Chapter Twenty-Six
TATE
My eyes open to the sunlight cascading through the window.
Not the pale early light of the previous morning, but the full, warm gold of a Nevada morning that has been awake for a while without me, lying across the bed in long bright rectangles that Memphis has already positioned himself in with the dedication of a dog who takes sunbathing seriously.
Sophia is still asleep beside me.
The morning light crosses her face, her hair is loose on the pillow, one hand resting between us, open and still. The careful composure she wears when she is awake is completely gone.
Just her.
Just this.
And she is beautiful.
I watch her a moment longer than necessary before I slowly get up so as not to disturb her and go make coffee.
Memphis finds me in the kitchen and sits at my feet with the patient dignity of a dog who understands that breakfast happens on my schedule.
I feed him, make coffee, then stand at the window looking out at the desert.
The mountains are sharp against a vast, clear sky, and the pool catches the first gold of the morning.
I stand at the window and think about her.
Not with the careful distance applied for months, but directly and honestly.
The way she looked up last night.
‘I need you, Tate. Not Ryan. Not a memory of him. You.’
The way she felt. The warmth of her, the way she pulled me closer when trying to be careful, the way she said my name like it meant something specific in her mouth.
It did.
The way she came apart, completely unguarded, her hands in my hair and my name on her lips. It was a privilege to be the person someone trusted enough to let go with.
Never felt that before.
Not once.
Standing at the window with the coffee warming both hands, I also think about Tracker and the last real conversation that had nothing to do with club business.
Sitting at this same kitchen counter late one night with a beer between us, him quiet for a long time before saying, almost to himself, ‘She’s it for me, Tate. She’s the one.’
I understand it differently now.
I wait for the guilt to arrive, but what comes instead is something quieter and more honest. He would have wanted this. He asked me to look after her. And maybe this, whatever this is becoming, is exactly what that looks like.
The shower runs about forty minutes later. I refill my coffee and give her the time she needs.
She appears in the kitchen doorway ten minutes after that.
Her hair is still damp, wearing one of my shirts that falls to mid-thigh. She stops when she sees me at the window, and something moves across her face that has nothing careful in it.
For a second, neither of us says anything.
The morning sits between us, warm, new, and slightly terrifying but not terrifying at all.
“Hey.” Her voice is still soft from sleep.
“Hey.”
She crosses to the coffee machine and reaches for the white mug with the chip in the handle.
I watch her move through the kitchen and feel something tighten at the sight of it.
She is wearing my shirt… in my kitchen… the morning after.
The rightness of that is something with no adequate framework and no point pretending otherwise.
She turns with her coffee and leans against the counter across from me.
We look at each other.
“How did you sleep?”
A small smile moves across her face. “Better than I have in months.” Then quieter, “You?”
“Same.”
She tucks a piece of damp hair behind her ear and looks down at her coffee for a moment. It’s the look she has when she is deciding something, and then she looks back up. “Are we going to talk about it?” she asks.
“Do you want to?”
She thinks about it honestly. “I don’t want to analyze it. I just want to make sure you didn’t wake up this morning and regret it.”
Crossing the kitchen, I set the mug down on the counter beside her and look at her properly. “Do I look like a man who regrets it?”
She looks up, those blue eyes searching, and whatever she finds there seems to be what she needs because the slight tension around her mouth dissolves, and she exhales slowly. “No. You don’t.”
“Good.” Reaching out, I run a thumb across her cheek and feel her lean into it slightly, her eyes closing for just a second. Something moves through me at that, the same thing that moved last night, except bigger now, less manageable. I lean down and press my lips to hers, slowly and softly.
She makes a small sound against my mouth, and I pull back.
Because if I don’t pull back right now, I’m not going to, and she deserves a morning that isn’t me coming at her with everything I’m carrying before she’s even finished her first coffee.
“Morning,” I say quietly against her lips.
She opens her eyes.
“Morning.” She’s slightly breathless.
The corner of my mouth pulls up.
Memphis appears between us and plants himself in the center of the kitchen floor, looking up with the satisfaction of a dog who has been paying attention to things his human hasn’t.
Sophia looks down at him. “Don’t look at me like that,” she tells him.
He tilts his head and looks at her exactly like that.
She laughs, that easy, unguarded sound, and the morning settles properly around us.
“Sit down,” I say, already turning toward the stove.
“I’ll make breakfast.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I want to.” She is already reaching for the pan, moving through the kitchen with the ease of someone fully at home in it. I sit at the island with my coffee and watch her, and I let myself have that too.
She makes eggs, scrambled, the way she’d figured out somewhere around the second week without being told, and toast, and we eat at the island side by side, the morning light coming through the glass doors and lying warm across everything, talking about ordinary things.
The Ember project. Something Victoria Chen said in an email.
Whether Memphis has figured out the sliding door.
At some point, she reaches over without thinking, steals a corner of my toast, eats it without asking, and I let her.
She looks up, catches me watching, goes slightly pink, and looks back at her plate. “Sorry. Habit.”
“It’s fine.”
She looks sideways.
“I like it.”
The pink deepens slightly, she looks back at her plate, and the kitchen feels considerably warmer than it did a moment ago.
***
The afternoon finds us at the pool.
Her idea. She appears in a swimsuit with her laptop, the energy of a woman who has decided today is a pool day and isn’t taking questions about it. I follow her out because there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.
Memphis stretches between us in the sun with the contentment of a dog who has decided this is exactly how life should be.
I work through club business on the phone, and in between, I watch her.
The way she frowns at her laptop when something isn’t working. The way her hand finds her water bottle without looking for it. The way she pushes her sunglasses into her hair and then forgets they are there.
Small things—the kind you only notice when you’ve completely stopped trying not to.
At some point, she pushes the laptop aside, lies back, and closes her eyes, turning her face up toward the sun.
Within ten minutes, she is asleep.
The phone goes down.
The want of her moves through me like heat through stone, slowly, deeply, and entirely unstoppable. Not just her body, though her body in that swimsuit in the Nevada afternoon is a difficulty all its own, but something larger.
I want her love.
Her laugh at breakfast.
Her voice in my kitchen.
The way she steals my toast without asking and goes pink when she gets caught. Wanting to be the man she chooses when she is fully herself, not out of grief or proximity, just her, choosing.
I’ve wanted women before, but this is something else entirely.
And underneath the want, there’s the fear of being too much before she is ready.
She will set the pace. That is the only way this is going to be what it deserves to be.
I go inside, grab two cold beers, come back, sit beside her, and wait.
Memphis looks at me, at Sophia, and then looks back at me with the satisfaction of a dog who has been paying attention.
“Don’t.”
He puts his head back down.
She stirs about twenty minutes later and finds me sitting beside her. Something moves in her expression that she makes no effort to contain.
“Hey.” Still half asleep.
I hand her the beer. “Hey.”
She takes it and slowly sits up. She pushes her hair back from her face, looks at the beer, and then at me.
“It’s not even four.”
“Close enough.”
She laughs, takes a sip, and settles back. We sit in the afternoon sun, the pool glitters, and Memphis snores softly between the chairs.
Perfect.
Quietly, completely, entirely perfect.
This is what it could be.
And then underneath that, quieter, less welcome. Don’t get used to it yet. There’s still Mexico.
I push that away.
Not today.
Today is this.
***
Sophia cooks dinner.
Pasta with a sauce from scratch, moving through the kitchen with the unhurried ease she brings to everything. The smell of garlic and tomato fills the house, while I sit at the island and watch her.
She’d picked up bread from the bakery with Remy earlier in the week and froze it for exactly this kind of evening. That small, quiet planning of it moves through me in a way not expected.
She is building something here.
So am I.
We eat outside.
The desert is going gold around us, the stars are beginning to appear overhead, the pool is shimmering below the deck, and the conversation moves the way conversations do between two people who have run out of awkward and found something easier on the other side.
She talks about growing up in Vixen Falls. Her parents, Frank and Diana, and her best friend, Annie. Sophia chose the graphic design degree because it was the only thing that had ever felt genuinely hers. Then she looks across the table. “Your turn.”
So, I tell her things not usually told to people. About growing up without our father and the decision made at fifteen to be someone who stayed. About finding the Sinners, Viper, and the brotherhood that filled something not known to be empty.
About Tracker.
Not the grief of him, but the memories of his laugh, his stubbornness, and the way he had of making any room feel like the right room.
She listens the way she always does. Completely present.
When finished, she is quiet for a moment before she says, “He talked about you constantly. Every story had you in it somewhere. You were always the reference point. The person he measured things against.” A pause.
“He loved you so much, Tate.” My eyes find the desert, and I breathe it in, the dark and the quiet of it, the Nevada stillness that asks nothing of you.
“Yeah, I know.”
After a while, she reaches over and places her hand over mine on the table.
Just that.
Just the warmth of it.
I turn my hand over and hold hers. Then I lift it to my lips and press a kiss there, once, unhurried, like I have nowhere else I need to be.
Sitting there like that for a long time, the desert is dark, the stars are enormous above us, and neither of us needs to fill it with anything.