TRUTH #5
“We’re doing this,” he said. “Just this. Nothing else tonight.”
“The war’s still out there.”
“I know.” He pulled back just enough to see my face. “It’ll be there when we leave. But right now—” He pressed a single, unhurried kiss to the corner of my mouth. “Right now, it doesn’t get to be in here.”
I reached between us and finished what needed finishing with his belt, and he helped without making a production of it. Then, there was nothing between us. I hooked my ankles behind him and pulled.
The first moment was slow. He watched my face instead of closing his eyes—that intense, focused attention that I’d stopped trying to make him break—and I watched his. It was the most exposed I’d felt in months. Not because of the physical. Because of what was underneath it.
“Okay?” he said.
“More than okay,” I replied. “Keep going.”
He did. Steady and deep, finding a pace that had nothing urgent about it, nothing trying to prove anything.
Just present. Every time I changed the angle, he read it instantly and followed—no ego, no negotiating, just response.
When I pulled his shoulder to roll us, I felt his momentary surprise, and then he went with it.
I sat up and looked down at him stretched out across his own desk and almost laughed.
“Something funny?” he said, his voice rough.
“You’re on your own desk,” I said.
“I’m aware.” His hands settled on my hips. “You going to do something about it or just look at me?”
I did something about it.
I set the pace this time—slower than he expected, a little deeper than was comfortable, and I watched his jaw tighten, his hands press harder into my hips, and his eyes fight to stay open and focused on my face.
His breathing changed first, then his control, and he said my name once, quiet and undone-sounding, and that was the thing that got me—not the physical, not the pace, but my name in his mouth like that, like he’d been carrying it a long time.
“Don’t stop,” he said.
“I wasn’t planning to,” I replied.
“Truth.” His hands pulled me down harder, and I let him.
We found something together that wasn’t quite rhythm and wasn’t quite chaos—somewhere between the two, urgent and deliberate all at once. He reached up and put one hand against the side of my face, his thumb against my cheekbone, and held my eyes with his while everything else came apart.
The release moved through me in a long, shuddering wave. I pressed my forehead to his chest and held on. He wrapped his arms around my back and followed me into it—his whole body going taut beneath me, a low, rough sound against my hair, and then we were both still.
Neither of us moved for a moment.
Then, he said, muffled against the top of my head, “You good?”
“I’m good,” I said, still not moving. “You?”
“I’m extremely good.”
I laughed despite myself, and felt him laugh too, his chest moving under my cheek.
Afterward, we were quiet for a while. I was still on his desk—he’d eased me off his lap, and I leaned back against the edge, his jacket draped over my shoulders because the air conditioning had made itself known.
He was sitting beside me, close enough that our arms were touching, his shirt still across the chair where he’d dropped it.
The laptop was where I’d pushed it. Through the frosted glass panel in the office door, the store’s display cases glowed softly in the dark showroom.
He reached past me and turned the laptop back around. The ring was still there on the screen, in its slow rotation, the vivid pink-orange stone moving through the rendered light.
I looked at it for a long time.
“The engraving,” I said finally. “Even when you don’t see it.”
“So you’d know,” he said, “on the days when nothing seems real or right or like I’m actually in your corner—you’d look at your hand and know it was there. Under everything.”
I didn’t say anything.
“You don’t have to say anything,” he said, like he’d heard the silence correctly. He reached over and closed the laptop. “I just needed you to see it.”
Outside, the city moved past the sealed doors of the store in its ordinary way—car horns, a saxophone somewhere down the block, the distant sound of a second-line drum starting up in the dark.
We’d walked in, carrying the weight of the afternoon—Kaisen’s face, the paternity results, the truck ride, all of it—and none of that had gone anywhere.
It was still out there, patient, waiting for us to come back to it.
But in here, for a little while, it was just us and the rings behind the glass and whatever we were building.
“We should go,” I said, not moving.
“We should,” he agreed, not moving either.
I leaned my head against his shoulder, his jacket still warm around me, and let myself have one more minute of this before we walked back out into everything that was real.
He pressed his mouth to the top of my head.
Outside, the second line got louder, then faded, carrying on without us.
I couldn’t believe this was my life now. A man who was fine and crazy as fuck. Two homes. A family.
I could never have imagined this even if I tried.