder. “Ghost?”
“Go back to sleep, baby.”
Apparently, that’s all she needs. Her body relaxes against mine, one hand curling loosely into the front of my shirt as I carry her across the apartment.
I should put her down. Instead, I take the long way around the coffee table.
I lower her onto the sofa carefully, but her fingers stay caught in my shirt for another second, like even asleep she isn’t quite ready to let me go.
Fuck.
I gently work her fingers loose and reach for the throw blanket folded over the arm of the sofa. The soft gray wool settles over her as I pull it up around her shoulders, and she burrows deeper into the cushions without opening her eyes.
At first, it’s nothing more than a sleepy shift, her brow creasing slightly as though she’s trying to remember where she is. Then her eyes open, unfocused and heavy with sleep, finding me without really finding me at all.
“Sage…”
Her hand reaches up. It happens so quickly I don’t have time to react.
Her fingers curl around the front of my shirt, and she tugs me toward her with surprising determination, the movement carrying me off balance just enough that I catch myself on the edge of the table before I end up in her lap.
“What are you…” The question never leaves my mouth.
Her lips meet mine.
Soft, warm, and so impossibly gentle that for the first second my brain refuses to accept what’s happening.
I stop breathing.
Everything else stops with me. It all disappears beneath the impossible reality of Sage kissing me.
It’s over almost before I’ve managed to catch up, and she draws back barely an inch, her eyes still hazy with sleep, still caught somewhere between dreaming and waking, and I just look at her. I don’t think I’ve ever looked at anyone the way I’m looking at her now.
My heart is doing something unfamiliar against my ribs, hitting harder than it should, and every sensible instinct I’ve trusted my entire life is telling me to stand up, take a step back, give her space before either of us has to figure out what the fuck just happened.
But I don’t move.
Then I watch her wake up.
Really wake up.
Confusion flickers across her face first, followed almost immediately by recognition, and I see the exact second the memory catches up with her.
Her eyes widen.
Every muscle in her body goes still.
“Shit!” she whispers.
I don’t think she’s talking to me. I think she’s talking to herself.
We’re close enough that I can feel the warmth of her breath against my face, close enough that if either of us leaned forward, the distance between us would disappear altogether.
Neither of us does.
I should say something. Anything. Instead, I keep looking at her. At the uncertainty in her eyes. At the apology beginning to form before she’s even decided whether she needs one. At the woman who somehow became the first person I look for every time I walk into a room.
The one who lingers in my head long after she’s gone, until somewhere along the way thinking about Sage stopped being something I did and quietly became the place my mind always returned to.
The decision isn’t dramatic. It slips past every instinct I’ve spent years trusting, quiet enough that I don’t realize I’ve made it until I’m already moving.
My hand lifts, settling against her jaw. Her skin is warm beneath my palm, impossibly soft beneath fingers that have spent more years wrapped around handlebars, keyboards, and weapons than they ever have around another person. My thumb brushes her cheek in a touch so gentle it catches me off guard.
She doesn’t pull away.
She simply looks at me.
Waiting.
Giving me every chance to stop.
I don’t.
I close the last inch between us slowly, giving her every opportunity to change her mind.
She never takes it.
The second her lips meet mine, everything inside me shifts.
It isn’t gentle, and it isn’t gradual. It feels as though something has been stretched impossibly tight for months, finally gives way, snapping with enough force to scatter every coherent thought I had.
Heat surges through my body so suddenly it steals the air from my lungs, and every wall I have spent years building, every careful calculation, every reason I’ve ever had for keeping people at a distance disappears beneath the overwhelming reality of Sage.
She’s all I can feel.
The warmth of her beneath my hand.
The softness of her mouth.
The quiet breath she lets out against my lips that settles somewhere deep in my chest like it’s always belonged there.
Christ.
My tongue collides with hers as I lean into her a little more forcefully, deepening the kiss.
I’ve imagined kissing this woman more times than I’ll ever admit to another living soul.
It’s usually late at night when sleep refused to come, when the clubhouse was quiet, and my brain wouldn’t stop replaying every smile, argument, and lingering glance I’d convinced myself meant nothing.
None of those imagined versions came close.
They couldn’t.
Nothing could have prepared me for the way she fits against me like she’s always belonged here, or how effortlessly the rest of the world falls away the second our mouths meet.
Somewhere in the back of my head, the part of me that’s usually ten steps ahead is trying to tell me something.
I don’t hear a damn word of it.
Her fingers curl into the front of my shirt, gathering the fabric in her fists as she pulls me closer instead of letting me go.
It’s the smallest movement, barely enough for anyone else to notice, but it tears through the last thread of restraint I’ve been clinging to because she’s choosing this just as much as I am.
“Ghost…” My name falls apart on her lips as if she’s forgotten every other word she knows.
“Yeah,” I murmur, though it comes out rougher than I intended.
She doesn’t give me the chance to say anything else when her mouth finds mine again, and this time there’s nothing tentative about it. We’re all tongues and teeth, as I lean her back against the sofa, my body towering over hers, my cock straining against my jeans like a restless animal.
Months of restraint unravel in a heartbeat.
Every conversation that lingered longer than it needed to.
Every excuse either of us ever found to stay in the same room.
Every look that lasted just a little too long before one of us remembered ourselves.
Every time I watched her walk away because it was the smart thing to do.
It all crashes into us at once.
She kisses me as though she’s done pretending she doesn’t want this, and somewhere in the middle of it I feel her smile against my mouth. It’s fleeting, almost shy, but it lands harder than the kiss itself because it tells me everything she hasn’t been saying.
I’m not the only one who’s been fighting this.
My hand slides to her waist, drawing her closer until there isn’t a fraction of space left between us. She melts into me so naturally it feels less like discovering something new and more like finding something that should have happened a long time ago.
Her hands travel up my chest until her fingers hook beneath my cut’s leather. She gives it an impatient tug that almost makes me laugh, and I break the kiss long enough to help her, shrugging the leather from my shoulders before it lands forgotten beside us on the sofa.
The second it’s gone, she’s kissing me again.
Like neither of us is willing to waste another heartbeat.
Eventually she pulls back just enough to breathe. Our foreheads rest together, our breaths tangled, neither of us moving because neither of us seems capable of it.
She smiles, almost disbelieving. “I was starting to think you were never going to kiss me.”
A laugh escapes me before I can stop it. “I was trying really hard not to.”
Her eyes search mine for a heartbeat before she smiles again, softer this time. “So was I.”
Those three words hit hard.
Deeper than the kiss.
Because they mean I wasn’t imagining it. Every look, every almost, every moment that felt like the ground shifted beneath us, she felt it too.
My thumb brushes slowly along her side beneath her shirt’s hem before I stop myself, searching her face instead of assuming. She answers by closing the distance herself, and hesitation disappears.
My fingers slip just far enough beneath the fabric to feel the warmth of her skin, and the shiver that runs through her makes my pulse kick harder.
Her hands find the bottom of my T-shirt at the same time mine settle against hers, and for a heartbeat, we look at each other, smiling as if neither of us can quite believe we’ve finally crossed the line we’ve been circling for months.
“Still with me?” she whispers.
I smile, resting my forehead against hers. “I’m exactly where I want to be.”
Her breath catches, her eyes softening in a way that almost undoes me, and when our mouths find each other again, the kiss is slower, now that neither of us has anything left to fight. Every kiss only makes the next one harder to stop.
Then the stairs creak.