Chapter Twenty-Seven #2
He was running his hand through my hair. Slowly. Methodically. The way he did everything. But there was nothing clinical about it now. His touch was tender in a way that remade my understanding of what tenderness meant from this man.
“I will spend the rest of my life making up for every day I didn’t see you,” he said.
His voice was quiet. The rawness of what we’d just done still in it.
“Every day I looked through you. Every meeting I didn’t invite you to.
Every word I said through a cracked door that made you think you didn’t belong here.
I will spend my life earning what you’ve given me. ”
I turned my face up to look at him. His blue eyes were unguarded. Completely open. Declan without his armor, without his analysis, without his walls. Just a man who had been wrong and knew it and intended to make it right with the same thoroughness he applied to everything.
“You don’t have to make up for anything,” I said. “You’re here now. That’s enough.”
“Let me anyway.”
It was not a question. It was Declan. Committing completely, the way he’d promised.
The iron will that had built walls now directed toward tearing them down.
I could have argued. I could have told him that atonement was unnecessary and that what mattered was the present and the future and the fact that his heart was beating under my cheek.
I didn’t argue. I let him hold me. I closed my eyes and breathed him in and let the blue thread hum and thought about Egyptian cotton and thread count research and the particular kind of love that expressed itself through preparation.
Declan’s love language was not words or touch.
It was diligence. It was the act of anticipating what you needed and having it ready before you arrived.
New sheets. Eye-level tea. A private dining room with pre-selected wine.
He loved like an architect. And I was beginning to understand the blueprints.
· · ·
We were on the couch when the front door opened.
Hours later. I was wearing Declan’s shirt, the button-down from earlier, which was too long in the sleeves and smelled like him.
My legs were tucked under me. His arm was around my shoulders.
We were reading, separate books, in comfortable silence, and the domesticity of it, the sheer ordinary calm of two people sharing a couch and a quiet evening, was almost more intimate than the bedroom.
The door opened. Footsteps in the foyer. Not Kieran’s heavy stride. Not Jonah’s easy gait.
Rhys.
He came around the corner and stopped.
He saw us. Declan’s arm around me. My legs curled on the cushions.
Declan’s shirt on my body, the collar slipping off one shoulder.
Two books. Two glasses of wine. The aftermath of intimacy visible in the softness of our postures and the absence of the distance that had existed between us for months.
Declan, who had fought Nora’s presence in his pack with logic and data and structural integrity arguments, holding her on his couch in his shirt with the contentment of a man who had finally found the variable his models had been missing.
Rhys’s face.
One second. One unguarded, unprotected, devastating second before the mask came down. And in that second, I saw everything.
Not anger. Not indifference. Not the blank, controlled nothing that he wore like a second skin.
Longing.
Pure, raw, agonizing longing. The kind that lived in the body, not the mind.
The kind that could not be reasoned away or walled off or metabolized by distance.
His gray eyes went wide and his lips parted and his entire body oriented toward the couch like a compass needle toward north, and the want in his face was so total and so exposed that I felt it in my own chest like a blow.
Then the mask came down. One second of longing collapsed into the familiar blankness, the controlled absence of expression that I’d been reading wrong for months.
I’d thought it was indifference. It was armor.
Bolted into place over a feeling so immense that letting it show for even one second had cracked the seal.
“Sorry,” he said. His voice flat. “Didn’t know you were here.”
He turned. He walked down the hallway. His bedroom door closed.
Declan’s arm tightened around me. He had seen it too.
“Rhys,” he said quietly. Not a question. An acknowledgment. The analytical mind recognizing what the data meant.
I stared at the hallway where Rhys had disappeared. The closed door. The silence behind it.
He didn’t hate me. He had never hated me. The man who left water outside the nest and played guitar through walls and fixed my car and handed me his keys and looked at my photograph in the dark was not indifferent to me.
He wanted me so much it was killing him.
And I didn’t know how to reach him. I didn’t know how to open a door that a man was holding shut from the inside with the full force of a fear that had nearly destroyed him once before.
The cedar thread in my chest pulsed. Faint. Persistent. Aching.
I looked at the closed door and I thought: I will find a way. I don’t know how yet. But I will find a way to reach you, Rhys Callahan. Because you have been reaching for me in silence since the day I arrived, and I am done pretending I can’t hear it.