Chapter 19
Audrey
“Fuck, Audrey.” Logan’s voice is strained, his hands gripping my hips as I straddle him. “You’re going to kill me.”
“That’s the plan.” I roll my hips in a slow circle, savoring the way his eyes flutter shut, the way his fingers dig into my flesh like he’s holding on for dear life. “Death by orgasm. Very poetic.”
Sunday morning. Work has been insane. It feels like we stepped off the dance floor at the club last week and went straight into the lab.
The closer we get to the FDA deadline, the more hours we’re putting in.
Logan sleeps over at my place most of the time, but sometimes we leave the lab so exhausted we fall asleep before we even take our shoes off.
My vagina is suffering withdrawal symptoms.
And since this is our only day off this week, I intend to make the most of it.
“God. Yes.” Logan lets his head drop back and groans. “There are worse ways to go than death by orgasm.”
I plant my hands on his chest and pick up the pace, chasing the heat building low in my belly.
Three weeks of this and I’m still not used to it.
The way he looks at me like I’m a miracle.
The way his body responds to mine like we were engineered to fit together.
He’s learned me so well, so fast. Every spot that makes me gasp, every rhythm that pushes me closer to the edge.
“Fuck,” he breathes, thrusting up to match my movement. “You feel incredible.”
“Less talking.” I clench around him and he groans, loud and unfiltered. “More fucki—”
BANG BANG BANG.
We both freeze.
“What the hell?” Logan’s eyes snap open, instantly alert.
BANG BANG BANG. “Audrey! Open up, birthday girl!”
Oh no. Oh no no no.
“Birthday girl?” Logan starts.
“AUDREY MARIE GREENE, WE KNOW YOU’RE IN THERE. MIKE SAW YOUR CAR.”
“Oh shit. It’s my family.”
“Your family?” Logan repeats, his face cycling through about seventeen emotions in two seconds.
I’m already scrambling off him. “Shit. Shit shit shit.”
“It’s your birthday?” Logan sits up, looking adorably bewildered and painfully hard.
“Ah…yes.” I grab a shirt and drop it over my head.
“Why didn’t you tell me it’s your birthday?”
“Because I didn’t want—” I’m spinning in circles, trying to locate my underwear. “Where are my panties?”
“You didn’t want what? And I don’t know, I threw them somewhere last night—”
BANG BANG BANG. “We have cake! And it’s getting cold out here!”
“Cake doesn’t get cold, you idiot,” another voice says. That’s Tony.
“It’s ice cream cake, dipshit. It’s melting.”
“Then say it’s getting warm.”
“Things don’t go from frozen to warm, numbnuts. It’s frozen, cold, then warm.”
“Jesus. We should’ve just brought regular cake—”
“You said to get her an ice cream cake—”
“I said to get ice cream AND cake, not—”
“AUDREY!”
“COMING!” I yell, then wince at my word choice. Logan snorts despite the chaos.
“Technically, neither of us is,” he mutters, and I throw a pillow at his head.
“Put pants on. Now. Please.”
He’s already moving, grabbing his jeans from the floor. “OK. But don’t think I didn’t notice you evading those questions.”
“You’ll have to accept it for now. My family is here.” I pull a clean pair of panties from my drawer and shove my feet into them. “And you’re about to meet them.”
“While I have an erection,” he mutters, buttoning up his jeans over the obvious physical evidence.
“Think unsexy thoughts!”
“You’re standing there in nothing but a pair of panties and my T-shirt. There are no unsexy thoughts available.”
I grab a pair of leggings from my dresser and yank those on too.
“Audrey, I swear to God, if you don’t open this door—”
I sprint to the front door and yank it open just as my brother Mike is winding up for another assault.
“Hi!” I say brightly, slightly out of breath. “What a surprise!”
My father stands in the hallway holding an ice cream cake that’s already starting to list to one side. Behind him, my three brothers—Mike, Tony, and Chris—are carrying gift bags and wearing matching shit-eating grins.
“Happy birthday, sweetheart.” Dad leans in to kiss my cheek, then pauses, his eyes narrowing. “Why are you out of breath?”
“Yoga. Morning yoga. Very vigorous.”
“Since when do you do yoga?” Chris asks.
“Since now. New hobby. Very Zen.” I step back to let them in, praying Logan has managed to make himself presentable. “You guys didn’t have to come all the way here—”
“Of course we did,” Tony says, already pushing past me. “It’s your birthday. We always do breakfast on your birthday. You think just because you keep telling us you’re too busy with work that we’re gonna—”
He stops dead in the middle of my living room.
Because Logan is standing there in jeans and nothing else, his arms crossed awkwardly over his chest like he’s trying to hide his nipples for the sake of modesty.
His hair is a disaster, his glasses slightly fogged up, and he’s got a deer-in-headlights expression that would be funny if I weren’t equally mortified.
“Oh,” Tony says. “Hello.”
“Hi.” Logan doesn’t uncross his arms, which only makes him look more ridiculous. “I’m Logan.”
“We know who you are.” Mike shoulders past Tony, looking Logan up and down with the assessing gaze of an older brother who’s done this before. “You’re the tech nerd who’s been dating our sister.”
“That’s... an accurate description, yes.”
“Why aren’t you wearing a shirt?”
Logan’s eyes dart to me. Then, slowly, he points while somehow still covering his chest.
All four of them turn to look at me. At my bedhead. At my leggings. At the T-shirt I’m swimming in—Logan’s T-shirt—that fits more like a dress than a shirt.
“Ah,” Dad says flatly.
“Would you believe,” Logan tries, his voice cracking slightly, “that I took it off while also doing yoga?”
“No,” all three of my brothers say in unison.
My father sighs heavily and walks past all of them to set the cake on my kitchen counter.
“Someone get the man a shirt,” he says. “And put on some coffee. It’s too early for whatever this is.”
“I’ll just—” Logan gestures vaguely toward my bedroom, still trying to cover his chest. “Shirt. I’ll get a shirt.”
I mouth an apology at him as my family tramples through the living room, their noise ricocheting off every surface like a flock of under-caffeinated pterodactyls. It’s always like this—Greene Home Invasion Protocol. There’s no stopping it. You either endure or perish.
Within seconds, Mike is inspecting my bookshelf (“Are you really reading Ulysses again, or is it just for aesthetics?”), Chris is yanking open my fridge and making a disgusted noise (“Do you have anything that isn’t LaCroix and string cheese?
”), and Tony—God bless Tony—is sniffing the ice cream cake as if determining whether ‘Cookies N’ Cream’ can mask the taste of abject humiliation.
My dad just stands in the kitchen, staring at me through the mirror-bright reflection of the countertop, his jaw set in that way that means he’s about to launch into a Serious Father Talk at exactly the wrong moment.
Before he can say anything, Logan emerges back into the living room wearing my favorite oversized tee. It’s hot pink, fitted across his shoulders in a way the shirt was never intended to fit, with bold white letters that read ‘GIRLS IN STEM DO IT WITH MORE PRECISION.’
The silence lasts approximately two seconds.
Then all three of my brothers burst out laughing.
“I didn’t—” Logan looks down, reads the shirt, and closes his eyes like he’s praying for the floor to swallow him. “I just grabbed the first thing that looked like it’d fit.”
“No, no, keep it on,” Tony wheezes, pulling out his phone. “This is going on the photo wall at home.”
“There will be no photo,” I say, snatching at the phone while he holds it out of my reach.
“There’s always a photo, Aud.” Mike is wiping tears from his eyes. “Always.”
Dad, to his credit, just shakes his head and starts opening cabinets in search of coffee filters. “At least it fits him,” he mutters. “Sort of.”
Ten minutes later, we’re all crammed around my small dining table, eating ice cream cake for breakfast while my brothers interrogate Logan with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
“So.” Mike leans back in his chair, coffee mug in hand. “You’re in tech. You must be pretty rich.”
“Software engineer,” Logan corrects. “And…sorta.”
“Sorta,” Tony repeats. “Right. Incidentally, how many zeros are in your bank account?”
“Tony.” I kick him under the table.
“What? It’s a fair question. I want to know if he can support you in the manner to which you should become accustomed.”
“I don’t need anyone to support me—”
“She really doesn’t,” Logan says. “Audrey’s the most capable person I’ve ever met. I’m fairly certain she could run a small country if she wanted to. But if it helps, I do. Have enough zeros, that is.”
My brothers go quiet. It’s not the answer they expected—no deflection, no false modesty, just genuine admiration and facts.
“Huh.” Chris tilts his head, studying Logan with new interest. “OK, I like him.”
“You don’t get to decide if you like him,” I protest.
“Too late. Decision made. Man just said you can do it on your own, but he’s also happy to support you.” Chris reaches across the table to shake Logan’s hand. “Welcome to the family, tech nerd. Don’t fuck it up.”
“I’ll do my best.”
My dad has been quiet through all of this, eating his cake and watching Logan with the unreadable expression he’s perfected over thirty years of single parenting. Now he sets down his spoon and fixes Logan with a look.
“You treating my daughter right?”
Logan meets his gaze steadily. “Yes, sir. Or at least, I’m trying to. She deserves better than right, though. She deserves perfect. I’m working on it.”
Dad considers this. Then he nods once, a gesture so small you’d miss it if you weren’t watching.
“Good answer.” He picks up his spoon again. “Have some more cake.”
I let out a slow breath. That’s as close to approval as my dad gives on a first meeting. Logan seems to understand this instinctively because something in his shoulders relaxes.
The conversation shifts—my brothers telling stories about the auto shop they run together, Dad complaining about his back, Tony’s ongoing feud with his neighbor over a property line.
It’s loud and chaotic and occasionally crude, everything Logan’s world probably isn’t.
But he’s leaning in, listening, laughing at the right moments.
He asks Mike about the transmission problem he’s been dealing with, and they spend ten minutes in a technical discussion that impresses even my dad.
I watch him, this man I’m falling for, as he navigates my family with the careful attention of an anthropologist discovering a new tribe—one he genuinely wants to understand.
He’s trying so hard. And not in a performative way.
In a genuine, I-want-these-people-to-like-me-because-they-matter-to-you way.
Something warm blooms in my chest.
I’m so caught up in watching Logan charm my disaster of a family that I almost forget the panic of the morning. I even start to relax, just a little, until I notice Tony’s face stretching into the grin he used to get right before feeding our neighbor’s goldfish an entire bottle of glitter.
“So, Logan,” Tony says, “Audrey tells us you’re working on some top-secret brain surgery thing. Is this, like, cyberpunk neural implants or that weird monkey stuff from Elon Musk?”
Logan actually laughs. “Nothing that dramatic. It’s a brain implant, but not for mind-reading or controlling Twitter with your thoughts.” He glances at me as if checking for clearance. I nod.
He explains with surprising fluency and non-nerd vocabulary, talking about ‘biocompatibility’ and ‘minimally invasive,’ sidestepping the medical jargon that would normally shut down the average family breakfast. My brothers are eating this up—Logan is smart but not condescending, self-deprecating without being weak.
He makes a joke about neural enhancers improving Tony’s beer pong accuracy, and even my ultra-jaded big brother cackles.
It’s weirdly heartwarming watching the men who raised me start to see Logan as a person and not just a potential threat.
When they leave—late, loud, reeking of too much aftershave and the strawberry syrup from the cake—they leave us with a kitchen wrecked from celebration and too much sugar and caffeine. Logan is sitting at the table, back to the window, sunlight defining every awkward angle of his posture.
He’s still wearing the pink GIRLS IN STEM shirt. He doesn’t seem to mind.
I drop into the chair across from him, exhausted in the best possible way. “So. You survived the Greenes.”
“Barely.” But he’s smiling. “They’re... a lot.”
“Too much?”
He shakes his head, something soft in his expression. “No. They’re perfect. Loud and chaotic and completely incapable of boundaries—but perfect.” He reaches across the table and takes my hand. “I can see where you get it from.”
“Get what?”
“The loyalty. The fierceness. The way you show up for people, even when it’s inconvenient.” His thumb traces my knuckles. “You’re a Greene through and through.”
My throat tightens unexpectedly. “Careful. Keep talking like that and I might start to think you actually like me.”
“I more than like you, Audrey.” He says it simply, like a fact. Like gravity. “Happy birthday.”
And despite everything—the interrupted morning, the ambush, the ice cream cake slowly becoming soup on my counter—I smile.
“Thanks for being here,” I say. “For all of it.”
“Nowhere else I’d rather be.”