Chapter 10 #3
“Two years, since Chicago. Clean.” I don’t need her to ask twice, and she doesn’t either. “You’re the first since I came home.”
Then I pull her back up and lay her down, spreading her thighs wide. Her pussy is soaked and swollen and so ready for me it nearly wrecks what’s left of my control. I line up the head of my cock at her entrance and finally, finally, sink into her.
Neither of us is quiet. I don’t care. I cannot make myself care.
I go slow when every part of me wants to go fast, because slow is the only apology I know how to give her without saying the word sorry out loud, and she lets me, arches into it, says my name again, pleading and broken, every bit of polish stripped out of it, like the word belongs to her again after so long spent pretending otherwise.
Fuck, my name on her lips undoes me completely.
I thrust into her deep, to the hilt, and set a punishing rhythm, hitting her G-spot.
I feel the release rising hot and fast, out of my control now, out of anyone’s control.
I pump into her over and over, filling her up, and I hear myself groan her name like it’s the only word I’ve got left.
She erupts at the same time, pulsing and clenching around me, her release mixing with mine and sliding down her thighs.
“Sage.” The only thing keeping me tethered to sanity at all.
I roll us both, taking her weight onto my chest, still inside her, neither of us in a hurry to be anywhere else. Over her shoulder, the dresser comes into view.
Her locked file case sits where she left it this morning, the little brass latch catching lamp light. My eyes land on it once, involuntary, and I look away before I let myself think too hard about what’s inside it.
“You didn’t look,” she says, drowsy, her voice already halfway to sleep, one arm thrown loose across my chest.
“I know.”
“You could have. I wouldn’t have known.”
“I’d know.”
She doesn’t answer that, just tightens her arm around me, and I take it as the closest thing to trust she’s got to give me tonight.
Afterward, she curls into my chest like she’s done it a hundred times before, like all those years simply evaporated.
Her palm settles flat over my heart, fingers spread, and I feel her pulse still hammering against my ribs where our skin meets.
I lie there with her weight against me and try to remember the last time I believed I’d ever get this again.
I didn’t. Not really. Somewhere under all the discipline and the routes and the freight contracts, I’d made my peace with a version of my life that didn’t include her in it, and now she’s here, breathing deep and even against my ribs, and it feels less like getting something back and more like being handed a future I already grieved.
She shifts closer, tucking her cold feet against my calf without waking, a habit from that summer that guts me more than anything she’s said tonight.
I’m terrified. That’s the truth of it, lying here in the dark with her hair spread across my arm.
Terrified in a way nothing in this war, not Cruz, not Robbie’s murder, not the fence line, has managed to make me feel.
I know what I’m not telling her yet, and I know what I stand to lose the day I finally do, and right now, with her this close, I can’t make myself want to trade tonight for that reckoning.
Not yet. Just this. Just her, a few more hours, before I have to risk losing her all over again.
I’ve never been more in love with anything in my life, and I’ve never had less of a right to keep it.
She falls asleep first.
I lie there a long time after, listening to her breathe, watching the sagebrush ink on my own wrist catch the last of the moonlight before I finally let my eyes close.
My phone buzzes on her nightstand, face down, glowing faint blue against the wood.
I don’t reach for it. Not yet. I tell myself five more minutes, five more minutes of her sleeping body against my chest and nothing in the world that needs my attention more than this.
It buzzes again. Then again, three times fast, the exact rhythm Mackenzie only uses when something can’t wait until morning.
I open my eyes and reach for it, and Sage’s hand closes over my wrist in the dark before I get there.
“Whatever it is,” she says, without opening her eyes, “it’s already happened.”
“That’s not a reason not to look.”
“It’s the only reason there is.” Her thumb moves once against the inside of my wrist, right over the sagebrush she hasn’t asked me about again. “Five minutes, Dawson. Then you can go be him. Right now be this instead.”
I lie there with her weight on my chest and four unread messages glowing against the wood and I give her the five minutes.
Every second of it is one I’ll be paying back before the sun comes up, and I give them to her anyway, and I understand while I’m doing it that this is the first promise I’ve made her that I intend to keep.
Then I take the phone out into the hall and shut the door so the light won’t wake her, and call Mackenzie back at two in the morning to find out what my own land has been hiding.