Chapter 26
Molly
After the deputy takes our statements and the manager supplies the footage, we head home.
The drive back to Topa Ridge takes forty minutes, and neither of us talks for the first twenty.
The hills roll past in darkness, the headlights cutting white tunnels through the black, and I keep replaying Kendall's face in my mind.
The mascara tracks. The trembling hands.
The absolute certainty in her voice that she was the wronged party.
"She really believes it," I say finally.
Taz glances over. "Believes what?"
"All of it," I say. "The story she's telling herself. She's not lying, not to herself, at least. She's fully convinced that you and she had a real love story, and I'm the villain who destroyed it."
"That doesn't make it true," he says.
"No," I agree. "But it makes her dangerous in a different way than if she were just lying."
He's quiet for a moment, hands tight on the steering wheel.
"The custody thing," he says. "I didn't know about that. About Hudson going to Jensen's parents."
"I figured," I say.
"It's... I mean, Hudson's innocent in all this," he says, rubbing his jaw. "He's just a baby. And now he's caught in the middle of whatever nightmare Jensen and Kendall created."
"Jensen's parents have him for now," I say slowly, remembering what she said. "They're assessing both Jensen and Kendall."
"Which means someone official decided she wasn't fit," Taz says. "At least not fit enough for unsupervised care."
"That's terrifying," I say.
He glances over. "Which part?"
"All of it." I lean my head against the window. The glass is cool against my forehead. "That she's spiraling badly enough to lose her child. That neither of his parents can be trusted with him alone right now. That we're somehow still at the center of this when we didn't ask for any of it."
Taz reaches across the console and takes my hand. I let him.
"I'm sorry the date got ruined," he says.
"It wasn't ruined," I tell him, and bump his knee with mine. "The salmon was good."
"Molly," he says.
"The first hour was perfect. Before the phone started blowing up." I squeeze his fingers. "That part: the talking, the being together somewhere that isn't the nursery or the kitchen, that was good. I want more of that."
"Yeah?" he asks, like he doesn't trust it.
"More of that," I say, and squeeze again. "Fewer ex-girlfriends."
By the time we get back to the ranch, Maggie has Clem asleep and is watching some murder mystery on the living room TV with the volume barely audible.
"How was dinner?" she asks, clicking off the show.
"Eventful," Taz says.
Maggie raises an eyebrow. "Good eventful or bad eventful?"
"Kendall showed up at the restaurant," Taz says.
The eyebrow goes higher. "In person?"
"Made a scene," he says. "Staff walked her out. Sheriff's office was contacted."
"Lord." Maggie shakes her head. "That woman is a ticking time bomb. Has been since the first Thanksgiving Taz brought her home from college, frankly. I never understood what Richard saw in her."
"You knew her back then?" I ask.
"She ate at my table twice, honey. A mother remembers who eats and who performs." She stands, gathering her cardigan. "Clem went down about an hour ago. She took a bottle around seven, might be ready for another around eleven if she wakes up."
"Thank you," I say. "For watching her."
"My granddaughter? Please. This is the best part of my week." She kisses my cheek, then Taz's. "You two get some rest. And maybe consider changing your phone numbers."
After she leaves, the house settles into that specific late-night quiet that used to feel lonely and now feels like possibility.
I check on Clem, still asleep in her nursery, breathing steady, looking like a tiny peaceful bean in her swaddle, and then I stand in the hallway outside the room I've been using.
The door to our old bedroom, the one Taz has been sleeping in alone, is twenty feet away.
It's been eight weeks since I left that hospital. Eight weeks since I decided I couldn't do this anymore, couldn't keep pretending that loving someone was enough when he kept choosing everything else over me.
I think about the letter folded in my grandmother's nightstand drawer. The bee suit drying on a porch rail in Paso Robles. The lullaby with the made-up line. Tonight, his hand on my arm while Kendall screamed, beside me and never in front. My fingers are already curled to knock.
I walk down the hall and knock on his door.
"Yeah?" he calls.
I push it open. He's sitting on the edge of the bed, still in his dress shirt but with the sleeves rolled up, the tattoos on his forearms dark against his skin. He looks up at me, and I watch his expression shift from tired to confused to careful.
"Mol?" he asks.
"Can I come in?" I ask.
"Of course," he says, already half off the bed.
I step inside. Close the door behind me. The room smells like him: cedar and that expensive aftershave I used to buy him for Christmas, the one that comes in the ridiculous leather case.
"I don't want to sleep in the other room tonight," I say.
His chest actually stops moving for a second.
"Okay," he says, barely a breath.
"I'm not—" I try to find the right words. "This isn't forgiveness. Everything is still a mess."
"I know," he says.
"But I miss you. And I'm tired of missing you when you're right down the hall." I take a step closer. "I don't want you mistaking my wanting you for an apology for leaving. I needed to leave."
He stands up slowly, the way you rise when a deer has wandered into the yard. "What do you need me to do?"
"Nothing," I say. "Just—be here. Be present."
"I can do that," he says.
He doesn't reach for me. He stands there with his hands clenched at his sides like he doesn't trust them off the leash, and I close the distance slowly, until I'm close enough to feel the heat coming off him through his shirt.
I flatten my palm on his chest. His heart is going like a hammer.
I trace the open collar, then the side of his neck, where his pulse jumps under my fingertips, then the rough edge of his jaw that he didn't bother shaving tonight.
He closes his eyes and turns his face into my hand and breathes against my wrist, one long uneven breath, and the sound he makes is so quiet and so starved that my knees almost buckle.
"Mol," he says, rough.
"Shh." I drag my thumb across his bottom lip. He lets me. He doesn't lean one inch toward me, and watching this enormous man hold perfectly still under one fingertip because I haven't said yes yet coils a tight, hot ache low in my belly.
When I finally kiss him, it's careful at first, a question more than an answer. His hands come up to cradle my face, and I can feel them shaking against my jaw.
"Molly," he breathes against my mouth.
"Don't talk," I tell him.
He doesn't.
Good. I don't want speeches. I want his mouth and his hands and the specific gravity of him picking this room over every other emergency in his life, at least for tonight.
I walk him backward until the backs of his knees hit the mattress and he sits down hard.
I climb into his lap with my knees on either side of his hips and kiss him deeper, still slow at the edges but hungrier underneath, a hunger that's been sleeping in the guest room down the hall and pretending it could live on pride.
He cups my face like he can't believe he's allowed to touch it.
His lips part like he's going to try again.
I press a finger over them. "I said don't talk. Undress me. Slowly. Like you've got all night to make up for every night you didn't."
He does.
My dress goes first, lifted over my head so carefully it would be irritating if it weren't doing terrible things to the place behind my breastbone.
My bra is next, unhooked by fingers that remember that clasp better than I do half-asleep.
He puts his mouth on the freckle under my left breast like he's been saving the spot through every week I made him sleep somewhere else.
I arch into him and grab a fistful of his hair.
When he reaches my underwear he glances up once, asking without breaking the rule, and I nod hard enough to shake my hair loose.
My panties go. Then I tear at his clothes with no grace whatsoever until he's naked under me, tattooed and enormous and hard against my stomach, and the first full press of skin on skin makes us both let out a breath like we've been holding it since the hospital.
I close my hand on his cock and give it one long pull, watching his jaw clench with trying to keep his mouth shut.
It jumps in my fist. I'm getting wetter by the second, my body remembering him faster than my pride wants to allow, and it's frankly insulting how ready I am.
I rise up on my knees, fit him right where I want him, and take him to the root in one slow, endless sink that leaves us both gasping without a sound.
He fills me like a held note, thick and deep and perfect in a way that makes forgiveness feel beside the point for a minute.
I brace my hands on his shoulders, ink under my palms, heat under the ink, and start to ride him.
My hips move unhurried, the rhythm of a woman coming home to a room before she's ready to come home to every version of the man in it.
His hands settle on my waist. I allow it. When they try to steer my pace, I pin his wrists to the mattress for three strokes just to see his pupils blow wide, then let him go, because I want his palms on me more than I want to win.
"You can touch," I murmur. "You still can't narrate."
He nods, already undone, and puts his mouth on my throat instead of words.
Kisses. Little bites. The scrape of stubble that makes my cunt squeeze him until his breath stutters against my collarbone.
I ride him harder, angling so every downstroke grinds my clit against his pelvis, and the room fills up with the soft slap and slide of us picking each other anyway.