Chapter 11
ELEVEN
SAGE
I wake in the dark to Dawson’s hand splayed possessive over my stomach, and for one disoriented second I think I’m still twenty and none of the last eight years happened at all.
Then I feel the shape of him behind me, warm and solid and real, his breath steady against the back of my neck. His arm is heavy across my ribs. His large hand is flat against my abdomen, and it makes my skin pebble, a small shiver running down my spine.
I lie still and let myself have it. Just for a minute. Just in the dark, where nobody’s keeping score.
He stirs when I shift, not fully awake, and his hand tightens instead of letting go. His mouth finds my shoulder, lazy, and the kiss he presses there isn’t asking for anything. It’s just want, slow and lazy, the kind that doesn’t need an audience or a reason.
“You’re awake,” he says, voice deep and groggy with sleep.
“You’re handsy.”
“I’m married. I checked. There’s a license.”
“You checked the license at three in the morning.”
“I check a lot of things at three in the morning.” His fingers inch lower, and whatever I was going to say next dissolves somewhere around my collarbone. “Occupational hazard.”
We don’t talk after that. There’s nothing efficient about it, nothing braced or urgent like last night, adrenaline and eight years of wanting all crashing into one bed at once. This one keeps no clock.
He doesn’t turn me over. He just gathers me back into him, chest to my spine, his knee nudging between mine, and his hand stays where it was on my stomach, spreading wide, pressing me back until I feel how hard he is against the small of my back.
His mouth drags up the side of my neck and stops under my ear, and he breathes there, just breathes, like he’s memorizing the smell of my hair in the dark.
It’s the first time I’ve woken up in this house next to him. That summer we never got a whole night. We’d stay out until the sky started to pale and then sneak back to our own beds before anybody woke up. My body figures out the difference before my brain does.
His fingers slide lower, lazy, and find me already wet, and he makes a rough sound against my shoulder like I’ve handed him a gift he didn’t ask for.
He circles me slow, then slower, dragging over the jewel until my hips start rocking back against him on their own, half asleep and wide awake at once.
“Sage.” Just my name, gravel and sleep. A question.
I answer it. I hook my leg back over his thigh, reach between us, and guide him to me, and when he finally moves inside me it’s patient, one inch at a time, his breath catching hot against my neck with every one of them, like he’s got nowhere else on earth to be and no intention of proving anything to either of us tonight.
He barely moves. He doesn’t need to. We rock together in the dark, small and deep and endless, his fingers keeping time with his hips, my hand over his to hold it there. The house ticks and settles around us. Cricket sighs in her sleep at the foot of the bed. Nobody’s keeping score.
I come apart against him with barely a sound, a long, shuddering pulse that curls my toes and pulls every muscle in me tight around him, and he holds me through all of it, murmuring things into my hair I can’t make out and don’t need to.
He follows a heartbeat behind me, my name rough against my neck, and then we’re just breathing together in the dark, tangled up in a way I haven’t let myself be tangled up in with anyone since I last made love to him on this same porch, right downstairs from where we’re lying right now.
I fall back asleep with his heartbeat under my ear and don’t dream about anything at all.
Morning comes in, dusted pink on the clouds through the east window, and I wake up laughing before I’m even fully conscious of why.
Dawson’s got one hand braced on the headboard and the other doing something entirely unfair to the back of my knee, and the whole production is somehow both filthy and ridiculous at once, the two of us fighting for space on a mattress that was plenty big enough for one person and apparently declares war the second you add a second one who refuses to stay on his own side.
“You elbowed me,” I say.
“You stole the pillow.”
“I didn’t steal it. I redistributed it.”
“That’s theft with better PR.” He hitches my leg higher over his hip, and every complaint I had lined up dies somewhere in my throat. “Redistribution implies consent from the other party.”
“You gave consent when you married me. It’s in the vows. Somewhere between for richer and till death, there’s an implied pillow clause.”
“I read that contract twice. No pillow clause.”
“Then I guess we’re doing this the hard way.”
He laughs against my mouth, a deep rumble I feel all the way down my spine, and it’s such a strange sound coming out of a man who spent two years handing me nothing but blank calm and controlled menace that I almost stop to mark the occasion. I don’t get the chance.
What happens next is lighter than last night and messier than the dark, and involves at least one more elbow, a pillow that ends up on the floor, and Cricket scratching at the door right when it matters most. Dawson says something deeply uncharitable about that dog’s timing.
I laugh so hard it should ruin everything. It doesn’t.
When it’s over we lie there sweaty and useless, my leg still hooked over his, his thumb tracing lazy circles against my hip like he’s not ready to stop touching me yet.
“That was better,” I declare.
“Better than what?”
“Better than last night. Last night felt like a funeral for everything we lost. This felt like breakfast.”
“I haven’t fed you yet.”
“Figuratively.”
“I know what you meant.” He presses a kiss to my temple, unthinking, the kind of gesture that means more than the ones that try harder. “I liked the funeral too, for the record. Just so we’re clear.”
“Noted for the eulogy.”
He laughs again, and I let myself enjoy it before Cricket scratches the door a second time, more insistent, and the spell breaks into something that just feels like morning.
I steal his shirt off the floor because it’s the closest thing within reach and because some petty, satisfied part of me wants to walk around his kitchen wearing his name on my back like I won something.
I pull on the pair of cutoff shorts and skip the underwear entirely, because apparently marriage has stripped me of some baseline modesty I used to have.
I find my glasses on the nightstand where I left them last night and put them on without thinking, and I catch him watching from across the room, an unguarded flicker crossing his face before he reins it back in.
“What?” I say.
“Nothing.”
“You’re doing the thing again.”
“What thing?”
“The thing where you look at me like I did something remarkable, and I’m putting on my glasses because I don’t have my contacts in.”
“You still have them.” He says it like it matters more than it should, and the weight in his voice makes me want to look away first, so I don’t. “The same pair. From before.”
“They’re not actually the same pair. Similar frames, much worse prescription. They’re glasses, Dawson. Not a shrine.” I push them up my nose and head for the kitchen before he can turn this into something bigger than it is.
“If you say so.”
“Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“The soft voice. Save it for someone who hasn’t spent this long learning exactly what believing it does to a person.”
He doesn’t answer right away. When I glance back he’s watching me with an expression I can’t fully read, somewhere between hurt and understanding, and I hate that I put it there and hate more that some starving part of me wanted him to argue.
He doesn’t argue. He follows me into the kitchen instead and leans a hip against the counter while I pull the portafilter and tamp the grounds.
“Show me,” he says, when I twist it into the group head.
“You want to learn how to make espresso?”
“I want to know how you like your coffee.” He says it lightly, but there’s nothing light underneath it.
I let him stand at my shoulder while I talk him through the tamp and the shot timing, and his phone buzzes against the counter twice while I do it, unanswered both times, and I mark the muscle that jumps in his jaw each time he ignores it.
Halfway through the pour he drifts to the window, and he runs the tree line like other men check a score. Corner to corner, the Corridor gate, the ridge, twenty seconds flat. Then he’s back at my shoulder like he never left, and I let him think I didn’t watch him do it.
Cricket parks herself directly between our feet at the counter, staring up at both of us with the flat, unimpressed judgment of a dog who has clearly seen enough of this marriage already to have opinions about it.
“She thinks we’re ridiculous,” I say.
“She’s not wrong.”
I pull two mugs down while the second shot pulls, and Dawson leans back against the counter beside me in a pair of sweatpants and nothing else, watching me work with the same intense attention he gives everything.
“You’re staring,” I say.
“You’re wearing my shirt and glasses and making me coffee in a kitchen I still can’t quite believe you’re standing in. Forgive me.”
“Don’t get used to it. This is a limited engagement.”
“I’ll take what I can get.”
The way he says it, level on the surface and not underneath, gets under my skin and stays there. I busy myself with the milk instead of looking at him, because looking at him right now feels like standing too close to a ledge.
His phone buzzes a third time. He glances at it, jaw tightening before he sets it face down again without answering.
“Who’s that?”
“Finn.” He says it too casually, and I’ve spent two years learning what his too-casual sounds like. “Wants to know why I missed the group run.”
“Are you going to tell him?”
“I’m going to lie to him.”
This time he answers, phone propped against his ear.
“I overslept.” A pause. “No.” Another pause, longer, and a look crosses his face that sits one door down from panic.
“That wasn’t the sound you think it was.
” A third pause. “I have a dog, Finn. Dogs make noise.” He glances at me, and I have to press my lips together hard to keep from laughing out loud. “I’m hanging up now.”
He sets the phone down like it personally betrayed him.
“He heard something,” I say.
“He heard nothing.”
“Somebody just got caught by his little brother.”
“I panicked about my dignity. Different category entirely.”
I let myself laugh at that, real and bright, and the line of his shoulders loosens watching me do it, like my laugh is worth more to him than it has any right to be this early in a marriage neither of us signed up for out of love.
He takes the coffee I offer him and doesn’t sit down right away. He just stands there, watching, the way he stood in the truck cab four days ago, right before he asked me to say Cruz’s name a second time and told me what would happen if he said it to the wrong person.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” he says. “About last night.”
My stomach drops before he even finishes the sentence.
“Mackenzie messaged me. Four times, back to back, right after you fell asleep.” He watches my face for the exact moment it lands. “You put your hand on my wrist and gave me five minutes. I took them. Then I called her from the hallway so it wouldn’t wake you.”
“You still haven’t told me what it said.”
“The location tag from the recovered backup. The fragment that survived. She confirmed it points somewhere on Sullivan land.”
“You’ve had this since last night?”
“I have.”
“And you waited until coffee to tell me?”
“I did.” He doesn’t dress that up as anything other than what it is. “I wanted one morning where the first thing either of us said to the other wasn’t about a body count.”
I set my mug down harder than I mean to. The old reflex is there, the one that’s kept me alive in every room my father’s ever put me in, reaching automatically for the anger. It comes up empty. Underneath it is a quieter part of me that believes him, and that’s worse.
“Where?” I ask instead. “Specifically.”
“She doesn’t know yet. The tag’s corrupted past that point. Just that it’s older than anything currently active. Older than the boundary house. Older than most of what my father’s built in the last twenty years.”
Older. The word sits strange in me, heavier than it should for two syllables.
“You should have told me last night.”
“Maybe.” He doesn’t apologize for it, which somehow makes the honesty feel harder than an apology would have. “I’d do it the same way again.”
I drink my coffee instead of answering, and for once the silence between us doesn’t feel like a standoff. It feels like morning, gold light across the counter, Cricket asleep in a patch of sun by the door, a man in sweatpants watching me like I’m the only thing on his schedule today.
“Don’t,” I say, before either of us can turn this into more softness than I’m ready for.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t make me believe you want the mornings too. I can survive the nights. I don’t know what I do with the mornings.”
He doesn’t answer that. We hold each other’s eyes too long, a raw current moving behind his, and I’m saved from whatever he was about to say by three sharp knocks at the front door, brisk and cheerful in a way that immediately sets every nerve in my body on alert.
Dawson’s whole posture changes, shoulders squaring, all that morning warmth burning off him like fog.
“For fuck’s sake,” he mutters, already moving for the door. “It’s barely seven.”
Through the front window I catch a flash of blond hair and a blazer too crisp for a Friday, a manila envelope tucked against one hip, and a smile already arranged and waiting before either of us has crossed the room to open the door.
Ashley Rourke Pruitt stands on our porch like she’s been invited, envelope in hand, smile perfectly in place.
“Morning,” she says, bright and untroubled, like she hasn’t just driven twenty minutes past the last gate that should have stopped her. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything. Mind if I come in?”