Chapter 12
Carol
Two steps and I’m in his shadow again, looking up at the biker who wants me.
“Carol,” he says and touches my cheek with rough, hot fingers.
Then he leans down, scoops me up. My legs wrap around his middle as my hands cling to his thick neck.
The kiss isn’t wild this time. It’s heat built slow, banked and coaxed.
He tastes like coffee now, not whiskey, like we might make better decisions but are choosing not to.
His hands are careful, one at my hip, one at the back of my neck, holding just enough.
I melt into him because my body already knows the map.
“Tell me to stop,” he says against my mouth.
I shake my head, forehead to his. “I can’t.”
He breathes out like a man who’s been underwater too long and finally broke the surface. “Me neither.”
We don’t rush. The storm beats the roof in a steady hush, like the world has decided to keep our secrets for once.
Sitting me down, he slides the hoodie up, fingers catching the hem of my sweater underneath, and I’m shivering again but for a different reason.
He kisses my throat, the place where my pulse lives, and the sound that breaks out of me is one I don’t recognize and don’t want to unlearn.
I memorize him in pieces. The scar that tugs near his jaw, the gray threaded through his dark hair, the way his mouth softens when I trace the wrenches inked on his forearm. He says my name like he’s fixing something with it, slow, precise, meant to last.
When he lifts me again, it’s not about throwing me anywhere.
It’s about holding. I feel it in the way he lays me down on the battered couch like I deserve better than the world.
The heater hums and the snow hammers and somewhere between those sounds my fear slides away.
What’s left is want that doesn’t feel like hunger anymore. It feels like choosing.
Humbug goes for my pants, tugs them from my legs, taking my panties with them. I pull him down. He undoes his jeans, positions himself and slides inside, like he never left.
Damn. Tears form. I’m whole again. And very, very full.
My body is loose in ways I forgot it could be. My heart is not. It pounds like it forgot it’s supposed to behave. Humbug is half on the couch, half on me, but all the way inside. The impossible weight somehow feels like relief as his breath warms the hollow below my ear.
I hum without meaning to, the note slipping out of me on the exhale. He goes still, the way a dangerous animal does when it hears something it recognizes.
“Don’t,” he rasps, his smile I can feel pressed to my skin. “You’ll kill me.”
“I think I’m already dead,” I whisper. “Died and gone to heaven.”
He lifts his head. The look he gives me is a soft, devastating thing that has no business living in a face like his.
“You sleighed me,” I joke, because the moment is too heavy.
He doesn’t laugh. “Seriously, you okay?”
The word okay is too small. I nod anyway. “You?”
He huffs a laugh that’s afraid to be happy. “I ain’t been okay since the night I walked into that bar and heard you hummin’ to yourself.”
I remind him of facts. His divorce isn’t final. “You’re married,” I say, and the truth tastes like blood even with the sweetness of after on my tongue.
He rolls his hips, striking me hard. “Not in the way that counts,” he says. “Paper don’t keep two people together. Neither does stubborn.”
“And what is this?” I ask, hating the tremor in my voice. “What are we?”
“Wrong,” he says softly. “And real.”
My eyes sting. The ceiling blurs. I’m not a crier. I hate crying. It feels like leaking. But the tears that slip are quiet, the kind that happen when relief shows up disguised as surrender.
He notices, but he doesn’t stop fucking me. Of course he doesn’t. I don’t want him too. I need him inside me like I need the air in the room.
His thumb finds one tear and chases it away like he’s got time to hunt every sorrow down as he pounds.
“Hey.”
“I don’t want to be someone I’m not,” I say, widening my thighs to let him grind deeper. “I don’t want to be… Her. The other woman.”
“You’re not,” he says, no hesitation, like he can will it true. “You’re the only thing in my world that makes sense anymore. Feels like the closest I’ve ever come to feeling peaceful,” he says, and the raw honesty in it lands in my ribs and lodges there. “Look at me.”
I do. He looks wrecked and holy at the same time. He looks like winter and a warm shelter. He looks like a cliff I’m about to fall off of. And I can see he’s close to coming too.
“Be careful,” I say suddenly. “You’re not wearing anything on that.”
“On what?”
“On your big sleigh,” I pant out. I can’t help it.
“Nothing on my big cock? You’re telling me not to come in you? Like I did last time?”
“Yeah, I was leaking all day long.”
Humbug bites his lip. “This is not the way to get me to pull out. But I will. I’ll never do anything to hurt you, Carol.”
It’s a small promise.
But it’s an earthquake.
Something shifts inside me, and I know the truth before I can stop it. This isn’t just lust, and it never was. Lust would’ve burned out. Lust wouldn’t make me feel quiet. Lust wouldn’t make me hum.
I slide my palm up his chest, over the thud that keeps time with mine. “I’m falling,” I say, because if I don’t say it, I’ll drown in it.
His eyes close like he’s taking a hit he knows he deserves. “Me too,” he says, giving one last thrust.
With that confession, we come undone as one, as he tugs out. Hot goo lands on my stomach.
We lie there and let the unspoken words sit with us, the way you sit with a friend who just told you their darkest thing and didn’t run.
After a while, he gets up to get me a tissue and wipes my stomach clean.
The wind changes again as he settles back beside me.
It’s scratching softly at the bay doors like a polite stray.
“It’ll be bad,” I say into the warm place between his collarbone and his throat. “When this blows back.”
“Already is,” he says. “Let it. Storms pass. We don’t.”
“You’re awfully sure.” My voice is small and a little scared. It’s honest.
He lifts my hand to his mouth and kisses my knuckles one by one like he’s counting them for proof. “About you?” he says. “For once.”
We drift. Not sleep, not yet. Something else, half-dream, half-keeping watch as we hold each other. Then when we feel safe, we explore each other more. I see if I can fit his big sleigh in my mouth. I succeed. Humbug tries to break the couch, again.
When I finally doze, it’s to the sound of his breath and a hymn I used to sing for other reasons.
I wake to silence that’s not absolute, plows in the distance, the building sighing as it releases the night. Pale light edges the window. The storm did what storms do, threw a fit, made a mess, moved on.
Humbug is up dressing. He checks the door, the drift outside. “We’re dug in a bit,” he says. “Give it an hour.”
“Okay.”
I sit up, hoodie sagging off one shoulder, hair a lost cause, and catch him looking like a man who just found water after a long walk through a desert and is trying not to scare it away. Heat rises all over again, not the bruising kind, the kind that says stay.
“You hungry?” he asks, smiling.
I smile at his smile. “Always,” I say, and mean more than breakfast.
He smirks, opens a cabinet like a magician with limited tricks, produces a pack of instant oatmeal and a jar of peanut butter. We eat like kids on a dare, perched on the workbench, legs swinging, the quiet between us easy as always.
He licks peanut butter off his thumb, and I nearly combust for reasons that have nothing to do with food. He catches me looking and grins in a way that makes my knees want to negotiate a surrender.
“Don’t,” I whisper.
“Don’t what?”
“Make me laugh when I should be calling myself a cab to church.”
“I can give you a ride to confession,” he says. “But you’re leavin’ with the same sin.”
I shake my head, smiling despite myself. Outside, the plows grunt closer. Inside, the radio gives us a weather update and a cheerful ad about local wreaths.
“What are we doing?” I ask softly, not a complaint.
“Surviving,” he says. “Choosing.”
“Each other,” I say, the words a warm rock in my mouth.
“Yeah,” he says. “Each other.”
He reaches across the workbench, takes my hand. We sit like that while the world digs us out, our fingers laced, the storm receding from the map and still raging in the parts of us that needed it to strip everything else away.
When it’s time to go, he hands me my coat. I pull it on over his hoodie. He watches like he wants to say something and thinks better of it. I say it for both of us. “I’ll bring this back.”
“You better not,” he says. “It looks better on you. But yes, come back… anytime.”
We step out into a morning that’s bright enough to hurt. The lot is a sculpture garden of white. He clears a path with a shovel, cussing at the wind like an old friend, and I laugh, helpless and whole.
I’m still wrong. And for the first time since I can remember, I don’t want to be right. I want to be here, where the snow gives way, where he takes my hand in broad daylight like he forgot to be afraid.
I’m falling. It’s terrifying. It’s true. And when I hum without thinking, he doesn’t tell me to shut up.
He just listens.