Maya
Reid’s shirt was transparent where it was plastered against his chest. His clothes were wet and his hair was still damp.
He stopped in front of her.
The crowd had thinned. The music had dropped to something quieter. Children were being gathered up by tired parents, and the folding tables were starting to come down at the far end of the block.
He was looking at her with that complete, undivided attention that had always made her feel like the only fixed point in whatever room they were in.
“That took guts,” she said. “Making a fool of yourself in front of everyone.”
“I already did that.”
Reid—"
“I made a fool of myself at the Roll & Run.”
She stared at him.
"I—" He stopped. Pressed on. "I said—" His voice cracked, just slightly, just once. "I said things to you that I will spend the rest of my life trying to unsay."
"Reid."
"I don't want a divorce," he said. "I want you to come home." His voice was rough and completely entirely unlike the cold man who had stood in their doorway and handed her a suitcase. "I want to be your husband. I want to try to deserve you.”
She didn't mind the law. She’d married Reid knowing how he felt and she liked that about him.
She had been so proud of him, proud of his moral certainty.
She was not the kind of woman who needed to be put first. She was generous and practical and she understood that the people you loved had other loves and that was fine, that was mature, that was—
A lie.
She knew that now.
She was greedy. She was jealous. She wanted to be the thing he chose—not the law, not the evidence, not the clean line between right and wrong.
Her.
She had wanted that since the day she married him and she had never once admitted it.
And the tragic unbearable thing was that she couldn't pretend anymore.
She wanted her husband.
She wanted to go home.
But she couldn’t.
Reid was waiting for her answer.
She wanted to say: I love you. She wanted to say: Take me home. She wanted to step forward and let him put his arms around her and press her face into his soaking wet shoulder and stay there.
The picnic ebbed around them, winding down, folding up, the end of the afternoon settling over the street like something exhaled.
"I want to have sex with you," she said instead.
She watched the careful, controlled Reid Lawson she loved disappear into something wild, something untamed. And then she saw him wrestle control back.
“Yes. Are you…” he swallowed. “Is this time…?”
Every movement around them seemed to blur briefly into irrelevance.
“This isn’t about the baby,” she said. “I want you for me.”
The expression on his face nearly undid her.
She loved that she could do this to him.
Loved it with a fierce, selfish kind of satisfaction.
“You said you wanted me to be selfish,” she said.
“I do.” His voice sounded undone now. “God, I do.”
“Okay.” Her pulse hammered. “Then I’m being selfish.”
His eyes closed briefly like the words physically hurt him.
When he opened them again, they were dark.
He stepped closer to her. “Let me take you home,” he said quietly. He reached for her hand.
Maya threaded her fingers through his before she could second-guess herself.
She wanted to feel in control of one thing. And more than control. She wanted to feel her husband—
She cut the thought off.
She wasn’t ovulating. But maybe she wasn’t tracking it properly. She’d never needed to know her fertility before. They’d never tried for a baby.
And she wanted him.
Her jaw set slightly.
He was still holding her hand. They had walked home from the picnic together.
She had spent weeks adjusting to things being taken from her. Her freedom. Her reputation. Her home. Her marriage.
She was allowed to take something too. She was allowed to take what he was offering her.
They could conceive another time. She would track her cycle, measure everything she had to measure.
Today, this was for her.
Maya’s pulse picked up.
This was crazy. Her husband was going to make love to her.
No. That wasn’t what this was.
It was just sex.
Maya thought of him with his arm around her in the community center. Of the way he had stood at the bake sale. The way he had said yes when she asked for this.
“Maya,” he said, his voice lower now. “There is nothing you could ask me for that I wouldn’t give you.”
Her breath caught.
She wanted to believe that.
“This isn’t fixing anything,” she said quickly. “I’m not here because everything’s okay now.”
“I know.”
“And I’m not promising—”
“I know.”
He was saying yes to her, yes to everything. That almost undid her more than the arrest had.
Her eyes lifted back to his. “I’m not ovulating,” she heard herself say, the words suddenly breathless and strange between them. “This is just… practice.”
She wasn’t sure what she wanted. She wasn’t sure why she told him that. Did she want him to reschedule? Or did she want him to take her in his arms and kiss her anyway.
For one fractured second, something flashed across his face. Want. Relief. Devastation. It happened so fast she couldn’t separate them.
He nodded once.
“Okay.”
She could feel the shift in the air, the awareness between them. She lifted her hand and let it settle lightly against his damp shirt. The warmth of his chest seeped through her palm, solid and real. His heartbeat was fast.
He made a small sound and his eyes dropped to her mouth but he didn’t kiss her. Even now, even here, he was holding himself back, giving her the choice.
Instead, his hand rose slowly and closed around her wrist, like he needed to touch her.
She remembered metal there. The click of cuffs closing.
But this was not that. This was his thumb moving over her pulse. This was gentle. This was… loving.
She rose onto her toes and kissed him.