Chapter 11 #2
"I'll have a glass with you." He pours two, hands me one.
"I don't make a habit of it. Doesn't always sit right with the meds, and I don't love what too much of it did to people I came up around.
But one glass, with you, on a night like this one—" the corner of his mouth tips "—I think I can manage. "
We eat pizza on his couch with the lamps low and Hoagie sprawled across both our feet.
We drink the wine slowly, and somewhere in there the worst of the day starts to loosen its grip on me.
The wine helps. I won't pretend it doesn't.
It comes up warm under my skin and takes the sharpest edges off, and after the second glass, I'm leaning into his side, feeling almost human, my legs across his lap, his hand wrapped warm around my bare ankle.
"I bought wine once for a book club," I tell him, lifting my glass, and a laugh comes out of me that's only half wrecked. "I was going to be the teacher who hosted a wine-and-novel night. Get the young moms out of the house once a month. I had a whole list of books picked."
"Yeah?" He's watching me, his thumb moving slowly on my ankle. "What was first on it?"
"Something uplifting." The laugh again, steadier this time. "God, I'm glad I never sent the invitations. Can you imagine? Beverly Daughtry in my living room discussing themes."
His chest moves under my cheek, the nearest thing to a laugh I've gotten out of him all night, and I feel it more than hear it, and I think—lying here warm and wine-soft against a man who rode an hour with murder in his face just to be gentle with me—that this is the only place in the world that hasn't turned on me today.
I set my glass down on the floor.
I turn in his lap so I'm facing him, my hands coming up to his jaw, the stubble rough under my palms.
"Sophie." He catches my wrists, the way he does, slowing me down. "You don't have to. Not tonight. You've had the worst day of your life. I'm not going anywhere if all you do is sleep."
"I know I don't have to." I lean my forehead against his. "I want to."
And I do.
I'm not hiding from the day in him, or I'm not only doing that—though if I am, a little, I think after everything I'm allowed.
I want the one clean thing in a day that was nothing but filth.
I want to be touched on purpose by someone who chose me instead of being touched by accident by people who'd scrub their hands after.
"They spent all day telling me what I am," I say against his mouth. "I want you to remind me what I actually am."
Something breaks loose in his face at that.
"Come here," he says, low and rough, and his hands slide up into my wet hair, fingers tangling tight as he pulls me in.
He kisses me like an answer to a question I stopped having the strength to ask hours ago.
He takes me to bed. He's careful with me—not the kind of careful that thinks I'll shatter, but the kind that understands exactly what today cost me.
It makes all the difference.
He undresses me slowly.
His fingers work the buttons, the zipper, the fabric sliding off my skin like he's unwrapping something precious.
And everywhere his mouth follows—my throat, the curve of my shoulder, the inside of my wrist, lower—he leaves a mark.
A bruise. A brand of his own making.
I understand what he's doing without him saying a word.
The town spent all day stamping ugly words across my name like they owned me.
He's writing something else now, in a language only the two of us will ever read.
He's claiming back every inch of me they tried to make filthy.
"Mine," he murmurs against my stomach, his breath hot on my skin. "Not theirs. They don't get to decide what you are. I do." He looks up at me, eyes dark and steady. "And you do. That's the whole damn list."
"Yours," I breathe back, and it's the truest word I've said all day.
His mouth continues down.
He spreads my thighs with his palms and presses his lips to the crease where my leg meets my hip, so close to where I'm aching for him.
His tongue traces a line along my folds, slow and deliberate, tasting me like he has all the time in the world. Like there's nowhere else he'd rather be. Like I'm something worth savoring.
I arch into him, my fingers finding his hair, gripping tight.
He groans against me—the vibration running through my clit—and slides two fingers inside me, curling them just right.
He fucks me slow with his hand while his tongue works circles around that swollen bud, and I'm already close, already trembling, because no one has ever touched me like this—like I'm sacred.
"Please," I whisper, and I don't even know what I'm asking for.
He knows. He pulls back just enough to say, "When I'm ready," and then he's back, his tongue working me harder now, his fingers moving faster.
I come apart with his name on my lips, my whole body shaking, and he doesn't stop until I've ridden every last wave.
When he moves over me, he keeps his eyes on mine.
He pushes into me—slowly, so slowly—and I feel every inch of him filling me up.
He says my name like it's a clean thing. Like it was never anything but clean.
"Sophie," he breathes, and the awful weight of the parking lot and the dried egg and Patricia's lowered eyes—all of it goes quiet under the weight of him.
He starts to move.
A slow, sure rhythm.
A man making sure I know I'm wanted by the one person whose opinion I've decided matters.
His hips roll into mine, deep and deliberate, and each thrust feels like a promise. Like he's rewriting me from the inside out.
"You feel so good," he groans against my neck. "So fucking good."
I wrap my legs around him, pulling him deeper, needing more. Needing to feel owned in a way that doesn't feel like ownership—just belonging. Just this.
"Harder," I tell him, because I want to feel it tomorrow. I want to feel it when I'm standing in front of all of them.
He gives me what I ask for.
His pace quickens, his hips snapping against mine, the sound of skin on skin filling the room.
He braces himself on one arm, his other hand gripping my thigh, angling me exactly where he wants me.
His cock hits that spot inside me with every thrust, and I'm climbing again, building toward something that feels like absolution.
"Come for me," he says, his voice rough. "I want to feel you."
I do.
I come so hard, my vision blurs, my whole body clenching around him, and he follows me over the edge, burying himself deep as he groans my name again.
Just my name. Nothing else.
We lie there afterward, tangled together, catching our breath.
I don't think about a single one of them. I think about him, and the way he says mine, and how for once in my life I belong to something I chose instead of something handed to me in a pew.
After, he holds me the way he's learned to. My back to his chest, his arm heavy over my ribs, his mouth pressed to the back of my neck.
"How you feeling?" he asks.
"Held," I say, and I feel him smile against my skin.
He gets up once, brings me water, and turns off the lamp.
When he settles back in, he pulls me close.
I lie there in the dark, in the wreckage of the worst day of my life, getting marked as his instead of branded as theirs. I wait for the old shame to come.
It doesn't.
The sky outside his window holds itself up the same as it ever has.
Indifferent and ordinary, not the least bit interested in punishing me for being loved.
"They're going to keep coming," I say into the dark, because somebody has to. "It's not going to stop because we had a good night."
"I know it." His arm tightens around me.
"We're not going to take it lying down, either.
Dag's already moving up in Tallahassee. Esperanza's got her teeth in the school board so deep they don't even feel it yet.
" He presses a kiss to my shoulder. "You spent today on defense, Soph.
Getting through it. Surviving them." His voice goes low and certain.
"Tomorrow, we start figuring out how to make every last one of them sorry.
The clean way. The way that holds up in a courtroom and takes everything they've got. "
I lie there and let that be true. The warm weight of him at my back, his promise sitting in the dark with us like something I can hold.
For the first time since I walked out of that grocery store, I don't feel like prey.
I feel like a woman with a club at her back and a man in her bed who'd burn the world down if she asked.