Chapter 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“You realize you’re not intimidating, right?”
Holden doesn’t even glance up as he ties his boots, perched on the lower bunk. “Good. I’m not trying to be intimidating. I’m trying to be unapproachable.”
“You’re failing at that too,” I say, tugging at the strap of my duffel bag, already dressed in leggings and a light blue tank. “Miserably, actually.”
He chuckles—low, effortless, that kind of sound that seems to vibrate somewhere beneath my skin.
No matter how many times I hear it, it still does something unholy to my nervous system.
And his smile? That’s even worse. It transforms his face in the most unfair way—pulls the sharpness from his features and replaces it with warmth, with mischief.
With something that makes me forget the alphabet.
He glances up at me, eyes dark and steady. “Come here.”
I’m already moving before he finishes the sentence. Always closing distance with him, as if my body’s trained for it. He parts his knees a little wider as I step in, and his hands lift—but pause midair, a breath from my waist.
“Can I touch you?”
“You don’t have to ask every time,” I murmur, even though part of me aches at how seriously he takes that. How careful he is with every inch of me.
“I do,” he says. “And I will.”
That earns him a crooked smile. “Yes, Holden. You can touch me.”
He exhales softly, and his palms land on my hips—warm, solid, reverent—before pulling me flush against his chest. I brace my hands on his shoulders to steady myself.
His heat seeps through the thin fabric of my tank top, his breath fanning against my collarbone, and every nerve ending I have tunes itself to him like it’s instinct.
There’s nothing casual about the way he holds me.
It’s not innocent. It’s not careful. It’s just him, needing me close, and taking it.
This—whatever this is—is dangerously easy to want.
The feel of him so near, the way his hands settle on me like they’ve been there a hundred times before.
It would be so simple to let myself believe this is settled.
That the hardest part is behind us. That we’ve crossed the line, and now we get to live on the other side of it.
But I know better.
I know how silence can look like comfort when you want something badly enough.
I know how quickly closeness can turn to distance if the things left unsaid stay that way.
Until we talk—actually talk—about what held him back all this time, about the space he kept putting between us like a wall I wasn’t allowed to climb, I won’t hand this moment over to hope.
Wanting him is easy. But trusting what this means will take more than wanting.
He pulls me in tighter, like he’s trying to memorize the way I fit against him, and every inch of restraint he’s clung to is coming apart. Slowly. Precisely. Like he’s dismantling it on purpose, even while pretending he still has control.
I can feel it in him—that low hum of tension just under the surface, running through his arms, his jaw, the way his thumb presses a little too hard against my hip. He’s fighting it, but he’s already lost.
We both have.
“Coralie,” he says, and my name sounds ruined in his voice. “When we leave this cabin, I can’t touch you like this anymore.”
I nod, but it’s a lie. A weak one. “I know.”
His eyes narrow a little, because he sees right through me. “No, you don’t.”
“I do,” I say, though I’m still inching forward, like I’m allergic to the idea of distance. “I just don’t care.”
That gets me a smile, one of those breathtaking ones that looks like it slipped out before he could stop it. He leans in the final breath of space between us, his lips brushing mine once, twice, like he’s testing the edge of a cliff before jumping off it.
And then I jump for him.
I press in, mouth opening just enough to let him in all the way. He groans against me, low and raw, like he’s been starving and I’m the only thing that’s ever tasted right. His hands tighten at my waist, greedy now, like he’s making up for every second we’ve wasted dancing around this.
“You’re impossible,” he mutters between kisses, pulling my bottom lip between his teeth. “You undo me.”
“Good,” I say, breathless, fisting the front of his shirt. “I was starting to think you’d never unravel.”
He laughs once, dark and low, and kisses me harder for it—less careful, more desperate, like he’s finally letting himself feel all the things he’s tried to bury beneath professionalism and protocol.
I kiss him back with everything I’ve been holding in, every touch I couldn’t allow, every look I couldn’t linger on.
And in this moment—this breathless, rule-breaking moment—I don’t care about anything else.
Not the rules.
Not the timing.
Not even tomorrow.
Just his mouth on mine, his body flush against me, and the sharp, exquisite danger of getting everything I want.
Half an hour later, his palms are smoothing over my hair, trying to tame the wild mess of curls he’s been tugging at with reckless, desperate hands—again and again and again.
Somewhere between kiss number seven and number I-lost-count, we both agreed we should probably stop if we wanted to look remotely human walking out of here.
“Turn around,” he murmurs.
I do.
Of course I do.
Because I love this side of him—composed, exacting, quietly sovereign over whatever world has been placed in front of him.
He’s always carried control like a second spine.
It’s there in the way he marks our papers in red, not carelessly but with surgical conviction; in the way his brow lifts, almost imperceptibly, when someone in seminar mistakes volume for intelligence; in the way disorder seems to offend him on a cellular level.
He hates mess.
Not chaos, though. That’s the contradiction. Mess irritates him. Chaos fascinates him.
A mislabeled data set can ruin his afternoon, but give him a cyclone—give him pressure systems collapsing into violence, give him wind with no manners and rain with teeth—and he leans closer. He wants to understand its shape. Its hunger. The exact point where pattern becomes destruction.
And then, because he is who he is, he tries to make even that obey a spreadsheet.
I feel the shift behind me—his fingers parting my hair into three even strands.
“Are you… braiding my hair?” I ask.
“Uh huh.”
“Where did you even learn to do that?” I glance at him over my shoulder, genuinely startled.
“Penny’s been asking for braids since she was four. Eventually I gave in.”
He ties off the braid with the elastic from my wrist casually. Like he hasn’t just made my chest ache with something unbearably simple. Then he pulls me gently into his lap, one arm slipping beneath my knees, easy as breath.
“Do you see her often?”
His knuckles trail absently along my shins, and my breath stumbles over itself.
“I see her once a week,” he says. “Stacy—my sister-in-law—and I have always been close. When Jacob passed, I started helping more. Penny keeps me in line now. Was furious I left for this trip.”
I smile, picturing it—this mini version of him, kind of, with a braid in her hair and a lecture on her lips.
“She’s lucky,” I say quietly. “To have you.”
He shakes his head. “No. I’m lucky. She reminds me so much of Jacob it’s hard sometimes. But it’s good. He didn’t get to stay, but he left her behind.”
He lifts me gently off his lap, sets me down like I’m made of something breakable, then hands me my duffel. One kiss to the crown of my head.
“Will you be okay until we talk?” he asks. “You need to know—this distance? This delay? It’s not about you, Coralie. It’s me trying to do the right thing.”
I swallow the lump building in my throat, the one that comes every time I think too hard about how temporary this might still be. “I’ll be fine,” I lie with a smile. “I’ll come find you at your office the day after we land?”
He nods. Presses his thumb against the side of my neck, like he’s marking the place for later. Then he’s gone.