18. Micah
EIGHTEEN
MICAH
He moves before she finishes. Drops to his knees at the edge of her mattress like some kind of worshipper. He doesn’t say anything. Just looks—at her, at me, at the outline of my body where I’m hard and straining through the sweats I slept in.
That’s when I understand.
He’s not angry. Not jealous. Not even a little.
He’s desperate.
Hungry in a way that makes my own need feel like a pebble in the ocean.
“Eli,” she breathes. “Please.”
Sage reaches for him again, hand in the air, urging him to close the distance. Closer.
He doesn’t move.
But he speaks.
“Make her come, Micah.”
I ease my hand between her legs again, crooking my fingers as I press my palm against her.
Her body bows and she tries to stifle the next wild cry with a fist against her mouth, but I don’t let her.
I slide my free hand up and pull her knuckles down, splay her wrist gently so her face is bare and open to me—to Eli, to all of us.
I want to see every filthy, honest moment.
“Let him watch you,” I whisper. “Let him see how beautiful you are like this.”
“Eli—Eli, please—”
She sobs, a wrecked, grateful noise, and Eli makes a sound so soft I almost miss it under the thunder of my own pulse.
“I’m here,” he says, voice barely audible.
“Touch me.”
A long, terrible pause.
Then he takes one hand out of his pocket and sets it on the bed, millimeters from her outstretched hand. He won’t let himself touch, but he’s close enough that she strains toward him and lets out a frustrated whimper.
“Please.”
I press deeper. I curl my fingers. My thumb works her clit in tight slow circles and she’s already so close it takes almost nothing—she’s been there since the moment he walked into the room.
Her whole body is straining toward the foot of the bed, toward him, her free hand grasping at empty air, her face turned away from me and toward him, eyes locked on his.
“Eli.”
“I’m here,” he says again.
She comes.
Her body locks, then shudders, then breaks open, and the sound she makes is wild and broken and shaped like both of our names. One hand wraps around my wrist as she bucks against me, and the other makes a final bid toward Eli.
Her fingertips brush his.
Just barely. The lightest possible touch. The smallest skin-to-skin contact that can still count as contact.
Eli flinches like she’s branded him.
The recoil is whole-body. He jerks back from the bed as if her hand has burned him, and his face—for one unguarded second—does something I have never seen Eli’s face do.
It collapses. The architecture goes out of it.
Whatever he has been holding in place for the last five minutes, the last two years, his entire life, gives way.
He stumbles back two steps. Then another.
Sage is still coming. Her body is still convulsing under my hand. Her fingers are still reaching toward where his wrist used to be, eyes hunting, mouth open around the shape of his name.
“Eli—”
He’s already at the door.
“Fuck.” I’m already moving, untangling myself from Sage, throwing the covers over and going after him. “Eli! Wait!”
“Stop him,” Sage calls after me. Her voice small, wrecked.
I freeze and look back at her—flushed, disheveled, looking like she’s about to shatter for an entirely different reason—and something in my chest cracks.
“I’ll fix it,” I say before I bolt for the door, nearly tripping over my own feet.
“Eli!” I catch up before he hits the stairs and grab his shoulder. He jerks away. “Eli, fuck, just wait—”
He doesn’t look at me. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what? Don’t explain? Don’t apologize?
” I move around him, block his path before he reaches the end of the landing.
He could shove past me if he wanted—he’s bigger, stronger, and right now he looks like he wants to put his fist through the drywall.
But he stops. Jaw tight. Eyes fixed somewhere over my shoulder.
“There’s nothing to explain,” he says. “You’re adults. You can do whatever you want with your time.”
“You mean our time. You were a part of that too.”
His gaze snaps to mine. Cold. Controlled. The Eli who runs operations, who makes hard calls, who keeps the rest of us from flying apart. I hate that version of him. I hate it because it’s a mask, and right now I can see the cracks in it.
“It’s none of my business,” he says, each word precise. “What you do with her—what she does with you—that’s between the two of you. I came to check on surveillance before work, not to—” He stops. Breathes. “The door was open. I heard sounds. I thought something was wrong.”
“Bullshit. You joined in.” I step closer. He doesn’t back up, but I see the tension coil tighter in his shoulders. “You’re pissed, and you’re pretending you’re not, and I need to know why.”
“I’m not pissed.”
“Then what are you?”
Silence. The stairwell is dim, early morning light filtering through the window at the end of the corridor.
I can hear Sage’s building settling around us—pipes, floorboards, the distant hum of traffic.
Eli’s breathing is too even. Too deliberate.
The way you breathe when you’re trying not to feel something.
“You want her.” I don’t ask, because the answer is plain as day. “You want her just as much as I do.”
His jaw flexes. “I don’t even know her.”
“That’s a cop-out.”
“And treating this like some fairy-tale romance is what?” His voice is low and razor-edged. “She’s not some princess, Micah. We’re not here to rescue her. We’re not going to take turns fucking her and somehow we’ll all be magically healed.”
“Don’t be so crass. That isn’t what this is, and you know it.” I lean in closer. “Don’t lie to me, man. She’s under your skin. Fuck, she’s under all of our skins.”
His eyes flick to my mouth, and suddenly his hands fly to my face and grip me hard, fingers digging into my jawline, and for one violent, breathtaking second I brace for a punch. Instead he drags me into him, mouth crashing onto mine, and it’s not sweet or careful or anything but feral.
He tastes like copper and salt and hurt. I freeze for half a heartbeat then kiss back, matching the pressure, letting him take whatever the fuck he needs. His teeth catch the corner of my mouth and it stings. I let out a sharp, guttural gasp.
It’s only then I realize his whole body’s shaking.
I don’t break away. I let him own this, let him devour my mouth until he’s gasping for breath and the thing inside both of us thrashes satisfied against its cage.
He tears himself back, eyes dark, chest heaving. For a moment, we just stand there—breathing like we fucked instead of fought, heads tipped together, me with my back against the wall and Eli’s hands against my chest.
“She’s not like us,” he says, barely above a whisper. “We should have gotten her out that night. But we didn’t. And now we’ve dragged her into—” He pushes away from me, rakes a hand through his hair. “It’s our job to protect her, not drag her in deeper.”
“I agree.” I tilt my head to try and catch his eyes.
Eli is a mask of control and restraint, and it’s always been beautiful to me, how he never lets it slip.
But I can see it now—the rupture under the surface.
The want, the terror. The knowing that he can’t control this.
Whatever is happening right now between us, and with her.
He has zero control at all. And that terrifies him.
“I agree with you,” I repeat. “If we’d gotten to that beach a few minutes sooner we could have stopped it before it started.
We didn’t. And we have to live with that.
” I keep my eyes on his and continue before he can open his mouth to respond.
“You’re wrong about one thing, though. She’s exactly like us. You just don’t want to see it.”
He steps far enough away that his back hits the opposite wall. “She’s not ready, Micah. You’ll break her. We all will.”
“She gets to decide who breaks her, and when, and how she wants to come apart.” I take a breath, bracing for his reaction.
“And if she does, it won’t be because you or I pushed her.
It’ll be because she needs to break, and we get to be the lucky bastards who hold her while she puts herself together. ”
He looks away. His throat works. The wall is back up but it’s glass now, brittle as fuck. “It was wrong, Micah. What we did in there. She just killed a guy and lost her sense of safety. She needs time, not—”
“She needed what I gave her. What we gave her. You don’t get to be angry at me for being there.”
“That’s not the same.” His voice is steel.
I crowd him, pressing my palm to the wall next to his head.
He towers over me, but I know how to make even giants feel cornered these days.
“Then help me understand, Eli. Help me out. Am I supposed to keep her at arm’s length when it’s obvious she’d rather be close?
Or am I supposed to shove my feelings down the way you do and call it penance? ”
His mouth opens, closes. A muscle in his jaw jumps again. “Micah—”
“You ever think maybe she needs both of us? All of us? That maybe she’s stronger than we are for surviving this long, let alone letting any of us in?” I stop. Swallow. Force the words from my throat. “I need you, too. Okay? Always have.”
The confession lands like a detonation in the narrow stairwell. I didn’t mean to say it. Or maybe I did. Maybe I’ve been carrying the feelings so long they finally got too heavy.
Eli’s pupils flare, dark and oceanic. “Don’t.”
I want to shove him, fuck or fight, doesn’t matter, just want to see him break out of that ice he lives in. “Don’t what?”
He grabs both my wrists and spins us, slamming me hard to the wall. His grip is iron. Crushing. My pulse spikes but I don’t look away or flinch. I never do. He can try to pin me all he wants, but he’s the one shaking.
“Don’t what?” I spit it back. My mouth is millimeters from his. I could goad him all day, let us both burn.
His hands tremble at my wrists. Barely, but enough. “Don’t make this about us.”
But it is. It always fucking is.
His body is so close I can feel how furious he is—every line of him wound tight, vibrating with that live-wire rage only Eli ever shows.
His breathing is shallow, and his fingers cut into my skin, and I wish he would let go or hit me or do anything except stand there, acting like this isn’t the only real thing we know how to do.
“Go on. Kiss me again. See if you can taste her.” I glare at him. “Better yet, why don’t you suck my fingers? Get your rocks off that way.”
“Fuck you, Micah.”
“No. Fuck you,” I say. “You’re scared, Eli. And you’re pissed at me because I got there first, and you think you don’t deserve to want her.”
“You don’t, either.”
“And you don’t deserve me.”
His eyes flash and he lets go of my wrists.
The heat and pressure disappear, and I almost slide to the floor from the drop in voltage alone.
Eli steps back, sucking in a breath so deep his chest expands against the stupid heather-gray Henley he always wears to work because he wants to look harmless.
“Go back to her,” he says. Voice frank. Dead steady.
“Shit, Eli. I’m sorry.” The fight drains out of me as fast as the expression clears his face, the mask sliding back on.
“Don’t be. You were right. But she shouldn’t be alone right now.”
I take a step toward her apartment but immediately turn back, guilt twisting in my stomach. For all of Eli’s faults, I can never stop caring about him. “What about you?”
“I’m going to work,” he says.
“That’s not what I’m asking and you know it.”
He shoots me a hollow smile. “I’ll figure it out. I always do.”
Then he shoves his hands back in his pockets and walks down the stairs. The door clicks shut behind him, and I’m left standing in the stairwell, heart pounding, head spinning, trying to figure out how the best morning of my life turned into a fucking disaster.
I take the stairs two at a time.
When I get back to her apartment, I do what I can to fix the lock before I go back to the bedroom. I find the door still open. Sage is sitting on the bed, wrapped in a blanket, knees pulled to her chest. Her eyes are red-rimmed. She’s been crying.
My hands are still shaking. I hide them in my lap as I sink down next to her.
“Is he okay?” she asks before I can say anything.
“He will be.”
“Did I mess everything up?”
“No.” I reach out, tuck a strand of hair behind her ear. “You didn’t mess anything up. Eli’s just . . . working through some things.”
We all are.
She nods, but she doesn’t look convinced. Her fingers twist in the blanket.
“He likes you,” I say, because she deserves to know. “That’s why he left. Not because he was angry at you. Or at me.”
She’s quiet for a long moment. “I like him too.”
It should sting. Maybe it does, a little. But mostly I feel relief—that she’s not apologizing, that she’s not pretending, that she’s being honest about something complicated instead of trying to make it simple.
“I know,” I say. “It’s okay.”
“Is it?” She finally looks at me, and her eyes are searching. “I just—you were so good to me, Micah. Last night, this morning, all of it. And then he walks in and I practically begged him to join in.” She presses her lips together. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. You must think I’m—”
“Human,” I finish for her. “It’s human, Sage. You’re allowed to feel more than one thing at a time. You’re allowed to want more than one person. That’s not a betrayal. That’s just . . . how this works.”
“How what works?”
I shrug. “Whatever this is. Whatever we’re all becoming. Something happened to us all that night to make us this way—twisted together in the same orbit. So let it be weird. Let it be messy. But let it be real.”
She blinks like she wants to cry but is now unsure if she should. “I don’t want to hurt anyone.”
“You’re not the one doing the hurting.”
She studies my face for a long moment. Then she leans in and kisses me—soft, sweet, nothing like the desperate heat of this morning. A thank you. A promise. Something I don’t have words for yet.
“Stay,” she says against my mouth. “Just for a little while longer.”
“Of course.” I pull her into my arms, and she comes willingly, her head finding the hollow of my shoulder like it belongs there. “I’ll stay as long as you need.”