25. Hannah #3
We leave a trail down his hallway, shoes and his belt and my jeans marking the route like evidence, and when the backs of my knees hit his bed I take two fistfuls of his open shirt and pull him down with me, because if he treats me like glass tonight I’ll scream.
He doesn’t. He’s careful the same way a storm is careful, everywhere at once, his hands relearning every inch of me like a man checking a map against a country he almost lost, and I arch into him and stop keeping track of whose sounds are whose.
“The launch,” I gasp, when his mouth is at my collarbone, because the wounds are surfacing with everything else tonight, they live that close underneath.
“Never again.” He says it into my skin, a signature on it.
“The guest room.” It comes out broken, when the last of the clothes are gone and there’s nothing between us but a year.
“Our room now.” He lifts his head and makes me watch him say it. “Whenever you’re ready. Not before.”
I pull him back down and kiss him until the ache turns molten, and then I press my palm flat against his chest and push, and he goes over onto his back without one syllable of protest, watching me rise over him in the dark with an expression I plan to remember on my deathbed.
“My rules tonight,” I tell him.
“Yours.” His hands settle at my hips, steadying, not steering. “Everything is yours. It always was, I just never handed it over.”
When I finally sink onto him, we both go still, forehead to forehead, breathing each other’s air, and it’s too much, over a year of loneliness and grief and wanting compressed into one point of contact, and I feel tears slide down my face and don’t care.
“You owed me.” The oldest wound. The first one. It comes out of me on a breath as I start to move.
“I owe you everything.” His voice shatters on it, and his hands frame my face, and his eyes never leave mine. “Let me pay it like this. Let me spend my whole life paying it.”
I ride him slow and then not slow, and he lets me set every ounce of the pace, meets me exactly where I ask and nowhere I don’t, this man who ran a billion-dollar company by taking whatever he wanted, holding himself on a leash beneath me and looking grateful for it.
The pressure builds low and hot and inevitable, and he reads it in me the second before it breaks, and he sits up and wraps me in his arms and takes my cry into his mouth as I come apart, and then he follows me over with my name on his lips like it’s the only word he knows.
For a long while, neither of us moves. He holds me against his chest, both of us slick and shaking, his hand tracing lazy lines up and down my spine, his lips pressed to my hair. Neither of us tries to make it mean anything out loud yet. It already does.
Later, the city hums below his windows and his heartbeat idles under my ear, and I trace the line of his collarbone in the dark, relearning.
“I have something for you,” he says into my hair. “I was going to wait. There’s no good time, so.”
He reaches into the nightstand and comes back with a single folded sheet of paper.
“Griffin, if that’s a love letter, I’m going to cry again, and I’m dehydrated.”
“It’s not a love letter.” He presses it into my hand. “Read it.”
I unfold it in the light from the window. One page. A few short lines and a signature I’ve seen ten thousand times, and it takes my exhausted brain three reads to understand what I’m holding.
The company. He’s signed me the company. Not a share, not a stake. All of it.
“Griffin.” My voice doesn’t work right. “This is…”
“Yours. It was always yours.” His hand covers mine, closing my fingers around the page. “I built it on your work and put my name on the door. This just corrects the record. One page. Turns out it was always going to be one page.”
“I can’t take your company.”
“You can’t take a gift?” His mouth curves against my temple. “You ran it for seven years, Hannah. You’ll be better at the top of it than I ever was. And if the idea horrifies you, sell it, gut it, rename it after Eliza, I genuinely do not care. As long as everyone finally knows whose it is.”
I stare at the page in my hand until the letters blur.
An hour ago he named every wound I’ve carried, out loud, against my skin.
And now he’s handed me the answer to the very first one, the one that started it all, my work with someone else’s name on it, and he’s done it in bed, half-asleep, no audience, no stage, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.
“I’m not saying yes to this tonight,” I manage.
“Okay.”
“I’m going to argue about it tomorrow. At length. With spreadsheets.”
“I look forward to losing.” He kisses my hair and pulls me closer, and within minutes his breathing goes long and slow, this man who just gave away an empire falling asleep mid-victory like it cost him nothing.
Because it didn’t, I realize. That’s the whole point. Everything else was the cost. The paper is just the receipt.
I wake at dawn in my ex-husband’s bed with his arm heavy across my waist and a billion-dollar piece of paper on the nightstand, and I lie there watching the ceiling go gray then gold, waiting for the panic to come.
It doesn’t come.
What comes instead, quiet as the light, is the thought I’ve been outrunning for over a year, and lying here in the wreckage and the beginning of everything, I finally stop running and let it catch me.
I never stopped loving him.
I’m not ready to say it out loud yet. But he told me he’d wait.
He won’t have to wait long.