39. Sage
THIRTY-NINE
SAGE
My phone buzzes against the counter while I’m standing over the sink eating a peanut butter sandwich I don’t want, and the screen lights up with the last name I expected.
Amy:
Hey bestie. I know I’ve been the worst lately. Are you home today?
A week ago I’d have left it on read. The worst lately doesn’t begin to cover the way Tyler’s been peeling my best friend off me like I’m a coat he doesn’t want her wearing.
But I’ve spent three hours refolding the same throw blanket and losing a fight with a sandwich, and instead of irritation my chest does this embarrassing little unclench.
Me:
I’m home. You free?
Amy:
Tyler’s at some country club. Heading home to breathe in my own space for a bit. Bringing coffee—the good stuff from Beanwerks, not the dishwater your work serves.
Me:
RUDE. But yes. It’s lonely here without you.
Amy:
I’m soooory. 45 mins. Love you.
Me:
love you too.
Forty-five minutes. I can do forty-five minutes.
Here’s the thing I keep not saying out loud: every conversation I’ve had in the last sixteen days has been with one of them, or about one of them, or orbiting whatever it is they are and whatever it is we’re doing.
You can’t tell five men who hung a guy off a jetty which nail polish you’re deciding between.
Except Jamie.
Jamie from the diner, who tips too well and asks how my shift’s going and tells me about whatever he’s reading.
Who’s been parked in booth seven, three of the last six afternoons, listening to me talk about nothing—the weather, whether the owner’s ever going to repaint, the kind of nothing I can’t say to anyone else because everything else in my life is a thing I’m not allowed to say.
Jamie’s easy. Jamie’s safe. Jamie doesn’t know a single thing about me that isn’t visible across a counter and a coffee pot.
It should make me feel less alone. Mostly it makes me miss Amy more.
I rinse a plate that doesn’t need rinsing.
Wipe a counter that’s already clean. My eyes snag on the two sets of keys by the toaster—strips of tape, Holden, Eli—and I still don’t know what to do with them.
Leave them there, I guess, until one of those men walks in and lifts his own key off my counter.
My pulse does something stupid at the thought.
Not doing that. Waiting for Amy.
A knock at the door.
Too soon. Tyler’s place is twenty minutes out, and that’s before a coffee stop.
I open the door.
“Holden?”
Holden in jeans and a charcoal Henley, sleeves pushed to his forearms, hair still damp like he showered right before he came.
He’s leaning one shoulder against the doorframe, hands in his pockets, like he’s been waiting a hundred years for the door to open and is choosing not to look bothered about it.
“Wildcat.”
The sound of his voice makes me instantly wet.
“Got a minute?”
“That depends. What for?”
“Police business. Mostly.” His eyes drop to my bare feet then slowly make their way back up to my face. “Unless you have plans.”
“I’m expecting someone.”
He flashes a grin that makes my knees go soft. “That’s okay. I can share.”
I step back and let him in. He walks past close enough that I get a hit of his cologne—sharp, cedar-edged—and I’m aware of my own body in a way that’s irritating.
Micah was in my bed this morning. I’ve had plenty of orgasms this week.
The man in my living room hasn’t laid a finger on me since he pinned me to a wall and called me wildcat—he shouldn’t be affecting me this deeply.
He takes a look around the apartment like he’s cataloging it, turning a slow circle until he clocks something in the kitchen and makes a beeline for the counter.
“What are these?” He scoops up the labeled keys, turning them in his palm.
“Milo’s arts and crafts hour,” I say. “Apparently everyone gets house keys now.”
Holden reads the little strip of tape with his name on it. His mouth does something unreadable. Not quite pleased. Not quite pissed. Both, probably.
“This one’s mine?”
“Yeah.”
He pockets it. Looks at Eli’s.
“I’ll get this to him too.”
Holden pockets the second key.
“You okay with this?” he asks. “Five of us with keys to your life.”
“Are you okay with it?”
He glances up. “I’m asking you, wildcat.”
“At this point it feels redundant.” I shrug. “You all got in here before the keys existed. They aren’t access. They just save the lock.”
“Hmm.” He moves to lean against the counter across from me, hands flat on the laminate. Three feet between us, keeping a careful distance. “That’s a pragmatic answer.”
“It’s the truth.”
“The question wasn’t really about keys.”
I meet his eyes. “I know.”
He doesn’t look away. He’s doing the same thing he was doing in the diner that first morning, where he looks at me like he’s reading something on my face. His eyes track from my mouth to my eyes and back. Once. Slow.
I have an insane urge to pounce across that counter and wrap my body around his and find out if he tastes as controlled as he looks.
“You said something about police business?” I prompt when the wanting becomes too much.
He clears his throat. “I need to take a statement from you.”
My spine goes straight.
“A statement about what?”
“Brock.” His voice is even, but there’s a tightness under it.
“His parents are pushing. I need something on paper that says what you’ve already told me informally—that you went to the party, he left with you, and then he bailed.
It gives me something to put in the file so nobody higher up decides to get ambitious. ”
The air in the apartment shifts. Not colder. Sharper.
“And this is official?”
“Official enough to be annoying.” His mouth tilts. “Not official enough for me to drag you downtown and make you sit in an interview room under fluorescent lights.”
I cross my arms. “How generous of you.”
“I’m a public servant.”
I snort, and his eyes flick to my mouth again like he can’t help himself. It should annoy me. Instead it lights something low in my belly—all the ways this man can ruin me without ever touching me.
He pushes off the counter first, like he knows if he stays there much longer one of us is going to say something reckless.
“Let’s sit,” he says.
I hate how immediately my body moves to follow him.
We move to the couch. I take one end while he takes the other. There’s enough space between us for good decisions and bad fantasies. He pulls a small notepad from his back pocket, then his phone, setting it face down on the coffee table.
“Relax,” he says.
“I am relaxed.”
He looks at my crossed arms, my pointedly straight spine, my bare toes curled into the rug.
“Sure you are.”
I glare at him. He uncaps a pen.
“Do you have to write it down like I’m on Law and Order?”
“I can go get a tape recorder from my car if you want the full experience.”
“That’s not funny.”
“It is a little bit.”
He opens the notepad and walks me through it slowly.
It’s more of an ironing-out-the-details conversation than a genuine statement.
Like he’s checking to make sure I have my story straight and we’re all on the same page.
Where the party was. When I arrived. Who I came with.
Brock’s mood. When we left. The walk home.
The route. Any cars or people I noticed.
What time we said goodbye. He asks the questions a few times, in slightly different ways, and the whole time he’s writing in the notebook in his neat, surprisingly small handwriting.
He flips the page, and I watch his hand move.
His fingers are long. A faint scar across one knuckle. His forearms flex every time he writes, the pushed-up sleeve catching just below the elbow, and I hate that I notice any of that. I hate that I notice all of it.
“Anything else?” I ask, because if I don’t put words in the room, I’m going to drown in the silence.
His pen stills.
Then his gaze lifts to mine. “Yeah.”
Something in my stomach drops.
He leans back against the couch cushion, not relaxed exactly—more like controlled to the point of violence. “Tell me about Stephen.”
I blink. “Stephen?”
“Mm. Was there anyone at the party with that name?”
I think back. The party. Brock’s friends. The blur of faces I’d been trying to keep clear of all night. “No. I don’t think so. Why?”
“One of Brock’s friends has been making noise. Pushing. Asking questions.” He closes the notepad and sets it on the table. “Sometimes the name attached is Stephen.”
I wet my lips before I can stop myself.
His gaze catches on the movement. Holds.
The room goes thick. Hot. Too small. Three feet of couch cushion between us suddenly feels like a dare.
He looks like he wants to drag me into his lap and interrogate me with his mouth.
I look at his hands and think about those same hands braced on either side of me, pinning me still while he forces me to spill my darkest secrets.
“I didn’t meet anyone named Stephen.”
“You sure?”
“Holden, I barely knew Brock’s friends. I knew Tyler because he and Amy were dating. The rest were just . . . there. I barely spoke to them.”
He nods. “And Tyler?” he says, eyes on my mouth. “Has he been around recently?”
His gaze slides back up to mine, pupils blown. Why does this feel more like foreplay than the procedural conversation it is?
I squirm a little in my seat, pressing my knees to ease the throbbing between my legs. “He, uh, came by Tuesday night with Amy. Picked up some of her things.”
“How was he?”
“Suspicious. Hostile. He asked if Milo was the guy I dumped Brock for. Milo called him Stephen, actually—is this why?”
Holden nods. Slow.
“What about your roommate? Has she said anything?”
I shake my head. “Not really. She’s been . . . off. Busy. Apologetic, but weird about it.” I hesitate. “Tyler’s become kind of a gatekeeper. He doesn’t really like her being here.”
“Why?”
I shrug. “I think he blames me for Brock leaving.”
“You think.”
“He hasn’t said it with words. But he’s been weird with me since Brock went missing.”
Holden’s face doesn’t change but something in the angle of his jaw does.
“If he comes by again,” he says. “If he says anything that makes you uncomfortable. If he so much as looks at you sideways. You call me. Or Knox. Or any of us. Got it?”
“Got it.”
“I mean it, Sage.”
“I said I got it.”
He holds my eyes another beat. Then he collects his things. “That’s all I need. I’ll be in touch.”
He’s up and crossing to the door so fast I almost miss the moment—almost miss my body following him like part of me can’t stand the idea he might vanish before I solve whatever this is between us.
He’s at the door when he pauses, muscle ticking in his jaw.
“Take care, wildcat,” he says, quiet but so fucking heavy it almost floors me.
He reaches for the door handle, hesitates and does a 180, eyes burning straight through me.
“Holden?”
His eyes move to my mouth. “Fuck it,” he mutters, closing the distance so fast his mouth crashes into mine.
For half a second I’m too shocked to move.
Then I grab his shirt and kiss him back.
Although, it’s not a kiss. It’s a fucking siege.
Teeth and tongue, his lips slamming mine open so hard that I gasp, and he’s all over me, hungry and uncontained in a way that’s never, ever happened before.
I taste coffee and salt and the pent-up charge of every minute he’s spent not touching me these last two weeks.
His hand fists into my hair, tightening, holding my head still so he can ravage my mouth.
And I moan because there is nothing else to do.
His tongue slicks into my mouth, and the sound he makes is a growl—deep, animal, the sound of a man who’s been starving for so long he doesn’t trust the food is real.
He pulls back just enough to bite my lower lip, hard. I whimper and taste copper, and he licks over the sting, then pulls back with a sound like it’s physically hurting him to stop.
“Christ, you taste fucking amazing,” he rasps, breathing hard, hand still tangled in my hair.
Then he drags his thumb over my bottom lip, collects the blood he’d drawn, and puts it in his own mouth like it’s the sweetest thing. He makes a noise—hungry, involuntary—like he wants to devour me from the inside out. Then he’s gone. Just. Gone.
The door clicks closed behind him and I’m left in the entryway, swaying on my feet, lip throbbing and thighs slick.
My head is buzzing like I just stepped out of a wind tunnel.
I barely register the passage of time until the front door rattles and swings open, and Amy comes in with a cardboard carrier of lattes and her purse, hair windblown, sunglasses already off.
She stops short, eyes wide at the sight of me standing stupefied in the entryway.
“Jesus Christ, Sage, did you get attacked?” she blurts, setting the coffees down on the dining table. “What the fuck happened to you?”
I try to answer but breathing is a full-time job. My mouth tingles. My lip is still bleeding, apparently, because Amy’s gaze sharpens to laser focus and she crosses to me in two strides, hands hovering near my face.
“Are you okay?” she says. The question is soft, criminally gentle, but her body is already bracing for whatever disaster I’ve brought into her home this week. “Sage? Talk to me. Are you all right?”
I let out a high laugh. “I’m fucking amazing.”