Chapter 9
Zane
Acar pulls up out front, and every muscle in my body goes still. The sound of tires on gravel rolls through the workshop’s half-open roller door. An engine idles for a second before cutting off. Silence follows.
Rainer is out on a tow a few hundred miles from town, hauling some poor bastard’s car off the shoulder after it gave up on life near the interstate. He left an hour ago and told me not to burn the place down before he ducked under the roller door and took the truck.
My first thought is Griff.
Trouble has always had excellent timing and terrible manners.
I set the wrench down and wipe my hands on the rag hanging from my back pocket as footsteps sound outside.
Light. Careful. Not Griff’s heavy tread. Probably just a customer needing something looked at. I move toward the roller door and stop the moment someone ducks under it and stands upright.
And there she is.
Skylar.
For one full second, the air leaves the room.
The dust stops moving.
The traffic outside goes quiet.
Even the light seems to hold its breath—that warm amber glow from the overheads catching her like a spotlight and holding there, as if it, too, has been waiting.
She is so fucking beautiful it knocks the breath clean out of my lungs.
That’s the thing I’m not prepared for, which is idiotic, because I’ve always known Sky is beautiful and should’ve been prepared for it by now.
Beautiful in that dangerous, bruising way that used to stop me mid-sentence and piss me off, because no girl should have been able to steal words straight out of my mouth unless her hand was wrapped around my cock.
Skylar at twenty-six is not the Skylar I left at eighteen, and my body is making that abundantly and inconveniently clear. Fuck me, my body needs to calm down.
The features I memorized have settled into something more certain, more fully herself, as if the years had not diminished her but carved her into a work of art.
Her hair falls loose around her shoulders, darker than I remember, though that could be the shadows and the workshop light playing tricks on me.
Her eyes are the same, though. Those beautiful fucking eyes that always looked at the world as if it had personally offended her.
My gaze lingers on the small scar above her brow. The one I once touched with a hand roughened by work and told her was proof she had made it through everything this shitty fucked up world threw at her.
I stare at her mouth for exactly one second before I force myself to stop, because that is a road I can’t afford to go down right now, given how my body is reacting.
I remember that mouth laughing on a rooftop with the whole town spread out.
It spitting fire at me across a foster home kitchen table, her eyes daring me to fire back.
Whispering I love you against my jaw in the dark, with such raw, terrifying honesty that I nearly came apart under the weight of it.
Taking my cock under the open sky, her eyes locked on mine until I forgot my name and every ugly thing I had ever been, before she looked at me like I was worth something.
Heat punches through me, low and merciless.
Silence stretches between us, thick and crackling, like a live wire pulled too tight. It hums in my teeth and burns low in my gut. It makes the air feel unstable, as if one wrong breath could bring the whole place down.
Her eyes move over me slowly.
They take inventory the way she has always taken inventory of everything.
They land on my shoulders, my arms. The grease on my hands.
The cut across my knuckles. I fight the urge to tell her it is from the wrench, not from what she might be thinking, because I need her to know that even though I’ve no right to need anything from her, it is not from fighting.
“Sky,” I manage to say.
Her name comes out rough, scraped raw from somewhere deep in my chest. Seven years, and it still tastes right in my mouth. That might be the cruelest fucking thing about all of this.
Her lips part, but she says nothing.
For one suspended second, I think she is going to turn around and walk back out under the roller door. I think I would deserve exactly that. In fact, after what I did to her, I would deserve worse than that.
Instead, she takes one step forward.
“Zane,” she says.
My name on her lips almost brings me to my knees.
I clear my throat.
Say something, you dickhead. Anything.
My mouth, that unreliable, cocky bastard that has never once failed me in my life, offers absolutely nothing.
She looks away first, and that small movement hurts in a place I was fairly certain had already been destroyed beyond the capacity to feel anything new.
“Rainer’s not here,” I say.
Of all the fucking sentences I could of said, that is the one my brain produces.
Not even close to what I want to say here. But it is what comes out when every circuit I have has been rerouted to the singular task of remaining upright in the same room as her.
“I know,” she says. “I mean, I didn’t know.”
She takes a breath and her eyes drift to the old car I’ve been working on.
I watch her stare at it and wonder if she is somewhere else entirely right now, the same way I am, if memory is doing to her what it is doing to me.
“I was just driving.”
“Okay.”
“I didn’t plan to stop.”
“Okay.”
She looks back at me. “You look different.”
Her gaze drops briefly to my arms, then she glances away. It’s fast enough to tell me she knows I caught it and that she is not entirely sure what to do with that.
My cock, traitorous prick that it is, reacts to that single glance as if we are not standing in the wreckage of every bad decision I’ve ever made in my life.
Heat moves through me the way it always did when I was with her. Fuck. Wrong time. Wrong place.
Right woman.
Always the right woman.
Something shifts in her expression, something complicated, and I watch it the way I have always watched her face, with the helpless attention of someone who learnt long ago that Skylar’s face was the most honest thing in any room she entered.
She folds her arms across her chest.
The movement draws my eyes down before I can stop them, and fuck, I try.
I genuinely try because I owe her respect and whatever she needs from me that is not this.
But my eyes are bastards. They always have been when she is around.
They drag over her anyway. The curve of her waist. The line of her throat.
The careful, controlled rise and fall of her chest as she breathes a little too heavily.
Even in work clothes, a narrow pencil skirt and a white blouse that does absolutely nothing to help me stay on the right side of this moment, she is still the most brutal kind of beautiful I’ve ever stood in front of.
Not soft. Skylar has never been a pretty thing arranged on a shelf for looking at.
She is a blade with a pulse. She always has been.
She catches me looking and lifts her chin. “Finished?”
“No.”
Her eyes flash, and there she is. The girl I loved. Right there, behind the composed, carefully held woman, burning exactly the same.
“You want to come in?” I ask.
She looks at me. “Do you want me to?”
There are a thousand answers stacked up behind my teeth.
Yes.
No.
Run.
Stay.
I want you nowhere near me because I ruin beautiful things when I get my hands on them, and you are the most beautiful thing I have ever been trusted with. I already proved what I do with trust.
I want to touch you. I want to fall at your feet and confess every ugly word I said in that visiting room until nothing remains between us but the truth and whatever you decide to do with it.
I want all those years back.
But none of that comes out.
“Yeah,” I say.
Her eyes hold mine for one more second.
“Okay.”
She steps farther inside.
The workshop seems to shrink around her, the walls pulling in, the space recalibrating itself as it always did with Skylar.
I move to the workbench because I need something to do with my hands before my brain has authorized a decision. I pick up a rag and drag it over a smear of grease that does not need wiping.
Skylar walks slowly around the front of the car, her fingers trailing along the fender.
I track every inch of her movement. She stops close enough that I catch her scent, and my body reacts before my head has the sense to intervene.
Every nerve I have sparks awake at once, as if it has been sitting in the dark, waiting for this exact second since the day I walked out of that visiting room and did not look back.
I lean against the bench, cross my arms, and look at her, because looking at her is both the worst thing I can do right now and completely non-negotiable.
“What are you doing with yourself?” I say. “Work.”
Something happens to her face. A quiet lighting up, something she is proud of and has earned the right to be.
“I work at a nonprofit,” she says. “New Ground. We support foster youth who are aging out. Case management, advocacy, court support.” She pauses. “I’m a senior youth advocate.”
I stare at her. “We could have used something like that back in the day.”
She tips her chin up slightly, that old gesture, the one that signals she is waiting to be underestimated and is fully prepared to handle it. “I started at nineteen. Patricia hired me before I graduated from Community College. She said my lived experience was the qualification.”
“She was right.”
I look at her standing here in this workshop under these lights, and I feel something move through me, made of pride and grief in equal measure. Two things that have no business coexisting, but they do.
She did all of that.
Of course, my girl became exactly that. With everything she was handed—every shitty house, every dead-eyed adult, and every system built to process her rather than see her—she stood up and turned her own trauma into something that kept other kids from drowning in theirs.
I don’t know why it surprises me, and I don’t know why it is currently destroying me.