Epilogue #2
Callan looked up from the woodpile. Across the distance, his eyes found mine as they always did, as if a thread were strung between us. He didn’t smile—he rarely did—but something in his expression softened slightly.
Yeah, I thought, lifting my mug to my lips to hide the smile. This is love.
* * *
It happened on a Tuesday. Or possibly a Wednesday. The days had stopped mattering in the way they used to, but this one—this one I would remember.
We’d all eaten dinner together, the four of us around the table Finn had built from reclaimed oak.
Ethan had caught three bass that afternoon, and Lock cooked them over the fire pit with wild garlic and whatever herbs he’d found in the greenhouses.
It should have been a good night. It wasa good night.
But Ethan had gone quiet halfway through the meal, pushing food around his plate with his fork, and when Lock asked him if he was alright, the kid shook his head and said he was tired and disappeared into his room.
Lock had followed him. He was good with Ethan in a way Callan and I weren’t—patient and steady, never pushing, just present. I’d heard the low murmur of his voice through the wall as Callan and I cleaned up, and then silence, and then Lock came out and said the kid was asleep.
“I’ll take the couch tonight,” Lock said, jerking his chin toward Ethan’s door. “Keep an ear out.”
Callan nodded. I dried the last plate. And then it was just the two of us standing in the kitchen with the fire crackling low and the island settling into its nighttime chorus of frogs and wind through the pines.
“Come on,” Callan said. Nothing else. Just that. His hand found the small of my back—that touch, that touch—and guided me down the short hall toward the room we’d been sharing for the past two weeks. We had agreed that being in the same cabin was safer.
The door clicked shut.
The air between us thickened instantly, and every nerve in my body lit up.
Callan turned the latch—a small, deliberate sound that echoed louder than it should have—and when he turned back to me, his eyes were dark.
Not dangerous. This darkness held heat. Intent.
A hunger raw and barely leashed, it made my pulse jump and my mouth go dry.
He crossed the room in two strides and took my face in both hands, thumbs brushing my cheekbones with a tenderness that broke me. He looked at me—really looked at me—and I watched him swallow hard, watched a man who had spent his entire life in control struggle to hold on to the edges of it.
Then he kissed me.
Not like a question. He kissed me like an answer to something I’d been asking my whole life without knowing it.
Hard enough to steal my breath, deep enough to reach the places I’d kept locked and hidden.
I made a sound against his mouth—half gasp, half surrender—and my hands fisted the front of his shirt, pulling, pulling, because there was still too much space between us and I couldn’t stand it, not for one more second.
He walked me backward, one hand sliding from my cheek to the back of my neck, the other dropping to my hip, guiding me with a confidence that made my knees unreliable.
My calves hit the edge of the bed, and he eased me down, following me onto the mattress so his weight settled over me, solid and warm, pinning me in the best possible way.
He broke the kiss to drag his mouth down the side of my throat. His teeth grazed the spot where my pulse beat, and I arched off the bed, a sound escaping me that I didn’t recognize. He lingered there, lips and tongue and the barest scrape of teeth, tasting my heartbeat like he needed proof of it.
“I need you.” His voice came out rough and low, barely above a whisper, spoken directly into my skin. “All of you. Right now.”
“Then take me,” I said.
He undressed me with steady hands. My shirt first—pulled over my head with care, his fingers grazing my breasts on the way up, leaving a trail of goosebumps in their wake.
Then his own, and God, the sight of him—all that lean, corded muscle I’d watched from the porch, close enough to touch now, close enough to press my mouth to.
I did. I leaned up and kissed the center of his chest, and his breath hitched, a sharp intake through his nose that made his whole body tense.
The rest of our clothes followed, every barrier stripped away until there was nothing left between us but skin and the thick, electric charge of wanting.
He settled between my thighs—the hard, heavy length of him pressing against me where I already ached.
He didn’t push in. Not yet. Instead, he rocked his hips, slow and deliberate, dragging himself through the slick heat, coating himself in my arousal while his eyes stayed locked on my face. Watching. Studying.
“Tell me you want this,” he said quietly. His forehead pressed to mine, breath mingling with breath, and the question wasn’t about permission—he already had that. It was about hearing me say it. About needing the words as much as the act.
“I want you.” My voice came out steady and sure, because I had never meant anything more. “Always.”
Something changed in his expression. A chink in the armor, a flash of vulnerability that he let me see for exactly one second before he kissed me again and pushed inside.
My body opened for him, stretched around him. I gripped his shoulders, nails pressing half-moons into his skin, and he paused, giving me time, reading my body with an attentiveness that made my eyes sting.
When he bottomed out, hips flush against mine, we both groaned—the sound raw and honest and tangled together in the quiet room.
He held there. Buried deep. Letting me adjust, letting me register every inch, every pulse, every throb of him inside me.
His hands moved—roaming my sides, cupping my breasts, tracing the dip of my waist, the flare of my hips—touching me like he couldn’t stop, like he’d been starving for this specific contact and now that he had it, he intended to be thorough about it.
He started to move, deep, rolling thrusts that dragged against every sensitive spot and pulled sounds from me I had no control over.
Not frantic. Not rough. Just relentless and deliberate, each stroke a full withdrawal and a slow, devastating return that left me gasping.
He set a rhythm that owned me—unhurried.
I wrapped my legs around his waist. Heels dug into his lower back, urging him deeper, and he answered—hips thrusting a little harder now, finding an angle that lit up something white-hot behind my eyes.
But still controlled. Still measured. Every movement designed with precision, with purpose, and the purpose was to unravel me completely.
One hand tangled in my hair, not pulling, just anchoring me close so he could swallow every gasp, every whimper, every broken version of his name.
The other slipped between our bodies, his thumb finding my clit and circling with firm, steady pressure that synced perfectly with the rhythm of his hips.
“God, Sloane.” The words scraped out of him, raw and wrecked against my mouth. “You’re so fucking perfect. Like you were made to take me. Like you were made for me.”
The praise hit harder than any roughness ever could.
The coil in my belly wound tighter. Tighter.
My hips rocked up to meet his rhythm, fracturing, nails raking down his back hard enough to leave marks.
He shuddered—a full-body tremor that rippled through him and translated into a thrust so deep I saw sparks—and drove harder in response, thumb pressing, hips grinding, giving me everything.
“Come for me, baby.” His voice dropped to a whisper, thick and strained, barely holding together. “Let me have it.”
I broke.
The orgasm crashed through me with a violence that stole my voice for a full second before it came back in a cry—“Callan”—torn out of me, echoing off the cabin walls. My walls clenched around him, thighs shaking, fingers digging into his shoulders hard enough to bruise.
His control shattered seconds after mine.
His thrusts turned erratic, desperate, hips stuttering as he buried himself to the hilt and came with a low, guttural groan that vibrated through both of us.
I held him through it, legs locked around him, hands in his hair, pulling him closer as I absorbed the hot, pulsing rush of him emptying inside me.
The warmth spread and spilled where our bodies joined, slick and obscene and intimate in a way that made my throat tighten.
He didn’t pull out.
Instead, he lowered himself carefully—shifting his weight so he didn’t crush me but keeping us connected—and wrapped his arms around me.
One smooth roll and I lay draped across his chest, legs tangled, skin cooling in the night air.
His heartbeat thundered under my ear, strong and rapid, gradually slowing.
One hand stroked down my back in a long, soothing movement.
The other cradled the back of my head, fingers threaded loosely through my hair.
I pressed my lips to the hollow of his throat. Tasted salt. Tasted him.
The silence held us for a long, perfect moment.
“I love you, Callan.”
He went still beneath me. The hand on my back paused mid-stroke. His heartbeat, which had been steadily calming, kicked up again under my ear.
One second. Two.
Then a sound rumbled through his chest—low and warm, almost disbelieving, like a man hearing something he’d stopped expecting to hear a long time ago. His fingers tightened gently in my hair, tilting my face up so he could see me.
I let him look. No walls. No armor. Just me—flushed and wrecked and more honest than I’d ever been in my life.
“I already knew,” he said.
His voice came out low and tender, stripped of every sharp edge I’d ever associated with it. And his eyes—God, his eyes.
He brushed his thumb over my bottom lip. Slowly. As if time no longer existed.
“And I love you too, Sloane.” He paused, and for a moment I thought he might not finish. But he did. “More than I thought I was still capable of.”
He pulled me up and kissed me. Slow. Lingering. Full of everything we’d circled around for years, everything we’d buried under bickering and tension and careful distance, but surrender—both of ours, freely given, long overdue.
When he pulled back, he pressed his lips to my forehead and held them there.
The world outside the cabin—the broken, burning, uncertain world—kept on turning. But in here, in this bed, in the arms of a man I never should have loved but loved anyway, without a single reservation—
I’d found something I didn’t know still existed.
Home.
The End.