5. Vera
Sandalwood.
That’s the first thing I sense — before my eyes open, before I know where I am, before anything else resolves. Sandalwood and warm skin and the low amber light pressing against my eyelids.
Then the weight of an arm across my waist.
I go very still.
The room comes in by degrees. The AC unit humming. The clock on the wall reading one twelve AM.
I fell asleep.
Kane’s chest lifts and drops against my back, slow and even. His arm is heavy across my waist, his body a furnace behind mine, and at some point in the night — without deciding to, without asking permission — I tucked myself into the curve of him like this was somewhere I belonged.
Oh no.
No, no, no.
The scene ended. Aftercare. Water, soft words, his forehead pressed to mine. We should have left. Gone our separate ways. Instead we fell asleep tangled together like it means something.
I ease myself from his arms, inch by inch.
“Going somewhere?”
His voice is alert. Not sleep-rough.
I sit up, pulling the sheet around myself. “I should — we should…” I stop. “We need to go.”
His shoulders straighten, and his eyes settle into controlled blankness.
“You’re right.” He stands and runs a hand through his hair, pressing it back into order. Then picks up his watch from the nightstand and fastens it with careful movements. “We should leave.”
That’s it? Just... leave?
I watch him gather his things: phone, keys, the black silk tie folded with careful precision before he tucks it into his pocket. Each movement controlled. Methodical. Creating distance with every economical gesture.
“So.” I pull my knees up, wrap my arms around them. “That was...”
“A good scene. You did well. Any concerns I should know about?”
A good scene.
I had been waiting, without knowing I was waiting, for something else. I don’t examine what. The words make my throat go dry.
I reach for the water glass on the nightstand.
“I’m fine.”
“No concerns about anything we did?” he asks, focused on collecting his belongings.
“I said I’m fine, Kane.”
He pauses. Studies me, really looks at me for the first time since getting up. “Aftercare isn’t just physical. If you need to process —“
“I don’t need to process. It was one night. We agreed. We’re done.”
He nods. “Of course.”
The silence stretches between us, heavy with everything unsaid.
He checks his watch.
I’ve seen him do that before. At Sloane’s dinner table when an argument goes somewhere he didn’t expect. In doorways when he’s deciding whether to stay.
He crosses to the door. Pauses with his back to me.
“Vera.”
I look up.
“If you need anything. Questions about the scene. Processing support. I’m available.” He still doesn’t turn around. “That’s my responsibility.”
Responsibility.
Just responsibility. Like I’m an obligation he’s dutifully fulfilling.
“I’m fine,” I say.
His hand tightens on the door handle until his knuckles go white.
“Good. Then... thank you. For trusting me with that. It was an honor.”
The door closes behind him with quiet finality.
I sit there in the empty suite, wrapped in a blanket that smells like him, and try to figure out how to be normal again.
Seven AM and coffee isn’t helping.
My shoulders ache with a sweet soreness from being bound overhead. My inner thighs are tender, sore in a way that catches me every time I move.
I still can’t believe — Kane Sinclair made me scream his name. That I surrendered so completely I stopped thinking.
I pace my apartment, mug clutched like a lifeline.
In three hours I have brunch with Sloane. I need to be normal. I need to look like someone who slept and didn’t spend the small hours of the morning staring at her ceiling replaying every moment of being taken apart by her best friend’s brother.
My wrists don’t have marks. He’d checked circulation twice, shifted the silk with two careful fingers, voice dropping: Too tight?
The care underneath the control. I hadn’t expected that. The way he held both things at once — the certainty and the checking, the command and the quiet I’ve got you — like my safety wasn’t an afterthought but the whole architecture of it.
Professional Dom. That’s what he is. That’s what last night was.
One night. Not personal.
Except it had felt personal when he held me after. When he pressed his forehead to mine in the quiet, his hands still warm on my face, and the tenderness of it was so specific and so careful that I almost let myself believe it meant something.
Stop.
I shower. The hot water is the wrong choice — it reminds me of his mouth, the heat of his hand between my thighs.
My hand slides down before I can stop it, seeking relief from the ache building low in my belly.
No.
I yank it away and press my forehead against the tile. I won’t give in to this. Won’t let him have this much power over me. Not like this. Not alone in my shower.
I turn the handle and let cold water numb my skin until my teeth are chattering.
Small victory. I’ll take it.
I get out, get dressed, and armor myself in tight jeans, a silk blouse the color of wine, and statement earrings that catch the light. This is the version of Vera who has her shit together.
One night. We got it out of our systems.
I’m making the lie easier with every repetition.
Sloane is already in our usual booth, mimosa in hand, smiling bright and uncomplicated. Phone face-down on the table, which means she’s serious about quality time. She waves when she sees me.
Normal. Easy. Everything I’m not.
I slide into the booth, arrange my face into casual Vera who didn’t submit to your brother last night.
“Finally!” She pushes a menu toward me. “I already ordered mimosas. You look like you need one anyway.”
“Do I?”
Her too-perceptive eyes move across my face with the systematic attention she brings to everything.
“You look different. Glowy. Like you got amazing sleep or amazing sex.” A pause. “Which is it?”
My heart stops.
Can she tell? Does she know? Can she see it written all over my face: her brother’s hands on me, his mouth, his commands, the way I came apart for him?
“Good sleep,” I say.
She looks at me a beat too long. Then lets it go. But I have the distinct feeling it’s not gone — just set aside, for later, when I’m less prepared for it.
The waiter appears. Sloane launches into a work story, and normally I’d be fully present for this, but today I’m only half-listening, caught between the pull of last night and the push of right now.
I try to focus on the familiar rhythm of our friendship, but my mind keeps sliding back.
Kane’s hands. His voice. The way he’d looked at me, like he saw straight through every defense I’d ever built.
And it doesn’t help, God, it doesn’t help, that every time I look at Sloane, I see those same gray eyes.
Different, softer, warmer, but still unmistakably his looking back at me.
The same shade that had held me pinned last night, that had watched me come undone with an intensity that still makes my breath catch.
“Vee, why are you being weird?”
The nickname lands wrong. Or maybe too right.
Vee. Sloane has called me that for nine years. It’s hers — the shorthand of a friendship that has survived everything. But last night, in the dark, with his lips against my forehead and his hands still warm on my skin, he said it too. Let go, Vee. Quiet and certain, like he’d always known it.
“I’m not being weird.” I fiddle with my napkin.
“You are. You have that look.” She points at my face. “Same one you had when you broke my favorite mug in college and didn’t tell me for three weeks.”
Think fast.
“Okay, you got me.” I force a smile. “I... I met someone.”
Her eyes light up like Christmas morning. “WHAT? Who? When? Tell me everything!”
Relief floods through me even as something sour settles in my stomach.
“It’s new. Really new. I’m not ready to talk about it yet.”
“But you’ll tell me when you are?” She’s practically vibrating with excitement.
“Of course.”
Sloane grabs my hands across the table. “I’m so happy for you. You deserve someone amazing after Damon. That asshole didn’t deserve you.”
Damon. Who told me my wants in the bedroom were unattainable with someone like me. That my character made it impossible.
Sloane was there for all of it. Held me while I cried. Drove to my place at two AM with ice cream and wine. Convinced me he was wrong. But she only knew the version I gave her — that he thought I was too much of a hassle. That we wanted different things.
She never knew what things.
And now I’m keeping the biggest secret of my life from the person who knows everything about me.
“Tell me when you’re ready,” Sloane says, squeezing my hands. “No pressure. I’ll be over here vibrating with excitement.”
“I know you will.”
She lets go and her eyes shift past me, and her expression brightens.
“Hey, you.”
I don’t have to turn around to know who she’s talking to.
I look up and find Kane beside our table in workout clothes: black athletic shorts, fitted compression shirt. Hair damp, curling slightly at the ends. He’s carrying a takeout bag and wearing the expression he uses when he’s not wearing any expression at all.
He’s closed in a way I’d stopped expecting from him, after last night. After the amber light and the silk and more than enough and the way his voice dropped all the architecture and —
I pull my eyes back to my menu.
“Grabbing food,” he says to Sloane. “Don’t let me interrupt.”
“You’re not interrupting, sit down.”
“I shouldn’t —“
“Kane.” Sloane’s voice carries the authority of a lifetime of getting her brother to do things he’d decided not to do. “Sit.”
He sits. Across from me, beside Sloane. Sets the takeout bag on the edge of the table. His eyes move to mine for one second — calibrating, reading, doing the thing he always does — and then away.
I don’t like it. I don’t like that I don’t like it. I spent the entire morning trying to wash him off me, and the moment he sits down across our usual brunch table being unreadable I want to reach across and shake him.