Chapter 3 #2
It shouldn’t be funny. It is anyway, dry and quiet and delivered like he’s got all evening to be right about it, and I loosen before I can stop it, the same traitorous give that used to mean I was already lost.
I catch it. Just barely. I’m still in the chair, but my weight has already shifted forward onto the edge of it, an inch, maybe less, enough that I feel the difference when I sit back and don’t let it become a second inch.
He tracks it anyway. He always could, even when I thought I was being careful, some old fluency in me he never lost the alphabet for.
“You almost laughed,” he says.
“I did not.”
“You almost came out of that chair too.”
“I was reaching for the folder.”
“The folder’s right in front of you. You didn’t move toward it.” He says it without any heat at all, which is worse than if he’d been smug about it. “You moved toward me.”
He stands and the space between us drops from a table to a foot to nothing I can measure. I don’t look down. Looking down means admitting how close he’s let himself get.
I’m on my feet before I decide to be, because I’ll be damned if I let him tower over me.
His hand comes up, and I could step back.
I don’t. I lift my chin instead, daring him to finish what he started, and his fingers find my jaw first, then trail lower, along the edge of it, to that spot just below my ear where every nerve I own apparently reports directly to him.
I feel the difference in it this time, less restraint and more decision, like he’s not asking permission anymore so much as confirming I haven’t changed my mind.
Heat drops straight through me, fast and unfair, a current that skips every reasonable stop between my jaw and the ache building low in my stomach.
I want him. Badly. I haven’t stopped wanting him for one single day of the last eight years, no matter how many people I’ve positioned between us to prove otherwise. That’s the humiliating part.
Our mouths are close enough that I can smell his breath, mint over coffee, close enough that if either of us moved another inch this would already be happening instead of about to happen, and every part of my body that used to belong to this man is leaning into the inch without asking me first.
I don’t move the inch. I curl my fingers into the front of his shirt instead, holding him there, holding myself there, refusing to be the one who backs off first and refusing to be the one who finishes it either.
Neither does he.
His forehead drops to mine, and we stand there breathing the same air like two people standing at the edge of something neither one of us is willing to be the one who jumps.
“This is a bad idea,” I say, and my voice comes out rougher than I want it to.
“Which part?”
“All of it. Any of it.”
“Then say so.” His thumb moves once along my jaw, barely anything, and my pulse answers it like a struck bell.
His voice has lost the bored edge it’s carried all evening, gone rough at the seams instead, each word landing like he had to pry it loose to get it out.
“Tell me to step back, Sage. I will. Every time. That’s the whole point of the clause you just made me sign.
I don’t get to decide that for you again. ”
I should say it. The word is right there.
I don’t say it. I let go of his shirt instead, slow, deliberate, my own hands making the choice my voice won’t.
He steps back.
Not far. Just enough to put air between us again, just enough that I can breathe without breathing him in, and the fact that he’s the one who ends it instead of me feels like a verdict all by itself.
“There you go,” he says, and it’s the same three words from the tack room, except this time I can hear what saying them takes out of him.
“That’s why we need the clause,” I say, and my voice comes out steadier than I have any right to expect.
“I know,” he says, and drags a calloused hand back through his hair, dark and a little too long at the front for a man who’s supposed to have his whole life managed down to the minute.
Neither of us says the rest of it. That knowing didn’t stop either one of us from wanting it anyway.
That some wounds don’t close just because you’ve built a very thorough contract around the scar tissue.
That eight years ago I was good enough to love in the dark and not good enough to keep in the daylight, and today, apparently, I’m suddenly good enough to marry, and the only thing that changed in between is what my last name is worth to the people who get to decide these things for me.
I sit back down. I pick up my pen. I sign my name on the last page like it’s just paperwork, because if I let it be anything else I will not survive this house.
My phone buzzes against the table. Tessa.
Blink twice if you need extraction. I don’t answer it.
Dawson’s phone buzzes a second later, and he glances at it, huffs out half a laugh, and turns the screen toward me.
Finn’s sent him a photo of a billboard off Highway 89, a divorce attorney’s grinning face above the words Life’s Short. Lawyer Up.
“Your brother has a gift,” I say.
“My brother has a phone and no impulse control.”
I almost smile. I catch myself doing it and stop.
We finish the last page in silence that’s neither comfortable nor hostile, some new thing I don’t have a name for yet, and I’m reaching for my keys when his phone rings again, actual ringing this time, not a text, and the bare urgency of it makes him go still before he even looks at the screen.
He answers. Doesn’t say his name. Just listens.
I watch his face do the thing I remember from the summer I learned to read every version of it, the stillness that isn’t calm, the stillness that’s a held breath waiting to find out how bad it’s about to get.
“Where,” he says. A pause. His knuckles go white around the phone. “How long ago?”
Another pause, longer this time, and whatever he hears drains the color out of his face, a look I haven’t seen on him since he was twenty-four years old.
He hangs up. Sets the phone on the table like it might go off again if he moves too fast.
“That was Mackenzie,” he says. “The informant missed his check-in.”
“People miss check-ins, Dawson.”
“Not this one. Not ever.” He stands, already reaching for his keys, already somewhere else in his head, calculating routes and distances like I calculate legislative votes.
He scrawls his signature across the last page without even looking at it, the pen barely down before he’s moving again.
“They found his truck twenty minutes ago, parked off the Corridor access road.”
“Then he’s close. That’s good, isn’t it?”
He looks at me, and whatever’s behind his eyes now isn’t the man who just agreed to every clause I wrote to keep myself safe from him.
“His truck’s running,” he says. “He isn’t in it.”