14. Kane
I wake at six-thirty and lie still for a moment.
Vera is still asleep, curled into me. One hand tucked under her cheek, the other resting on my forearm where it wraps around her waist.
I give myself five minutes of watching her. The slope of her nose. The fan of her lashes. The stillness of her face.
Then her eyes flutter open.
“Morning,” I say.
“Hi.” She blinks. “Oh god. I stayed.”
“You did.”
“I have work at nine.”
“Stay for coffee,” I say.
She shifts to sit up and immediately winces, hand going to her hip.
“Careful.” I catch her waist. “How bad?”
“Not bad. Just—” She makes a face. “Sitting is going to be interesting today.”
“Let me see.”
“Kane—”
“Let me see.”
She considers arguing. But a moment later she chooses to roll onto her stomach with a dramatic sigh. “Fine. Inspect your handiwork, Sinclair.”
I pull back the sheet.
Pink-to-red across her skin, the marks settled overnight into a deeper flush. A few areas show the distinct outline where the wood made contact. Nothing broken. Nothing beyond what’s normal for impact play. The marks will fade in a day or two.
I run my fingers over them, checking for heat, for anything beyond surface level. Warm but not inflamed.
“Does it hurt to touch?”
“A little. Good hurt, though.” She glances back at me over her shoulder. “Honestly? I kind of like it.”
“Like what?”
“That you can see it. That there’s proof.” Her voice goes soft. “Makes it more real. Like I didn’t just dream the whole thing.”
I lean down, press a kiss to one of the marks. Then another.
“It was real. Every second of it.”
“Good.” She relaxes under my touch. “Because I’d hate to think I hallucinated the best night of my life.”
I smile against her skin. “Best?”
“Don’t let it go to your head, Sinclair.”
“Too late.” I kiss my way up her spine, to the sensitive spot behind her ear. “You admitted I ruined you.”
“I said best, not only—” She gasps when I bite down on her earlobe.
“That’s cheating.”
“That’s motivation.” I pull back, help her turn over. “Come on. Coffee will help.”
She takes the shirt I offer without comment, one of mine, a dark gray henley from the clean laundry I haven’t put away yet. She pulls it on and it swallows her completely. Mid-thigh. Sleeves covering her hands until she rolls them up three times.
“What?” she asks, catching me staring.
“Nothing.”
She gives me a look, then follows me into the kitchen. Settles onto a bar stool, pulling the too-long sleeves over her hands. I’m in jeans, no shirt. Didn’t bother.
I measure the grounds with precision. Check the water temperature.
“Look at you,” she says, voice warm. “All that focus.”
I glance at her. “Coffee requires precision.”
“Oh, I remember.” Her smile turns slightly wicked. “Six level scoops. Medium grind. Fill to the six-cup line. Exactly.”
Heat flickers through me.
“You were paying attention,” I say.
“Hard not to when someone’s teaching you so thoroughly.” She props her chin on her hand, watching me work. “Although I seem to recall you had me do all the work that time. This feels like role reversal.”
“This is aftercare. Taking care of you.”
“Mmm.” Soft now. Genuine. “My very careful Dom, making sure his girl is properly caffeinated.”
His girl.
I don’t examine those words.
“Always,” I say.
“Even if I question your grind settings?”
“Even then.”
The coffee finishes. I pour two cups. Add cream and sugar to hers, one packet, splash of cream, exactly how she takes it. Because I was paying attention too.
I hand her the mug.
She takes it with both hands before bringing it to her lips and taking a sip.
“Perfect.” Soft. Appreciative. “You make good coffee, Kane.”
Then her smile fades.
She sets down the mug, hands still wrapped around it.
“Oh no.”
“What?”
“We’re not arguing.” Her eyes go wide. “Kane. We’re not arguing.”
“We don’t have to argue about every—“
“Yes, we do!” She stands abruptly, barstool scraping the floor. “We always argue! About everything! And now we had a civil exchange about your coffee-making process!”
“Vera—”
“Sloane’s going to know.” She’s pacing, hands pulling through her hair. “She keeps a running list of things we’ve argued about. And now we’re —“ She gestures wildly at the bedroom, at me, at herself in my shirt. “We can’t pretend everything’s the same when we’ve done this.”
“We can absolutely maintain—”
“How?” Nearly shouting. “How, Kane? You think we can flip a switch? Go back to being enemies in public while we’re—“ She gestures at the bedroom again. “While we’re doing what we’re doing?”
“We were never enemies.”
“That’s not the point. The point is Sloane knows us. She knows how we are together.”
“So we’ll be more careful.”
“More careful?” She laughs, sharp and humorless. “You think we can choreograph our arguments like scene negotiations?”
“That’s not what I’m saying—“
“Then what are you saying? Because it sounds like you think we can just perform normalcy and she won’t notice everything’s different!”
“I’m saying you’re overreacting!”
“I’m not—“
“You’re panicking over one conversation—“
“It’s not one conversation, it’s a pattern! It’s years of history we’re about to destroy because we can’t keep our hands off each other.”
“So what do you want me to do?” My voice rises to match hers. “Go back in time? Pretend last night didn’t happen?”
“I want you to take this seriously!”
“I’m taking it seriously! You’re having a meltdown over coffee.”
“It’s not about the coffee!”
“Then what is it about?”
“It’s about lying to my best friend.” Her eyes are bright with angry tears now. “It’s about destroying a friendship that’s older than any relationship I’ve ever had because I can’t stop wanting someone I’m not supposed to want.”
“You think I don’t know that?” My mug hits the surface with force. “You think I’m not aware of what we’re risking? What we’re doing to her?”
“Then why are we doing it?”
“Because I can’t stop!” The words come out before I can shape them. “Because years of fighting it didn’t work. Because you knelt for me and looked at me like I wasn’t broken and I—“ I stop. Force breath into my lungs. “I can’t give that up. I can’t give you up.”
The argument goes out of the room.
She stills. Her hands uncurl at her sides. Her chest rises and falls once, slowly.
“Even if it costs us Sloane?”
“I don’t know.” The admission burns. “I wish I could promise you this won’t blow up in our faces. I can’t.”
She looks at me for a long moment. Not reading me, not calculating. Just looking.
“You’re an asshole.”
“You’re impossible,” I say.
“We’re going to hurt her.”
“Probably.”
“And you’re still not going to stop.”
“No.” I meet her eyes. “Are you?”
She looks away. The window. The counter. Somewhere that isn’t me.
Then back.
“No.”
We stare at each other across the kitchen. Both completely unable to walk away.
The air between us changes.
Her lips twitch.
“We were fighting,” she says.
I blink. “What?”
“We had a full Sinclair-Beckett Smackdown. About our agreement. About Sloane.”
The understanding hits me a beat after her.
We did. We fell right back into it — the same push, the same fire, both of us too stubborn to back down.
Except this time it was real. Not armor. Not performance. Two people who genuinely drive each other insane even when they’re sleeping together.
“We’ve still got it,” I say.
She starts laughing. Actually laughing. “Oh my god. We do. I had a complete meltdown and you got frustrated with me and we argued about whether we could still argue and—” She covers her face with both hands. “This is insane.”
“Completely insane.”
She drops her hands. Looks at me with something between relief and resignation. “So we can have this—” she gestures between us, “—and still want to strangle each other over stupid shit.”
“Apparently.”
“That’s—“ She searches for the word. “That’s actually kind of perfect.”
“Perfect?”
“Yeah. Because it means nothing has to change. We can still be us, the arguing, annoying, incompatible us that Sloane knows, and also be the other us. The private us.”
Her hands settle on my chest. “The fighting is real. The frustration is real. You’re still a controlling perfectionist and I’m still a woman who thinks she knows better, and that hasn’t changed because you’ve seen me naked.”
I look at her. Standing in my kitchen in my shirt, hair a mess, yesterday’s mascara smudged, arguing her way to peace the way she does everything.
“You’re something else,” I say.
“Is that good or bad?”
“I haven’t decided.”
She grins. Leans up on her toes. “Let me know when you figure it out.”
I pull her against me and kiss her, and she stops smiling long enough to kiss me back properly.
A kiss that starts as punctuation and becomes its own argument, the way it always does.
Her hands slide up my bare chest. Mine find the hem of my henley where it falls across her thighs.
She presses closer and I let her, for longer than I should, until I’m hard against her hip and she feels it and goes very still.
She pulls back.
Looks up at me with an expression I can’t immediately name — not desire, or not only that. Something steadier.
“Kane.” Her voice has lost the teasing. “You didn’t come last night. Again.” A pause. “You never do. Not with me.”
I hold her gaze. “No.”
“Why?”
“Because the scene isn’t about me,” I say finally. “What you needed last night — the consequence, the aftercare, all of it — required my full attention. Taking something for myself would have meant splitting it.”
I search her face. And then, before I can decide not to:
“It’s harder to stay present. When I’m not indifferent to the outcome.”
I’m aware that I said more than I meant to. Not the first part. The second part. When I’m not indifferent to the outcome.
That wasn’t strategy. That was just true.
I don’t look at her.
The problem with Vera is that she notices. She will notice this. She’s noticing it now, in the quarter-second before she speaks. And I have nothing to do with that except let it stand.
“That’s—“ She stops. Tries again. “That’s the most you thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“I’ll take that.”