31. No More Pretending
Chapter thirty-one
No More Pretending
Atticus POV
The hallway is three steps, a shoulder turned sideways past the stock shelves, and then a door she nudges open with her hip. The back office is small and dim and smells like old wood and whiskey and something that is entirely, specifically her.
She pulls me in by the collar and I let her, because I have been letting her lead me somewhere for months and I am done pretending I don't know where we're going.
The back office door clicks shut behind us and I take her face in both hands and I look at her for one full second before I kiss her again.
Not like the cameras. Not like an almost.
Like I mean it. Like I've been meaning it.
She makes a sound against my mouth and her hands fist in my shirt and I feel the whole arrangement, every agreement, every rule, every reason I told myself she was off-limits, dissolve into nothing.
Good. It was always a lie anyway.
I take my time.
That's the thing she doesn't expect. I can feel it in the slight impatience of her hands, the way she angles up toward me like she wants to skip the middle. I pull back just enough.
"Atticus—"
"No."
Her eyes open. Dark, startled, a little annoyed. I keep my hands exactly where they are.
"I've been waiting long enough to do this right," I say. "You can be patient for once."
She stares at me. Then, quietly, like she doesn't want to give it to me, she laughs.
There it is.
I press my mouth to her cheek, her throat, the soft place below her ear that makes her breath go shallow.
I learn her that way, slow and systematic, the same attention I give to anything I want to understand completely.
Her pulse under my lips. The small sound she makes when my hands slide under the hem of her shirt.
"You're insufferable," she says. Her voice is unsteady. She means it as a complaint and it comes out as something else.
"I know."
I get her shirt over her head and she reaches for mine and I let her this time, and then there is only warm skin and her hands, certain and unhesitating, tracing the scar on my ribs like she already knows its history.
"How'd you get this one?" she asks.
"Boards. Nineteen years old." I press my mouth to her collarbone. "You can ask me later."
"I'm asking you now."
I look up at her. She's watching me with that particular Sienna Hart expression, curious and careful and bright-edged, and something in my chest does something it has never done before.
"Later," I say. "I'll tell you everything. Later."
She considers that. Then she pulls me back down.
I work my way down her body with a patience I don't feel but intend to keep. She's warm and restless beneath my hands.
I stay until she's pulling at my hair and swearing at me in a fractured, breathless voice that I will hear in my sleep for the rest of my life.
"Atticus. I swear to God—"
"Tell me what you want."
"You. Now. Please."
I come back up the length of her, skin to skin, her hands pulling at me before I've even settled. She gets my belt and I help her and then there is nothing between us and I feel every place we're touching like a live wire.
She reaches for me and wraps her hand around me and I go still for a second, just breathing, because the wanting has been so long and so controlled that the reality of her, warm and certain and right here, takes a moment to land.
I press my forehead to hers. Give us both a breath.
Then I move into her slowly, feeling every inch of it, watching her face the whole time.
Her lips part. A sound escapes her that she didn't plan.
Her nails press into my back and I take that as the answer it is and push deeper, until I'm fully seated and we're both just holding the moment, not moving, adjusting to the weight of finally.
Eyes open. On mine.
I stop.
The room is very quiet. She breathes in. Out. Her hands find my back.
"Okay," she says. Soft. Just for me.
So I move.
There is nothing controlled about it after that.
I move and she arches into it, her hips rising to meet every thrust, her breath coming out in short, broken pieces that land against my neck like something she can't hold back anymore.
I feel her everywhere. The grip of her thighs.
The drag of her nails down my back when I find an angle that makes her gasp and turn her face into my shoulder.
I do it again.
She moans, open and entirely unguarded, and I feel it move through me like a current. I pull back and drive forward and she makes that sound again, louder this time, and I decide I am going to spend a considerable amount of time learning exactly how to produce it.
She says my name. Not a question, not a warning. Just my name, rough and wrecked, like she's been keeping it behind her teeth for months and her body finally took it from her. I feel it everywhere.
I pick up the pace. She takes it. She more than takes it.
She rolls her hips and meets me and says my name again and digs her heels into the back of my thighs like she's trying to pull me closer and deeper and I give her everything, because there is nothing left in me that wants to do anything else.
I talk to her. I don't decide to. It just comes out, unedited, the truth of what she does to me said plainly while I show her exactly how much I mean it.
"You have no idea," I say against her throat, "how long I've—"
"I have some idea." Her voice comes out fractured and it makes me want to take her apart all over again.
"Sienna."
"Right here."
She wraps herself around me and pulls and I understand that she is done letting me set the pace, and I am entirely fine with that.
At some point we lose our footing.
One moment we're upright and the next we're not. She makes a startled sound, I catch the edge of the counter on reflex, and we look at each other for half a second, both of us braced, neither of us hurt, and she starts laughing.
Actually laughing. Eyes bright, body shaking, the most genuinely delighted sound I have heard from her in all the months I have known her.
I have held myself together through penalty boxes and press conferences and a locker room that turned on me and none of it touched me the way her laugh does right now.
"Problem?" I ask.
"The floor," she says. Still laughing.
"The floor works."
"Does it?"
"Yes," I say, and pull her down with me.
She laughs again when we settle. Then she doesn't laugh for a while.
After.
My jacket is under her head. The floor of O'Malley's back office is not comfortable and I don't care at all.
She's on her side, one hand flat against my chest, her breathing slow and settling. The city comes through the window in pieces. Distant traffic, something musical three blocks over, the hum of a city that doesn't sleep.
I stare at the ceiling.
The thing that lives in my chest — the low alarm, the constant background calculation of distance — isn't there right now. The space it left is wide.
Her thumb moves. Small, unconscious. Tracing a slow line across my ribs.
I catch her hand and hold it there.
She tips her face up. Studies me the way she does when she's deciding how honest to be.
"What are you thinking?" she asks.
I consider giving her something manageable. Something that doesn't cost much. Old habit.
"That I don't want to leave," I say instead.
Her expression shifts. Opens up a little.
"You don't have to."
"I know."
I turn my head toward her. She's watching me with those clear, sharp eyes that have never once let me hide from anything, and I say it the way it is. Not as a pitch, not as a performance, not as anything I'm managing.
"I've never let anyone see me like this."
I mean it as a fact.
It comes out like a confession.
She holds my gaze for a long moment. Something moves through her face. Not pity, not alarm. Just recognition. The quiet kind.
"You didn't have to tell me," she says. Then, soft: "I see you."
I press my mouth to her temple and close my eyes and hold her in the dark, and the city is loud outside, and the bar is ours and quiet, and I think: this is it. This is the thing I've been afraid to name.
I should say something. I have something to say and I am trying to figure out how to say it without making it sound like something she has to carry.
Her fingers lace through mine.
I open my mouth.
My phone screams.
We both go rigid. She pulls back half an inch. I reach without thinking, muscle memory, the reflex of a man who has spent years being on call for emergencies, and the screen is so bright in the dark it takes a second to read.
LEAGUE OFFICE
Not a call. A text. At this hour that's somehow worse.
New evidence submitted in your case. Required at league offices. 8 a.m. sharp.
I set the phone face-down on the floor and sit with that for a moment.
Sienna's hand finds my back. She doesn't ask. She waits.
"I have to be at the league office in the morning," I say.
"I know."
I look at her, half-dressed on the floor of her bar, hair undone, eyes completely steady, and I feel the weight of everything I haven't said yet press at the back of my teeth.
"Sienna—"
"Come home with me tonight," she says. Not an offer. Not a question. Just clear. "And we'll deal with the rest in the morning."
I pull her hand to my mouth and press my lips to her knuckles.
Then I help her up off the floor of O'Malley's, and she turns off the last light, and we walk out into the night together.
Whatever is coming, it's coming at eight a.m.
Tonight is still ours.