Chapter Twelve #3
My breathing came in short, uneven pulls.
Not panic. Something lower than panic, something that lived in the muscles between my ribs and had been living there since Grant walked through the door, and maybe longer.
My hands were shaking. I pressed them flat against my thighs, fingers splayed, and held them there for three seconds before I gave up and let them shake.
Rogue didn’t tell me I was okay.
He didn’t tell me it was over. He didn’t say anything.
He put both arms around me and pulled me against his chest and held on.
His chin dropped to the top of my head. One hand spread wide across my back, palm flat between my shoulder blades, fingers spanning the width of the cut.
The other arm locked around my waist. He held me the way you hold something that’s coming apart -- not to put it back together but to make sure none of the pieces get lost.
I cried.
Not the pretty kind. Not the kind you see in movies where the woman looks beautiful with a single tear tracking down her cheek.
This was the kind that came from the chest, from somewhere below my sternum, a sound that started as a hiccup and became something raw and ragged that I didn’t recognize as my own voice until I heard it echoing off the cinderblock walls of the hallway.
My fists curled into the front of his shirt.
I held on. The fabric was warm from his body and smelled like motor oil and the particular cedar scent of the closet where he hung his cut at night, and I buried my face in it and let the sound happen because there was nowhere else for it to go.
He didn’t move.
He didn’t shush me. He just stood there with his arms around me and his chin on my head and his heartbeat steady under my ear, and he let me fall apart in a hallway full of folding chairs and donation boxes while the fundraiser carried on without us.
It took a while.
The crying had its own rhythm. It peaked, held, then began to recede -- not all at once, in increments, each breath coming a little easier than the last until the space between them widened enough that I could feel my lungs again.
My hands were still shaking. My face was wet.
I could feel the salt on my upper lip, the particular sting of tears that had been held back for so long they’d developed a chemical edge.
I pulled back. Just enough to look up at him.
His face was close. The hallway light threw harsh shadows across the planes of his jaw, the stubble dark against his skin, his eyes watching me with that particular watchfulness that had been there since the first night and had never once made me feel like I was being measured.
“I love you,” I said.
The words came out hoarse. My voice was wrecked from crying.
My eyes were swollen. I was a mess in a dim hallway in my leather cut, and I said it anyway -- not as a thank-you, not as relief, not as the payoff to a scene that had earned its emotional beat.
I said it the way you say a thing you’ve known for a while and are finally done keeping to yourself.
I said it because it was true and because he deserved to hear it.
Something shifted in Rogue’s face.
The hard line of his mouth softened. Not into a smile -- something quieter than that.
His jaw unclenched. The watchfulness didn’t leave, but it changed, the way light changes when it moves from one surface to another, and what was left was something unguarded that the club almost never saw because the club wasn’t supposed to see it.
He cupped my jaw in both hands. His thumbs brushed the tears off my cheeks. The calluses on his palms caught against my skin -- rough, warm, familiar in a way that made my chest tighten all over again. He looked at me for a long moment. Then he bent his head and kissed me.
Once. Slow. His mouth was warm against mine, and he tasted like the coffee he’d been drinking and something underneath it that was just him. I felt my hands find his wrists and hold on, and the kiss lasted long enough I felt breathless.
When he broke it, he didn’t go far. His forehead rested against mine. His hands were still on my face. Our breath mingled in the narrow space between us, warm and shared.
Then he pulled me back against his chest. His arms came around me again. One hand spread wide across my back. The other found the nape of my neck, his fingers threading into my hair, and he held me there in the dim hallway.
I pressed my cheek to his chest and listened to his heart.
It was steady. Slower than mine. The rhythm of a man who knew exactly what he wanted.
I could feel the cut between us -- his leather against mine, both of us wearing the same insignia, and the weight of it was something I had chosen and something he had given.
Outside, through the wall, someone was laughing. The sound was bright and unconcerned, the sound of a person who hadn’t been in the room when Grant Stewart placed a folder on a table.
Rogue’s hand moved once, a slow stroke from the base of my skull to the place where the cut ended at my shoulders, and I closed my eyes, leaning into him.