Chapter 26 #3
We sit close, her legs thrown over mine and her back against the pillow, the swing creaking its old, familiar creak. Cricket’s a red shape asleep against the door. The valley’s gone quiet for the hour, crickets starting up in the grass, the last of the heat lifting off the boards under us.
I don’t stop watching the tree line even now, same vigilance that doesn’t switch off just because the night’s gone soft, and Sage catches me doing it, the quick flick of my eyes to the fence and back.
“Still working,” she says.
“Always working. Just quieter about it tonight.”
“Eight years ago,” she says finally, “we used to hide out here because we were terrified our fathers would find out and end it before it even started.”
“I remember.”
“And now they’re the reason we’re here at all.” She takes the bottle from me and drinks straight from it, an impressive slug, watching the mountain instead of me. “That’s either the funniest thing that’s ever happened to either one of us, or the cruelest. I genuinely cannot decide which.”
“Both. I’ve decided it’s allowed to be both.”
She looks at me then, and her eyes have gone so black, only a sliver of brown iris left catching the moonlight, in a way that has nothing to do with the wine.
“I used to lie in my apartment in Ithaca and think about this exact spot,” she says.
“Not metaphorically. This porch. This swing. I used to wonder if you ever thought about it too.” She doesn’t wait for the answer.
She got it in a granite pool with the water still on both of us, and neither of us needs it said twice.
She sets the bottle down on the porch boards and climbs into my lap without a single word of warning, her knees braced on either side of my hips, her hands framing my jaw like I frame hers.
“I don’t want to talk anymore,” she says, her lips barely touching mine. “I want more of what you gave me last night. The couch, then the bed. Dirty and desperate and like you’d combust if you didn’t have me right then.”
I don’t need to be told twice.
I pull her mouth down to mine and there’s nothing held back in it, nothing measured out like I’ve made myself do since the courthouse.
My hands untie her robe and she’s already tugging at my shorts, and by the time the porch swing stops rocking under us we’re both bare to the night air, no audience but the mountain and one white star.
She rises up over me and sinks down in one long stroke, her slick, tight heat already starting to clench around me before she’s even finished. I hold still for it, just a second, just to feel her settle around me instead of chasing the finish.
“Fuck, Sage, I could do this every night for the rest of my life,” I say with awe in it, “and still want you again the second we’re done.”
Her head tips back, and I set the pace slow at first, both hands braced on her hips, watching every second of her face while I move inside her, and it’s a long time before either of us lets it turn urgent, both of us rocking into a rhythm that’s more instinct than plan, chasing each other harder and faster.
There’s no grief in it tonight. No fury from the Ledger floor, no confessions still hanging in the air between us. Just her, and me, and all the wanting finally allowed to be simple.
“Sage.” Her name in my mouth like a vow instead of a warning. “Look at me.”
She does. She doesn’t look away once, not when she comes apart around me with a sound halfway between my name and a prayer, not when I follow her under, both of us shaking, the swing gone still beneath us like even it understood this one needed reverence instead of speed.
She leans into my chest after, my shirt draped loose over both of us, her breathing slowing against my collarbone. If eight years bought me this one hour, I’d spend the eight years again without hesitating.
My phone lights up on the porch boards before either of us has caught our breath.
I almost let it ring out. Sage feels me tense before I’ve even reached for it, and she doesn’t tell me to ignore it. She just sits up, pulling my shirt tighter around her shoulders, and waits.
It’s Holt. He never calls this late unless it can’t wait for morning.
“Yeah.”
“Records fire,” he says, no greeting. “Tate got a clean pull on the Highline account. The second payment to Ashley, the one dated last week. It cleared the same day as the fire.”
“Same day.”
“Same day, Dawson.” A pause, and something shifts in his voice, careful now, how he sounds right before he hands somebody a wound instead of a fact.
“I had West run the basement inventory against what the insurance adjuster logged after the blaze. Half the 1962 archive’s missing from both counts.
Not burned. Missing before the fire ever started. ”
The porch goes very still around me.
“She didn’t burn the files,” Holt says. “She moved them first.”
I set the phone down on the porch rail and don’t pick it back up. The mountain’s gone black and enormous out past the fence line, giving nothing away, the same as it has every night of my life.
Behind me, from the dark where the swing is, Sage says, “Which one of them was it?”
She heard enough. She always hears enough.