Peyton
Iam still under the awning of my own building, stuck on a sentence that will not move, when Ryan’s truck turns the corner.
He should be at the rink. He should be anywhere a photograph of the two of us isn’t worth more to my enemies than anything either of us could say.
He parks badly and gets out anyway.
I have the sentence ready. I built it in the bar while my father offered me the exit — clean, merciful, the kind that ends a thing while pretending to save it. We should cool it for a while. For the story. For you. I will not have to mean it for it to work.
He crosses the sidewalk. I open my mouth to be noble.
And I hear it coming — the exact shape of California in my own voice before a word is out.
The softened paragraph. The quote moved down the page.
The true thing handed over so a powerful man could stay comfortable and I could stay safe.
I swore I would never do it again. And here I am, about to do it to the one person I cannot stand to lose, and call it mercy.
No.
“Don’t,” I say, before he can. “Don’t get the careful look. I had a speech ready. The reasonable one, where I let you go for your own good and get to feel brave about it.”
He stops on the sidewalk.
“Peyton—”
“I am done being brave like that.” My voice is not steady. I do not care. “I have given up every single thing I ever wanted to stay out of trouble’s way, and it has never once made me safe. It just made me good at being alone.”
His ribs are still taped. I can see the line of it when he breathes.
“I’m keeping you.” It comes out hard, like something held too long underwater.
“Not for a while. Not until it gets expensive. The next person who calls that a conflict of interest can read it in print, under my name, with my father’s right beside it if that is the price. No exceptions. Not this time.”
I make myself say the last part out loud, where I cannot take it back.
“I am so tired of being safe to love from far away.”
Ryan does not look like a man being talked into anything. He looks like a man who already had this fight with himself and came out the other side.
“I know,” he says. “I had your name on my phone an hour ago and a clean speech about giving you room. The kind of leaving I’m good at — the kind that looks like protecting someone.” A breath. “I put the phone down before I drove over. I didn’t come to be talked out of you. I came to tell you.”
“Tell me what.”
“That I’m done hiding it.” Not a hope. A decision. The kind the rest of them follow. “I didn’t get the C by handing over the things I want. I’m not starting with the one that matters.”
“That was almost a speech.”
“I came with one. You took the first half.” His mouth almost curves; then it doesn’t, because this is the part that matters.
“The second half is for the cameras. I’m going to the podium tomorrow — your name and the word love in the same sentence, in front of every lens Jennifer owns.
I’ll stand in the open until the word stops meaning anything.
They can’t expose what we put on the table ourselves. ”
“That will cost you.”
“You sound like Evan.”
“He’s right a lot. It’s annoying.”
“You were never going to have to choose between me and the story,” he says. “They needed that choice to be real. It never was.”
“Then I write it the way I should have written the last one.” I mean it the way I will have to mean it in print.
“The truest version I can defend. My name, my conflict, all of it on the page. If my source comes back, good. If he doesn’t, I keep reporting until someone braver than the smear says a name out loud.
Let them call it a vendetta. I’ll outwrite it. ”
The thing I came here to give up, and neither of us is going to let me.
I step into him.
“I love you,” I tell him. I do not look away. After tonight, looking away would be a lie, and I am done with the convenient ones.
Ryan goes very still. The way he does when something gets past every guarded part of him before he can decide whether to allow it.
“Say that again.”
“Which part.”
“You know which part.”
“I love you.”
He kisses me on a public sidewalk under a paper twenty-one in the bar window across the street, where anyone with a phone could turn us into exactly the thing they’ve been selling.
He does it anyway.
So do I.
He drives us to his place, and for once I do not care who might see.
We make it to the couch first.
Barely.
His apartment is dark except for the city light through the windows.
He kisses like he has been waiting all night for permission to be done waiting.
My jacket hits the floor. His shirt follows.
His hands are everywhere and still asking, thumbs stroking my ribs, his mouth at my neck, his breath hot against my skin.
“Bedroom,” I manage.
“Yes.”
He lifts me. I wrap my legs around his waist and laugh once, breathless, when he clips the doorframe with his shoulder.
“Smooth.”
“Do not review my footwork.”
“I am a sportswriter.”
“Former beat reporter.”
“Current menace.”
He laughs into my throat, and the sound makes me want him more than any perfect line could.
In his bedroom, the laughter turns into heat.
He sets me on my feet instead of the bed.
For one second, we just stand there in the dark, breathing too hard, his hands at my waist, mine on his chest. The city light cuts across his face and catches the damage there — the exhaustion, the want, the thing he has been holding back since the first night he told me to lock the door.
Not tonight.
Tonight, he looks at me like leaving is not even in the room with us.
“This is us choosing,” he says.
My throat tightens.
“Yes.”
Then his mouth is on mine again.
Not careful. Not polite. Not the version of Ryan that steps back before the line can blur.
He kisses me like he heard every word I said on that sidewalk and intends to make me prove it.
My back hits the wall beside his dresser.
His hands slide under my shirt, hot against my skin, and I arch into him because restraint has had long enough.
“Peyton.”
I pull his mouth back to mine. “I love you.”
His whole body changes.
It is not soft. That is the surprise of it. The words do not make him gentle. They make him sure.
My shirt comes off. His follows. Then his hands are at my jeans and mine are at his, both of us laughing once because the timing is terrible and neither of us is patient enough to fix it.
“Bed,” he says.
“Bossy.”
“Yes.”
The word should annoy me.
It does not.
He backs me toward the mattress, and I pull him down with me before he can do anything noble. His weight lands over me, solid and real, and the sound I make into his mouth is not one I could ever blame on emotion alone.
His mouth moves down my throat. Over my breast. Lower.
“Ryan.”
He looks up at me from between my thighs, eyes dark, mouth already dangerous.
“I’ve got you.”
“I know.”
“No.” His hands tighten on my hips. “You don’t.”
Then he proves it.
He puts his mouth on me like he has been thinking about it for days and hating himself for how much. Like he remembers every time he stopped. Every time he left. Every time he decided restraint was the cleaner choice.
There is nothing clean about this.
I fist the sheets. Then his hair. He groans against me, and the vibration nearly takes me apart.
“Fuck, Ryan.”
His hand slides up my stomach and presses me back down when I try to lift away from it.
“Stay there.”
“I’m trying.”
“Try harder.”
I laugh, or I mean to, but his mouth changes and the sound breaks into something helpless.
He knows exactly when I stop performing control.
I hate that.
I love that.
The first orgasm hits fast and mean, my back bowing off the bed, his name torn out of me while he holds me open and does not let me hide from any of it.
He kisses his way back up while I am still shaking.
I taste myself on his mouth.
That should not be hot.
It is.
It makes me reckless. I get a hand on his shoulder and shove, reaching for the turn — to put my hands on him, even the score.
Ryan
She goes for the flip, a hand hard on my shoulder.
I catch both wrists before she gets the leverage.
“Not yet.”
She tests the hold. I let her feel it does not move.
“Bossy,” she says.
“You reached first.”
I put her hands back above her head and keep them there. Her pulse goes hard under my fingers. She watches me decide what to do with her, and her breath gives her away before her face does.
I get the condom from the drawer one-handed. She does not tell me to hurry. She watches me do it slow, like she wants me to know she could wait all night and is choosing not to make me.
Then I am over her. Then I am in her.
There is nothing controlled about the way I want her.
There is control in how I love her.
I move slow on purpose. Make her take it. Her legs come up around my hips and her wrists pull against my hand and I give back neither.
“Ryan.”
“I know.”
Each stroke pulls a sound out of her, and I want every one. I want her loud in a building where no one can turn it into a headline.
“Tell me again,” I say.
Her eyes open.
“I love you.”
It lands somewhere I do not guard. My rhythm breaks on it. I let it break. The version of me that keeps the beat clean left on the sidewalk and does not get to come back for this.
“Again.”
“I love you.”
“Fuck.”
I do not use that word. She knows it. She smiles under my mouth even as she starts to come — the smug curve of it, the win she will never give back. That is what takes me. Not her body. The look.
I let her wrists go. Her hands drag down my back and dig in. I follow her down hard and bury the sound in her neck.
I do not move.
No call waiting. No clock. No apology already forming for the morning.
Just Peyton, gone heavy and slow against me, her breath leveling out in the dark.
She drifts first.
I have skate in the morning. I watch her instead.
The city gives me enough light. A freckle high on her shoulder. The mark my mouth left on her hip, going dark already. Her hand open on the sheet where I let it go.
Mine is the wrong word.
I know that.
Peyton belongs to herself in a way I am not fool enough to touch.
Here is the word I get.
She is here.
She turns in her sleep and puts her back to my chest and does not wake.
I stay.
Not the way a man stays when going would cost him.
The way a man stays when he is finally out of reasons to go.