Chapter Thirteen
What the Body Remembers
Three weeks after the hearing, nearly two months since church, Callie found herself standing in the doorway of the garage at nine in the evening, watching Marcus work on a bike that did not need his attention nearly as much as he needed something to occupy his hands, and understood, watching him, that she had run out of reasons to keep pretending she did not want him.
He had not pushed. That was the thing she kept coming back to, turning it over the way she turned over every important fact, six weeks of a man doing exactly what she asked and nothing more, present but never presuming, honest but never demanding, and somewhere in the disciplined patience of it, the wound that had felt, in the first days after church, like it might never fully close had begun, slowly, to knit itself back together into something that still ached but no longer threatened to consume everything around it.
He looked up when she stepped into the garage, and something in his face went carefully still, a man who had trained himself, over six weeks, not to hope too visibly, not to reach before he was invited.
“You’re up late,” he said.
“I couldn’t sleep.” She crossed the garage, closer than she had let herself get in weeks, close enough to smell the familiar mix of engine grease and the soap he always used, a scent that had meant home to her for nine years and had, for six weeks, felt like something she was not yet allowed to want.
“I keep thinking about the fight. Two weeks ago. In the kitchen.”
“I think about it too. Every day.”
“I liked fighting with you.” She said it plainly, the way she said everything, and watched surprise flicker across his face before it settled into something more careful, more attentive.
“I did not expect that. I thought forgiveness, if it ever came, would feel like relief. Like a door opening. Instead it feels like this. Small ordinary moments where I forget to be careful, and I look up, and you are just there, being exactly yourself, and some part of me that has been very angry for six weeks quietly decides it is tired of being angry.”
“Are you saying you forgive me?”
“I am saying I am trying to.” She reached out, slow, deliberate, and rested her hand against his chest, feeling his heart beating hard and fast beneath her palm, feeling him hold himself very still, very carefully, giving her every chance to change her mind.
“I am saying I do not know if forgiveness is a single moment or a thousand small ones, and I am tired of waiting to find out which, because I miss you, Marcus. I miss you so much it has been sitting underneath the anger this entire time, and I am done pretending it is not there.”
He did not move first. She understood, even as she said it, that he was not going to move first ever again, not after four months of choices that had taught them both exactly what happened when he acted without her full, willing participation, and so she was the one who closed the last of the distance between them, rising onto her toes, and kissed him.
He made a low sound against her mouth, something between relief and disbelief, and his hands came up slowly, careful even now, framing her face like she was something he still could not quite believe he was allowed to touch, and when she pressed closer, silently answering the question he was too careful to ask out loud, he groaned and pulled her fully against him, nine years of familiarity and six weeks of careful distance colliding all at once into something that felt, to both of them, like coming home to a house they had feared was lost for good.
“Callie.” Her name came out rough, half question, half prayer. “Tell me this is what you want. I need to hear you say it, because I cannot trust my own hope right now.”
“I want you.” She pulled back just far enough to meet his eyes, steady, certain, the same directness she brought to everything that mattered.
“I am still angry. I am still working through six weeks of grief you handed me in a room full of witnesses. But I want you, tonight, and I am done pretending my body does not remember exactly how much it has always wanted you, anger included.”
He kissed her again, slower this time, deliberate, savoring, and walked her backward toward the office stairs with the reverence of a man who understood exactly how much trust was being extended to him and had no intention of ever taking it for granted again.
Upstairs, in the office where this entire crisis had begun with three words on a stranger’s phone, he undressed her slowly, worshipfully, murmuring against her skin every apology he had not yet found the words for in six weeks of careful daylight honesty, and she let him, let herself feel wanted and seen and entirely present in her own body, that certainty finally returning after church had taken it from her.
He was careful with her, achingly careful, until she pulled him down with a fierceness that told him clearly she did not want careful tonight, she wanted him, entirely, the way she had wanted him for nine years, and he answered that fierceness with his own, and for a long time neither of them said anything at all that needed actual words.
Afterward, curled together in the dark of the office, her head against his chest, his hand tracing slow absent patterns along her spine, she felt more at peace than she had felt in six long weeks, and also, underneath the peace, a small persistent thread of fear she could not quite silence.
“This does not fix everything,” she said quietly, into the dark.
“I know.”
“I am still going to be angry sometimes. I am still going to need you to prove yourself, over and over, for longer than either of us probably wants.”
“I know that too. I am not asking tonight to be the end of it. I am just grateful it is a part of it.” He pressed a kiss to her hair, gentle, unhurried.
“I will keep proving it for as long as you need. Tonight does not change that promise. If anything, it just makes me more certain I intend to keep it.”
She let herself believe him, lying there in the dark, six weeks of careful distance finally, cautiously, beginning to close, and understood that whatever still lay ahead, whatever cost Selene Vasquez or Reyes Cardenas still intended to extract from them, she was not facing any of it alone anymore.
She had chosen him again. Not because he deserved it automatically. Because, one unglamorous honest day at a time, he had finally earned the chance to be chosen.
She woke before dawn to the sound of his phone buzzing against the desk, insistent, the kind of ringing that would not stop until someone answered it, and felt him stir beside her, reaching for it with the automatic wariness of a man who had learned, six weeks ago, that a buzzing phone could mean the end of everything he cared about.
“Steele,” he answered, voice rough with sleep, and Callie watched his face change in the gray predawn light, watched the peace of the night before drain out of it in real time as whoever was on the other end delivered whatever news had been urgent enough to call before sunrise.
“When,” he said. A pause. “How bad.” Another pause, longer this time, his jaw tightening in a way she recognized from six weeks of watching him absorb bad news without flinching. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
He hung up, and sat a moment in the dark, and Callie pushed herself up onto one elbow, already bracing herself for whatever came next.
“Talk to me,” she said.
“That was Vance.” Marcus rubbed a hand over his face, and when he looked at her, whatever peace they had built together overnight had been replaced with something harder, more alert, the president rather than the husband.
“Selene Vasquez is gone. Left the Serpents four days ago, according to Reyes’s own people. Nobody’s seen her since.”
“That should be good news.”
“It would be, except for what replaced her.” His expression darkened further.
“Castillo, the man who apparently put her up to the corridor scheme in the first place, is telling anyone who will listen that Selene didn’t just leave, she took something with her when she went.
Files. Financial records. Things that could hurt us both, if they end up in the wrong hands. ”
Callie felt the peace of the night before curdle into something colder, more familiar, the readiness she had spent six weeks slowly setting down now snapping back into place without her permission.
“Is it true?”
“I don’t know.” Marcus was already reaching for his clothes, already moving back into the version of himself the club required of him, though he paused long enough to look back at her, something apologetic and urgent both crossing his face at once.
“But if it is, this is not over. Not even close. I need you to be ready for whatever comes next, Callie, and I am so sorry that I have to ask you that again, tonight of all nights.”
She was already reaching for her own clothes, already rebuilding her armor one careful piece at a time, and found, underneath the fear, a small steady core of readiness that felt, for the first time in six weeks, like something they were facing together instead of something she was bracing against alone.
“Get dressed,” she said. “Tell me everything Vance told you. We handle this the way we handle the hearing. Together.”
He nodded, and for a moment, standing in the gray predawn light with the whole night’s tenderness still warm between them and an entirely new danger already gathering on the horizon, they were simply two people who loved each other, gearing up to fight one more battle side by side.
It was not the ending either of them had hoped the night would lead to. But it was, Callie thought, exactly the kind of morning that proved whether what they had rebuilt could actually hold weight, and she intended to find out.