Chapter 8 #2
I think about Garrett's mama in her kitchen in Garrison giving my number to the man who pretended to be Garrett's best friend.
I think about a six-year-old boy at my kitchen table asking if Rogue was going to stay forever.
"I want him to stop. I don't care how. I just need him to stop."
Something in Rogue's face moves one degree. Like he's been waiting to be allowed. "All right."
"I don't want to know how."
"Good."
The room goes quiet after.
I'm still in the leather chair. He's still on the edge of the desk. Neither of us is movie.
The afternoon light is coming through his front window the way it did yesterday and the way it will tomorrow, and the whole world outside this room is going on like nothing in here has changed.
It has, though.
My body knows before my brain catches up.
I'm aware of him in the way a body is aware of weather—pressure shifting, air changing, something building.
He stands up from the desk. "Anything else you wanna tell me, Hadley?"
I stand up too. My legs are not entirely steady under me. "Yeah."
"What?"
"I didn't dream about what happened on my porch last night."
"Neither did I."
I take one step toward him. My heart is loud enough I'm sure he can hear it from where he stands.
My mouth has gone dry and my palms are sweaty.
I say, low, "I don't want to go back to my cabin yet."
He holds my eyes for a long moment. "You sure, Hadley?"
"I'm sure."
"Say it."
A knock comes to the front door.
We both go still.
It's not a hard knock. It's a friendly knock—three light raps, the kind you give when you're stopping by to ask a small favor and don't want to startle anybody. I know the rhythm before I know the knocker.
Rogue's eyes meet mine. He hasn’t moved.
He says, low, "You expecting anybody?"
"No."
Another knock. Then a small voice from the porch. "Mama?"
Nash.
My heart, which has been doing one thing for the last twenty minutes, switches to doing a different thing entirely.
I cross the front room and pull the door open.
Grace is on the porch in jeans and one of Shadow's old t-shirts, hair in a ponytail, Waylon on her hip and Nash standing beside her with one hand in hers.
Grace looks at me, looks at Rogue behind me and looks back at me again.
The smallest knowing crinkle moves at the corner of her eye and she doesn’t say a word about it.
"Hey, sweet thing," she says to me. "I was takin' Waylon out for ice cream. Thought I'd see if Nash wanted to come."
"Mama," Nash says, beaming up at me. "I told her you were probably here."
I crouch down because my legs aren't going to hold me if I don't. I take Nash's face in my hands and I kiss the top of his head. "Did you, baby?"
"Yeah. Aunt Grace knocked at our cabin first but you weren't there. So, I told her where to look."
Grace's mouth twitches.
I stand up. I don’t look at Rogue. I don’t have to.
I can feel him at my back, the quiet weight of him in the doorway behind me. "You want to go get ice cream with Aunt Grace and Waylon, baby?"
"Yes, please."
"Then go get ice cream."
Grace shifts Waylon to her other hip. "You want to come along, Hadley?"
I make myself meet her eyes. "I think I'll stay here, Grace. If that's all right."
Grace holds my eyes for one moment that lasts about a year, and then her smile goes warm in the way Marlena's did this morning at the bunkhouse.
"It's all right with me, sweet thing. We'll be back in about an hour and a half. Waylon needs a nap after sugar."
"Thank you, Grace."
"Anytime."
She takes Nash's hand. Nash waves at me—and then turns and waves at Rogue past my shoulder, big and unselfconscious. "Bye, Rogue!"
Rogue, behind me, says, "Bye, partner."
Grace's mouth twitches again as she turns to go.
I close the door slowly.
I stand at the door with my hand on the wood and my back to Rogue for one long moment while my heart settles into whatever it's going to be now.
Then I turn. He's still where I left him.
"You still sure about this, Hadley?"
"Oh, I'm sure."
He crosses the small room in two steps.
He has one hand under my jaw and the other at my waist before I've finished breathing in.
This kiss isn't the one from last night.
This is the kiss he didn't give me on the porch. The one I felt him hold back. The one that's been burning behind his eyes every time he looked at me sideways across the fence line.
His mouth hits mine like he's been starving for it. Sure and hot, and there's no hesitation in the way he tilts my chin up and takes what I'm offering.
My hands fist in his shirt before I make the decision—they just do.
I rise up on my toes, pressing into him because my body has stopped asking for permission.
His beard scrapes against my skin, rough and perfect, and I taste coffee and something darker, something that's just him.
He breaks the kiss just enough to speak. His voice is low, rough, barely holding together. "Bedroom or here, Hadley?"
"Bedroom."
He doesn't waste a second.
One arm hooks under my thighs, the other bands across my back, and he lifts me like I weigh nothing.
The kind of move a man makes when he's done being patient, but not done being careful.
I wrap my legs around his waist without thinking and feel the hard muscle of his chest against mine, the heat of his skin through our clothes.
He carries me down the short hall, and when he shoulders open the closed door—the one I haven't looked at since I started coming here—I feel a shiver run through me.
The bedroom is plain. A bed with a dark grey quilt. A nightstand. A small window with the blinds drawn against the sun slicing through the slats in warm blades.
He sets me down on the edge of the bed, but he doesn't step back.
He kneels in front of me. Eye to eye.
He takes his hat off at last and sets it on the nightstand, and I see his hair is rumpled, a lock falling across his forehead.
He runs a hand through it, then rests his palms on my knees, thumbs stroking the inside of my thighs through my jeans. "Tell me if I do somethin' you don't want."
His voice is steady but I can hear the want underneath it, ragged at the edges.
"I will. I promise."
He leans in and kisses me again—slower this time, deeper.
His tongue brushes my lower lip and I open for him, let him taste me.
His hands slide up my thighs, over my hips, settling at my waist. Then he reaches for the hem of my shirt and pauses, eyes locking on mine for the ask.
I lift my arms.
He pulls it off slow. Deliberately. Tugging the fabric up, letting his knuckles brush my ribs, the curve of my bra. The air hits my bare skin and I feel my nipples tighten beneath the lace.
He doesn't look away from my face until the shirt is gone, and then his gaze drops, and he takes me in.
The gold chain at my throat. Garrett's ring riding just above my cleavage. He sees it. I feel the weight of that look.
But he doesn't ask me to take it off. He doesn't flinch. He lowers his head and presses a kiss to the hollow of my throat, then another just below, his lips dragging down to my sternum, right above where the ring sits.
The breath I let out shudders out of me, shaky and raw.
Then his cut and shirt come off.
I watch it happen. The way he pulls the fabric down his arms and over his head, the way the muscles in his shoulders flex, how the light catches the ink of his arms.
For the first time I see them up close—the full sleeves of black and grey, the Shotgun Saints patch inside his forearm, the single black dots on his knuckles, the low scar across his ribs that I've wondered about.
I reach out and trace it with my fingertips. A question I don't have to ask.
He answers anyway. "Lubbock."
"I know," I whisper.
He lays me back on the dark grey quilt, and the mattress gives under us.
His body covers mine, knee sliding between my thighs, weight settling over me in a way that's both grounding and electrifying.
He's careful—so careful. Every move is measured. Every pause is a check-in.
He kisses my jaw, the corner of my mouth, the shell of my ear.
His breath is hot. His hand slides up my side, fingers splaying across my ribs, thumb brushing the underside of my breast. "Hadley."
His voice is a prayer against my skin.
"Stay with me. That's it. Look at me, Hadley."
I do. Every time he says my name I meet his eyes, and something in me unravels just a little more.
He lowers his mouth to my collarbone, teeth grazing, tongue soothing.
My back arches before I can stop it.
His hand finds the clasp of my jeans. He pauses again and looks at me.
I nod, and he eases the button open, pulls the zipper down slow enough to make me ache.
The denim slips over my hips, past my thighs, and he helps me kick them off. Then his hand comes back, palm flat against my belly, dipping lower.
"You're so beautiful," he says, and the way he says it—like it's a fact he's been holding onto—makes my breath catch.
He works me open with his fingers, slow and deliberate, watching my face the whole time.
He finds the rhythm I need before I know I need it.
My hips roll against his hand. I make sounds I don't recognize—low and desperate.
He answers them with pressure, with pace, with the pad of his thumb circling where I'm most sensitive. "Let go, Hadley. I've got you."
And I do.
I come apart with my face pressed to his shoulder, my hand tangled in his hair, my chest flattened against the chain that holds Garrett's ring.
The orgasm crashes through me in waves, and he doesn't stop, doesn't rush, just rides it out with me until I'm trembling and breathless beneath him.
Then he moves over me, and I feel him—hard and ready against my thigh.
I reach down and guide him, and he pushes into me slow, inch by inch, filling me so completely I gasp.
"Hadley," he breathes into my hair.
"Yeah."
He moves like he's memorizing me. Each stroke deep and deliberate, his forehead pressed to mine, his breathing ragged and uneven.
I wrap my legs around his waist, pull him deeper, and he groans low in his chest.
"Come again," he says. "Come with me."
I do. He feels it—the way I tighten around him, the sound I make against his mouth—and he follows, sinking into me one last time and holding himself there, shuddering, his forehead against mine while we both come back to ourselves.
He doesn't pull out right away. Doesn't move. Just stays, heavy and warm, and I feel every heartbeat of his through my chest.
The chain at my throat is warm between us.
After a long moment, he shifts, settling on his side and pulling me with him.
The quilt comes up over us, and I tuck into the curve of his body.
His arm wraps under me. His other hand finds the chain at my throat, fingers tracing the gold links, careful around the ring, like he's reading a story I haven't told him yet.
"Hadley?"
"Yeah."
His voice is quiet. Sure. "I'm not lettin' you go back to bein' careful with me."
The laugh that comes out of me is quiet and breathless, and I feel it move through both of us. "Good."
He presses a kiss to the top of my head. His hand stays on the chain. And I stay right there, letting the afternoon light fade behind the blinds, letting his heartbeat steady me, letting myself feel all of it—the grief and the want and the hope—tangled together under that dark grey quilt.
Outside, Diesel barks once at something that's probably nothing.
I'm going to have to get back to my cabin eventually, but I don't move yet. Neither does he.
For the first time in nearly two years, I'm lying next to a man who isn't my dead husband, and my body doesn't know how to feel guilty about it.
My body knew before my brain did that this was where it was supposed to be.
The ring on the chain isn't coming off today.
But the not-ready feeling I have about it isn't the same shape as it was a week ago.
It used to feel like a fence I couldn't climb. Today it feels like a door I haven't opened yet.
I press my forehead against Rogue's shoulder.
The Shotgun Saints patch is in my line of sight.
The dark ink of it lies just under my chin where I have my face turned.
I run my thumb along the edge of it once.
Mine.