It’s warm. Clean. Safe. There’s
Lexi falls asleep almost immediately once we’re inside the room.
I don’t know whether to be grateful for that or devastated by it. Probably both.
She barely stirs when I ease Bunny more securely into her arms and tug the blanket up over her little body.
Her lashes rest against her cheeks, dark and soft, her breathing deep and even in that way only children seem capable of after they’ve run straight through the edge of exhaustion and dropped off anyway.
One of her curls is stuck awkwardly against her forehead from the truck ride, and I smooth it back with careful fingers, lingering longer than I need to because touching her is grounding and because if I keep moving, I don’t have to think too hard yet.
Emma helped me get her settled without making me feel incompetent, which is some kind of miracle I didn’t realize I needed tonight.
Mac found me an extra pillow, a clean washcloth, and a tiny travel toothbrush from somewhere like she’d been expecting a woman and a kid to appear in the middle of the night, which somehow feels exactly like the kind of thing a place like this would prepare for.
They didn’t ask for details. They didn’t tiptoe around me like I might shatter.
They just…handled it. Quietly. Kindly. Efficiently.
It should make me emotional.
Instead, right now, it mostly makes me feel untethered. Like I’ve been running so long I don’t know what to do with people stepping in without strings attached.
The room itself is simple. A bed big enough for me and Lexi, a dresser with two empty drawers, a chair in the corner, a lamp on the nightstand, a small attached bathroom with clean towels folded on the shelf and a little basket of travel toiletries someone must keep stocked for guests or emergencies or women like me who arrive here with their lives crammed into one duffel bag and a child.
There’s nothing fancy about it. No expensive art. No polished furniture. No curated softness trying too hard to feel comforting.
And yet.
It’s warm. Clean. Safe.
There’s a difference between a room being nice and a room feeling like nothing bad has happened in it for a while. This one feels like the second.
I stand at the edge of the bed for a long moment, staring at Lexi’s sleeping face while the silence settles around me in a way that should probably feel eerie after everything else.
Instead, it feels…unfamiliar.
Not empty. Not dead. Just quiet enough for my own thoughts to finally start catching up.
That is dangerous territory.
I know better than to let my mind wander too far once the adrenaline starts wearing off, but there’s no outrunning it now. The drive is over. We made it. The chapter doors closed behind us. My daughter is asleep in a bed that does not belong to a house Cal has ever set foot in.
And I am still standing.
That realization should probably hit harder than it does.
Maybe I’m too tired for the full weight of it.
Maybe my body is still waiting for the other shoe to drop before it lets me feel anything too deeply.
Or maybe there’s only so much terror a person can metabolize in one day before the rest just gets stored for later.
I press my fingers to my eyes for a second, then force myself to move.
Shoes off first. Then the baseball cap, finally. Then the sweatshirt. I pause with my hands curled in the hem of it, my pulse doing something stupid and unnecessary the second I start lifting it over my head.
It is ridiculous how aware I am of the fact that it’s his. Not because I think there’s anything romantic about wearing a man’s sweatshirt after six hours in a truck while hiding from my violent ex-husband.
That would be absurd.
No, it’s just…there.
The awareness. The scent of it still lingering in the fabric, darker now from being against my skin for hours. The weight of it. The way it made me feel steadier in the passenger seat when I absolutely should not have cared.
I tell myself I’m only noticing because it’s unfamiliar. Because everything tonight is unfamiliar. Because my body is latching onto anything that feels remotely grounding.
That explanation sounds very sane and very mature.
I don’t fully believe it.
Still, I fold the sweatshirt carefully and set it over the back of the chair instead of tossing it into my bag. That decision feels more loaded than it should.
I ignore that too.
The room is quiet enough now that I start noticing the sounds underneath it. Not silence exactly. The clubhouse breathes around me in its own strange way. Somewhere in the distance, I hear men laughing.
Not loud enough to make out words, just the low rise and fall of it, deep voices and easy amusement bleeding through the walls and down the hall.
Outside, there’s the occasional rumble of a bike starting up, then fading off into the night.
Music drifts faintly from farther inside the building, something old and low and steady enough that it feels more like atmosphere than noise.
It should feel chaotic.
If someone had described this to me before tonight, I would’ve pictured noise and mess and men too loud for the walls to hold. Instead, what I feel standing here in the middle of this unfamiliar room is something much stranger.
The place feels alive.
That’s the only word for it. Not polished. Not orderly. Not sanitized and hushed in the way people like Cal always tried to present control as elegance.
No, this place has weight and noise and movement and people existing in it without apology.
It feels lived in. Warm in all the places that matter.
Safe in a way that doesn’t come from perfection, but from the sense that there are people here who would wake up fast and angry if the wrong person ever tried the wrong thing.
I don’t think I realized until this moment how long it’s been since a place felt alive without feeling threatening.
I sit carefully on the edge of the bed and stare at the wall across from me. Then I realize something.
Joker’s room is right next door.
The thought lands so suddenly and so fully that I physically still.
I replay the hallway in my head. Emma opening my door.
The room beside it. The brief glance I caught between Joker and Logan when they realized where I’d been put.
The way Joker had gone oddly still for half a second before masking it.
My pulse ticks up for no reason I’m prepared to examine.
He’s right there. On the other side of that wall.
Probably showering. Maybe changing. Maybe already in bed.
Maybe awake. Maybe just as aware of the fact that our rooms are separated by a few inches of drywall and whatever terrible sense of humor the universe has developed at my expense. That should not matter.
It does.
More than I’m comfortable with.
I don’t know if it’s because he’s the only familiar thing in this entire building right now, which is absurd considering I met him a handful of hours ago and he spent most of that time driving while I tried not to fall apart in his passenger seat.
Or if it’s because he was steady all night in a way I’m still not sure what to do with. Or if it’s because he carried my daughter inside like it was the most natural thing in the world and then looked at me in the hallway afterward like he was trying very hard not to say the wrong thing.
Whatever the reason, the awareness is immediate and impossible to ignore once it settles in.
I stand again too quickly, suddenly restless.
The bathroom.
I need the bathroom. That sounds like a reasonable enough excuse to get moving and stop thinking about the man on the other side of the wall.
The attached bathroom is small but spotless, and the sight of a clean sink, fresh hand towels, and a shower with actual water pressure should not nearly undo me the way it almost does. I stare at my reflection in the mirror for a long second and barely recognize the woman looking back.
My hair is wild from being pinned and trapped and dragged around under a wig for hours. My eyes look huge in my face, tired and too bright all at once. My mouth is pale. My skin is washed out under the bathroom light.
I look like I’ve been surviving.
Which, to be fair, I have.
I splash water on my face and brush my teeth with the tiny travel toothbrush Mac found, and the normalcy of the motion nearly breaks something in me all over again.
It’s such a small thing. Toothpaste. Water.
Standing in a safe bathroom at nearly two in the morning while my daughter sleeps in the next room.
And yet my hands shake the whole time.
When I finish, I stare at the closed bathroom door for a second before opening it again.
The room is still quiet. Lexi is still asleep. The wall beside the bed is still the wall that separates me from Joker.
That’s what I tell myself as I stand in the middle of the room, I walk over to the chair and pick up his sweatshirt.
It’s folded.
Neatly. Carefully. More carefully than it needs to be. That alone should probably tell me everything I need to know.
It’s just a sweatshirt. That’s the thought I keep circling back to, like if I repeat it enough times it will settle into something true.
Just fabric. Just something he handed me in the truck because I was cold. Just something that smells like clean detergent and something darker underneath that I don’t want to think too hard about. Just something I should give back.
Immediately.
Before I start assigning meaning to something that doesn’t deserve it. Before I get comfortable. Before I forget that none of this is permanent.
My fingers tighten slightly around the folded fabric.
I exhale slowly. Then I turn toward the door.
The hallway is dim when I step out, quiet in that early-late night way where the building feels like it’s holding its breath between night and day. The low hum of the clubhouse still exists somewhere beyond the walls, but it’s distant enough that this part of the hall feels almost private.
Too private.
My bare feet make no sound against the floor as I move the short distance to his door.
I hesitate.