4. The Fantasy I Hate
Chapter four
The Fantasy I Hate
Sienna POV
The apartment is too quiet.
That's the problem. O'Malley's runs loud until midnight and then I come home and there's nothing left to fill my head with, and in the absence of noise my brain does exactly what I don't want it to do.
It replays.
The footage. The way it looked from the outside. Me, yanked back hard against a body that didn't budge. Atticus Knox, solid and immovable, his arm across me like a bar across a door. His voice cutting through the noise without raising. Back up. Two words. The crowd moved.
I stare at the ceiling.
I've had men try to step in for me before. They usually make it worse. Puff up, escalate, turn my problem into their performance. Atticus didn't perform anything. He stepped in front of me like it was a reflex. Like I was already something he'd decided to protect before his brain got a vote.
I hate that I keep thinking about it.
I roll to my side. Check my phone. 1:47 a.m.
Put it face down.
The problem with Atticus Knox is that he's been living in the back of my head for years. Long before the footage. Long before tonight. He got in there the night I don't talk about. The one I've folded up and shoved to the back of a shelf in my mind where I put things I can't do anything with.
I'd called Mason in a panic. Some guy from the bar had followed me to my car, wouldn't leave, and Mason was three hours away at a team event, voice tight and furious and helpless on the phone. He'd said, I'm sending Atticus. Ten minutes. Stay in your car.
I hadn't wanted Atticus.
Atticus Knox was my best friend's older brother, already a force of nature by then, already the kind of man who made rooms rearrange themselves. Mason idolized him. I'd spent years watching Atticus from a safe distance and deciding that men who looked like warnings were not for me, thank you.
He'd arrived in eight minutes.
Knocked on my car window. When I unlocked the door he didn't reach in to pull me out, didn't do anything dramatic. Just stood there in the cold until I got out on my own. Then he walked me to his car, put me in the passenger seat, and drove me home in complete silence.
Not the bad kind. Not the tense, loaded kind where you feel like a burden. The other kind. The you're safe, you don't have to explain kind.
He'd walked me to my door. I'd stood there in the entryway and looked up at him and the moment stretched in a way I didn't know how to handle. He had this look on his face. Careful, almost strained. Like he was holding something back with both hands.
Then he'd said, "You're off-limits, Sienna."
Like he was telling himself.
I'd gone inside and locked the door and been furious at him for two weeks. For showing up perfectly, for driving home in that silence, for looking at me like that and then deciding for both of us.
I hate him a little right now, too.
My phone screen has gone dark. The apartment is silent. Outside, the city does its low, distant hum.
I close my eyes.
That's my mistake.
Because the moment they're closed it's not the footage anymore. It's not the bar, not the crowd, not the security angle and the bad lighting. It's the version my brain has been building in the dark.
Atticus. His voice. The lower register. The one he uses when he's holding something back. His hands. The way they look. Knuckles that have been split and healed more than once, the kind of hands that know exactly how much pressure to use and when.
I should stop this.
I don't stop this.
My hands slide under the sheets.
The fantasy starts slow, the way he'd do it.
I know that, somehow, deep in the part of me that reads people for a living.
He'd be patient. Deliberate. He'd take his time the way he does everything, the way he moved through the bar tonight like he already knew where every exit was, like he'd already decided the outcome.
His mouth at my throat first. Hot and unhurried, dragging down the column of my neck while his hands pull my shirt up and off like he has every right to. His stubble catches my collarbone and I feel it all the way down.
I push my underwear aside.
In my head he keeps going. Mouth moving down the center of me, my stomach, his big hands spreading my thighs open like he already owns the space between them.
I know what's coming and my whole body is pulling tight before he even gets there.
When his mouth finally finds me I make a sound into my pillow that I'm glad no one can hear.
His tongue circles slow and deliberate and I press my own fingers where his mouth would be and chase it.
He doesn't rush. In the fantasy he stays there until my thighs are shaking against his shoulders and I'm gripping the sheets with both hands. When I try to pull him up he pins my hip to the mattress without breaking rhythm.
Not yet.
Close. Right there. Stay with me.
I curl my fingers inside myself and my hips roll up to meet my own hand.
Then he's moving up my body. The full weight of him settling over me, between me, his cock pressing against me before he even moves and I feel how much he wants this. He reaches between us and lines himself up and pushes inside slow. So slow. Like he wants me to feel every inch of it.
I'm so wet he slides all the way in on the first stroke and we both go still for a second.
God, he says. Rough. Wrecked. You feel that?
I feel it. I feel all of it.
He starts to move. Deep, unhurried rolls of his hips that drag against every nerve ending and wind something in my stomach impossibly tight.
His thumb finds my clit and circles in time with his thrusts and I stop breathing normally.
I stop thinking in sentences. There's only the pressure of him, the rhythm of him, the rough sound he makes against my throat when I clench around him.
That's it. Right there. Don't stop.
His pace builds. Deeper. Harder. The hand on my hip tightens and he pulls me into each thrust and I feel the full length of him on every stroke and it's too much and not enough and I say something into the pillow that isn't a word.
He answers it. His mouth finds my ear, his voice rough and wrecked and saying my name like it costs him something, and his thumb presses harder and the circles get tighter and I arch up into it because I can't not.
Let go, he says. I've got you.
I shatter.
It moves through me in waves, contracting and releasing, and I'm gripping the sheets with both hands and pressing my face into the pillow and my whole body is shaking with it.
He works me through every second. Doesn't stop.
Doesn't rush the finish. Stays with me until I'm wrung out and breathless and the shaking finally stops.
After, he'd pull me in. His chest at my back. One hand spread flat against my stomach, holding me against him like he already owns the quiet.
He'd know what he was doing. That's the part that unravels me.
Not the fantasy of inexperience. Not the fumbling of it.
The opposite. The certainty. A man who restrains himself that hard in public, who carries that much controlled heat behind the scowl and the silence.
In private, when he decided to let it out, he'd be devastating.
I don't say his name out loud. I don't have to. My body already knows.
I finish with my face hard into the pillow, my whole body shaking with it.
Then I lie there. Breathing. Staring at nothing.
Furious.
Specifically furious at myself for exactly one reason: it worked. The man I've been irritated at for half a decade, who has the emotional availability of a traffic cone, whose first and apparently lasting thought about me is off-limits. And my body treats him like an answer.
I put the pillow over my face.
I hold it there for five seconds.
Then I get up, because lying there is worse.
I'm still in my sleep shirt when morning hits. Gray light, first coffee brewing, absolutely refusing to think about the past six hours. I am a professional. I run a bar. I have survived worse than a bad decision in the dark.
The knock comes at seven-forty-three.
Sharp. Certain. Three knocks, no hesitation, no apology.
I already know.
I open the door.
Atticus Knox. Unshaven, which is a detail I did not need.
There's a tightness around his eyes that means he either rolled out of bed early or didn't sleep at all, and either option makes him worse.
Sharper. More real than I want him to be this morning.
He's in a dark henley and jeans, not team gear, which means he came here first. Before the facility.
Before whatever PR circus Delia is spinning up.
He's holding a coffee he didn't get from my kitchen.
He holds it out.
I stare at it.
"I'm not your mess to manage, Knox."
"I know." His voice is low. A little rough at the edges. Definitely no sleep. "I need you to hear me before Delia gets to you. Five minutes."
I take the coffee, because I'm not an idiot, and step back from the door.
He comes in and doesn't sit. He stands in the middle of my kitchen and looks at me like he's already run through this conversation three times and decided how to say it. I lean against the counter and wait.
"The PR plan is going to name you," he says. "They want you as the narrative. Wholesome face, clear conscience, proof that I'm not what the headlines say. I came to tell you before they brief you. So you have time to refuse."
I look at him. "You're here to give me an out."
"Yes."
"And what happens to you if I take it?"
His expression doesn't shift. "That's my problem."
I watch him for a moment. He means it. That's the thing about Atticus Knox that nobody who only reads the sports pages understands.
The bad boy, the dirty player, the toxic captain the media loves to frame as a villain.
What they don't see is this: the man shows up.
Every time. He showed up at my car in the dark.
He showed up at my bar last night. He's here at seven-forty-three in the morning holding coffee he didn't have to bring, offering me a door he didn't have to open.
I hate it.
I take a sip of coffee.
"What if I don't want the out?" I say.
Something moves through his eyes. He doesn't answer right away.
My phone lights up on the counter between us.
Unknown number. Photo attachment.
I pick it up without thinking. Open it.
The image loads slowly. A document, scanned from a physical page, the kind of paper that yellows at the edges.
I recognize the letterhead before I recognize what I'm seeing, and when the rest of it loads, when I see the date and the signature at the bottom, the bottom of my stomach drops out entirely.
The message below it is four lines.
Hi sweetheart. Recognized you on the news last night. You look good. This file has been sitting in my drawer for fifteen years and I've been patient. I think it's time we talked about what it's worth to you to keep it there.
Pay me. Or I give this to every reporter in the city.
Love, Dad.
I read it twice.
I keep my face still.
Atticus is watching me. He clocks the change. I see him clock it. The slight shift in his attention, the way his stillness sharpens into something alert.
"Sienna."
"Give me a second."
I set the phone face-down on the counter.
I pick up my coffee. Take a slow sip. Put it down.
Then I look at Atticus Knox standing in my kitchen at seven-forty-three in the morning and I think, very clearly: I am going to need that PR plan after all.
"Five minutes," I say. "Start talking."