Chapter Four
Lachlan
The lock takes eleven minutes.
Old hardware, painted over so many times the strike plate had swollen past the frame. Four coats, maybe five. I chisel it back, chase out the screw holes, seat the new deadbolt, and throw it six times before I’m satisfied it catches clean.
It isn’t good work. Anybody could do it. But it’s the first thing I’ve built with my hands since a courtroom took the shop, and my chest does something complicated that I’d rather not look at directly.
Tatum sits cross-legged on the bed the whole time, a textbook open in her lap that she hasn’t turned a page of.
“You’re staring,” I say without turning around.
“You showed up at nine in the morning on a Saturday.”
“I said Saturday.”
“You did.” Something in her voice makes me look up. She’s got her chin propped on her hand, watching me the way people watch weather. “I didn’t think you’d actually come.”
I go back to the door. “I said I would.”
“People say things.”
I test the bolt one more time and start packing the case. Behind me, the mattress creaks as she uncurls.
“Lachlan.”
“Yeah.”
“Thank you.”
Something about the way she says it, plain and unhurried, with no expectation attached, makes it harder to take than if she’d made a fuss.
I snap the case shut. “Get your things.”
She blinks. “What?”
“You heard me.”
Her mouth opens. Closes. Color climbs into her cheeks, and I stand there and watch her work out exactly what I’m saying—and watch her decide not to make me say it twice.
“Okay,” she says.
She’s ready in four minutes. I don’t help.
***
I changed the sheets on Thursday.
I want to be honest with myself about what that means. I stood in a store on Thursday afternoon with a package of sheets in my hand like a man who had already decided something. I bought them, put them on the bed, and then spent two days telling myself it didn’t mean anything.
She notices. Of course she does. She steps into my apartment and takes in the made bed and the clean counter and the fact that there isn’t a takeout bag anywhere in the room. She doesn’t say a word about any of it. Just sets her bag down by the door and turns around to look at me.
“You planned this,” she says.
“Yeah.”
Her breath goes uneven. I watch it happen—the moment it stops being an idea and turns into something happening to her body. Everything I’ve been holding since her dorm room goes tight and hot and dangerous.
“Come here.”
She obeys.
I take her face in my hands, and I kiss her. I take my time about it because this is the last part of tonight I’m going to be able to do anything slowly.
I get her out of her clothes standing up, piece by piece, and I don’t rush any of it.
Her shirt. The clasp of her bra, one-handed, while she watches my face.
Jeans, socks, everything, until she’s bare in the middle of my apartment with the light on and her arms twitching like they want to cover her body.
“Don’t,” I say.
Her hands still.
“Let me look at you.”
She’s shaking by the time I’m done looking.
I walk her back to the bed and put her down on it.
I follow her, and when my mouth laps at her pussy, she makes a sound like she’s been waiting years for it.
I don’t tease her the way I did in her dorm.
I don’t have it in me tonight. I put my mouth on her and take what I want, and she comes on my tongue inside of two minutes with both hands fisted in my sheets.
“Hands above your head,” I tell her.
She’s still shaking, still half-gone, and she does it anyway. Immediately.
“Keep them there.” I close one hand around both her wrists and press them into the pillow. The way her breath stutters at that shoots through me like a current. “Don’t move them unless I say. Understand?”
“Yes.”
I strip out of my clothes and settle between her thighs, and there’s a second there—one second—where I get a clear look at what I’m doing. Twenty years old. Never been touched. Looking up at me like I’m something worth trusting.
I could still stop.
“Lachlan.” Her voice is barely there. “Please don’t change your mind.”
I don’t.
I line myself up and push in slowly, watching her face for every fraction of it. She’s tight enough that it takes everything I have to keep it gradual, her body gripping me, resisting and yielding at the same time.
Her brow furrows. Her breath goes short.
“It’s a lot,” she gets out. “It’s—”
“I know.” I get a hand under her jaw and hold her where I can see her. “Look at me. Breathe out.”
She does. Her body softens around me.
“Good girl.”
I sink the rest of the way home, and she makes a sound I’m going to be hearing for the rest of my life.
“Please,” she gasps. “Please, Daddy—”
Everything in me stops.
She hears it about half a second after I do. Her eyes come open, wide and horrified, color flooding her chest and throat. “I didn’t mean… I don’t know why I—”
“Say it again.”
She stares up at me.
“Tatum.” I can’t move. If I move right now, this is over. “Say it again.”
“Daddy,” she whispers.
Something in me that’s been locked shut for four years comes open all at once. I’m not going to examine it. Not tonight, maybe not ever. All I know is she handed me something without meaning to, and I have no intention of giving it back.
I start to move.
Slow at first because she needs it slow, long strokes that drag out almost to the tip before I sink back in. Her wrists flex against my hand and stay where I put them.
“Feel that?” My forehead drops to hers. “Feel how you take me?”
“Yes.” Her voice breaks on it.
“That’s mine.” My control is already going. “This is mine, Tatum. Say it.”
“Yours.”
“Again.”
“Yours, Daddy—”
I lose the last of my control right there. I hook her leg over my arm, open her up, and go deeper. She cries out, her back coming off the bed, her hands still obediently above her head even though I let go of them two strokes ago.
That does something to me. The fact that I stopped holding her and she stayed.
“You’re perfect,” I grit out. “Taking me like that. So fucking good for me.”
I feel her start to tighten. “Not yet.”
“I can’t—”
“You can. You hold it until I say.”
She sobs into my shoulder, and she holds it. I keep her there—right on the edge, one stroke at a time, until she’s shaking apart underneath me and making sounds that aren’t words.
“Now.” My thumb finds her clit and presses. “Come for me.”
She shatters, and the feel of her pussy clamping down around me is the end of every last thing I had. I bury myself deep and let go with her name in my mouth. My orgasm seems endless, thick ropes of cum filling her. For one long, white second, there’s nothing else in the world.
Afterward, I clean her up and get her back into bed. I pull her against me, and for a while, neither of us says anything.
“Are you okay?” I ask eventually.
“I’m so far past okay I can’t see it from here.”
Something that might be a laugh moves through my chest.
She’s quiet for a minute. Then, into my ribs, she whispers, “What did you think about? In there.”
Four years of people asking me questions I didn’t answer.
“Depends on the day,” I say.
“That’s not an answer.”
“No.” I look at the ceiling for a while. “The first year I thought about Tyler. All of it. Every version of that road where I do something different.”
Her hand goes still on my chest.
“After that, I stopped because it didn’t go anywhere.” I have to work at the next part. “So I picked something else to think about instead. Something that hadn’t happened yet and might.”
“What?”
“You,” I say. “Graduating.”
She doesn’t say anything at all. But her face turns into my chest, and after a second, I feel it, warm against my skin. I hold on to her and let her cry in my arms.
***
I wake before her. That’s not unusual. What is, is the fact that I don’t move.
She’s curled into me like she was assigned the position, one arm across my chest, her face pressed into the pillow just under my shoulder.
Her hair spills across the pillow in soft waves.
Morning light comes through the thin curtain and lands on her, and she looks younger asleep, softer, untouched by any of it.
Her lashes rest against her cheeks, long and dark, casting faint shadows over her skin. Her lips are slightly parted, full and still flushed from the night before. She fits here. Too well. That’s the problem.
Something quiet settles in my chest that I don’t have a name for and don’t intend to find one for. I shut it down.
She stirs. Presses closer without waking, her fingers tightening briefly against my chest.
I slide a hand up to her jaw and tilt her face up, my thumb brushing lightly across her lower lip. Her lashes flutter.
“Tatum,” I murmur, my voice low, rough from sleep.
She hums softly, still mostly under.
“Wake up,” I say, quieter this time.
Her eyes open slowly, unfocused at first, then land on me. Recognition hits. Then warmth. A smile tugs at her lips before she’s fully conscious of it.
“Morning,” she whispers. Then, barely awake, barely voiced: “Morning, Daddy.”
And she doesn’t blush this time. Doesn’t catch herself. It just comes out of her like it’s been hers all along.
I kiss her for a long time. Slow, unhurried, nothing behind it but wanting to. She melts into it, warm and pliant, one leg sliding over mine. It turns into something else the way it was always going to, but gentler than last night. Softer. Her hands stay in my hair the whole time, and I let them.
Afterward, she’s boneless and laughing at nothing.
Then she blinks. Her eyes cut to the clock.
“Oh my God.” The words come out sharp, panicked as she jerks upright. “I’m so late,” she says, already scrambling out of bed, grabbing for her clothes in a rush that makes her movements clumsy. “Why didn’t you wake me up?”
A laugh breaks out of me before I can stop it. It’s rough, unfamiliar, out before I know it’s coming.
She freezes mid-motion, turning to stare at me like she’s never heard that sound before. My smile fades quickly, but the echo of it lingers in my chest as I push myself up on one elbow, watching her rush around the room, half-dressed and flustered.
“I tried,” I say dryly.
She glares at me, cheeks still flushed, hair a mess around her shoulders. “That doesn’t count.”
Another small huff of laughter escapes me, quieter this time. For a second, it almost feels normal.
She finishes dressing, grabs her bag, and waves from the door. “See you later.”
I smile and grunt in response.
The door clicks shut, but whatever she leaves behind doesn’t go with her. It lingers, in the sheets twisted around my legs. In the air. In how heavy the quiet lands once there’s nobody in it.
***
It wasn’t supposed to go like this.
I told myself I’d hold her at arm’s length. I lasted about a week.
Not because she wore me down. That’s the part I keep turning over. After that night in her dorm, she never asked me for a single thing—never pushed, never engineered a reason to be in front of me. She just kept showing up and leaving the decision on the table where I could reach it.
So I reached.
I’m the one who asked her to stay the first time. I’m the one who cleared out a drawer. I’m the one texting her at eleven at night when the apartment gets too quiet. I'm the one who drove out to campus on a Tuesday because she mentioned in passing she’d be walking back after dark.
Three weeks go like that.
She’s here most nights now, curled up in my bed like it’s hers. And I let her. Worse than that—I want her there.
Because it stopped being about the physical somewhere I didn’t notice. It’s the way she talks to me. The way she looks at me like I’m still someone worth knowing, like the last four years didn’t strip something essential out of me.
It’s disarming. It’s dangerous. Because it makes me forget. For a few minutes, for a few hours, I forget the four years. What I did. What it cost.
Until she’s gone. Until the apartment is quiet again, and there’s nothing left to stand between me and it. My jaw tightens as I push off the bed, running a hand through my hair as I pace once across the room before stopping near the window.
Tyler.
The name hits like it always does.
I’m sleeping with his sister. There’s no arrangement of the facts where that isn’t true. I brace my hands on the counter and drop my head. I close my eyes for a second, and I try, the way I’ve tried a hundred times in three weeks, to work out what he’d say.
I don’t know. That’s the honest answer. I used to know everything that man thought.
What I do know is that every time she curls into me like she trusts me completely, something shifts in a way I can’t control. Something that has nothing to do with guilt and everything to do with wanting.
That’s the problem. She thinks I’ve made peace with Tyler, prison…everything. I let her think that.
I push off the counter and drag my shirt on, like putting fabric between me and the smell of her on my skin will help.
It doesn’t. She’s too far in.
And whether I like it or not, I’m not pulling away.