48. Sage
FORTY-EIGHT
SAGE
Istare at the clock on the wall, willing it to click over to five, practically vibrating behind the counter.
I’ve wiped down the same section of Formica three times. My body is here, but my brain checked out about an hour ago—already halfway home, already picturing the two men who’ll be waiting for me when I get there.
Today marks three weeks since that night under the jetty. And to say my life is drastically changed would be the understatement of the century.
“Okay, spill.” Jamie slides onto his stool with an eager look on his face.
After our conversation yesterday—the one Milo interrupted with his over-the-top apology—I’m starting to think Jamie might become a real friend.
Not a replacement for Amy. Nothing that simple.
But close enough that the rare contact I’ve been having with her doesn’t sting quite so sharply.
“Spill what, exactly?” I ask, meeting his kind eyes.
“You’ve been grinning at salt shakers since I got here. What’s got you so jazzed? Hot date for a Friday night?”
“Something like that.” I can’t keep the smile off my face. I don’t even try.
“Something like that, she says.” He props his chin on his hand. “You look like someone who won the lottery and is trying to act casual about it.”
“I’m not acting casual.”
“No, you’re not.” He grins. “Go. Get out of here. The clock just hit five.”
I bounce on my toes. “I’ll see you tomorrow?”
“As long as you come back with details.” He points his finger at me. “I’m living vicariously through you now. It’s the least you can do.”
I untie my apron, grab my bag, and practically skip out the door. The bells jangle behind me and the evening air hits my face—warm, salt-tinged, golden—and I feel something I haven’t felt in so long I almost don’t recognize it.
Happy. I feel happy.
The walk home takes twelve minutes.
I’ve done it enough times now that I know every crack in the sidewalk, every streetlight that flickers, every patch of pavement where the tree roots have shoved up through the concrete like the town is trying to break its own bones.
Tonight, the walk feels different.
Not safe, exactly. I don’t think I’m built for that word anymore. Safe is too clean. Too absolute. Safe is something people say right before the floor drops out from under them.
But I feel . . . held.
Which is insane, because I’m alone—physically. I’m sure one of them is watching from somewhere, somehow.
But as far as I can observe, there’s no Knox beside me, silent and massive and steady.
No Holden parked across the street pretending surveillance is casual.
No Milo materializing out of nowhere with food and chaos and that grin that makes every dark thing in my head trip over its own feet.
No Micah’s hand at the small of my back.
No Eli’s autumn eyes turning me inside out from a shadow somewhere.
Just me. My sore feet. The sea air. The leftover heat under my skin from last night.
By any reasonable measure, my focus should be the murder. The danger. The dead men. The cameras. The fact that five killers have folded themselves so thoroughly around my life that I can’t always find the seam between being protected and being wanted.
But it isn’t.
It’s them. What happens to me when I think about them. And not just the sex, though God, the sex is a significant percentage of the problem. My brain has become an unhinged little animal with no hobbies left except replaying hands and mouths and voices in the dark.
But under the noise of all that wanting is the part that should actually frighten me. And it’s not the bodies or the cameras. It’s that in three weeks, every one of them has found a place under my ribs, and I don’t know what happens if one of them leaves.
Micah was first. Micah, who held me when I was still half blood and half panic and somehow knew better than to tell me I was okay before I could stand to hear it.
He texts me things like Did you eat? and once, at midnight, I can still taste you, and not one of those messages has ever made me feel like a problem being managed.
Just held.
Apparently that’s a thing I get to have now. Who knew.
Holden was the opposite delivery method.
He handed me the truth with the wrapping torn clean off—told me to my face what I was to them in the beginning.
Witness. Liability. Participant. Threat.
And somehow being named all four made me feel bigger instead of smaller, because he wasn’t flinching from the parts of me everyone else keeps waiting for me to apologize for.
He looks at my temper like it’s a feature.
He calls me wildcat and something behind my ribs bares its teeth every single time.
I have chosen not to think too hard about how much I like the marks he leaves.
On Wednesday a toothbrush appeared in my bathroom.
He didn’t admit to putting it there. Of course he didn’t.
Holden operates in evidence and denial, and apparently now one of those things lives in my medicine cabinet.
This morning he kissed me goodbye like coming back tonight was the most obvious fact in the world, like leaving pieces of himself in my apartment wasn’t a confession at all.
Then there’s Milo, who has spent most of the time between visits turning my phone into a gallery of cursed images—a dog in a bow tie, a hardware-store sign that says SCREW IT, a tragic selfie in front of the security-camera wall at Best Buy, captioned “triggered”—and who can make me laugh so hard I forget, for whole minutes, that I am a person who killed someone.
He’s too loud and too much and he takes up more room than the laws of physics should permit.
Yesterday he dropped to his knees on the sidewalk outside the diner and screamed my name down the street, and I can’t decide whether that’s the most mortifying or the most romantic thing anyone has ever done for me.
I was viscerally furious at him. And he didn’t joke his way out of it.
He let me be furious. He gave me my space.
Then he looked dead-on at the worst thing he’d done to me and just—took it.
Milo finds my darkness and starts stringing it with fairy lights.
I don’t trust it. But I keep reaching for it anyway.
Knox doesn’t deal in words. What Knox hands me—and I didn’t know I’d been starving for it until he did—is room.
A man that size, that dangerous, and he walks beside me close enough that our arms brush and never once crowds me, never fills a silence just because he could.
His quiet isn’t the punishing kind. It has weight to it.
Gravity. A steady place to fall toward when the world tips sideways.
He’s also the one who taught me what being watched does to me.
An alley, his hand between my legs and the entire street one turned head away from seeing everything.
He started that. He doesn’t even know he started that—that he’s part of the reason being seen can feel like desire instead of danger.
But the camera over my bed only reads as a gift because I asked for it.
Because I control it. Because nothing goes live unless I decide to turn it on.
And then, like he’d frightened himself, he folded back into all that careful quiet and hasn’t let himself off the leash since.
He kisses my forehead at my door and leaves.
Every time, I stand there wanting to haul him back inside and show him I won’t break.
And then Eli.
Eli is the ache. The locked door. The hand that gets an inch from mine and then retreats like touching me would cost him something he can’t spare.
His jacket is still draped over my chair.
He hasn’t asked for it back, and I refuse to read anything into that.
He claims he’s a monster. But that monster seems afraid of precisely one thing, and that thing is me.
But he watched me last night. The feed Milo set up for me also told me exactly who clicked the link and how long they watch. The monster peeked through the bars of his own cage and let himself look.
I don’t know what it means, and I’m not going to insult myself by pretending I do. I just know I’m not finished.
A car rolls past, headlights dragging across the sidewalk, and for once my body doesn’t lock up. I notice the absence of it—the flinch that doesn’t come, the small, fragile pocket of ease sitting under my ribs where the dread usually lives.
They didn’t fix me. I don’t think I want to be fixed.
But somewhere in three weeks, they handed me back pieces of myself I’d stopped believing I was allowed to hold. The biggest one is this: last night I turned that camera on because I wanted to. Because the thought of all five of them watching lit me up in a way that was mine.
Not Brock’s. Not fear’s. Not survival’s.
Mine.
Tonight I’m going to choose again. Except tonight, two of them will be in the room.
Because tonight is Milo and Holden.
A couch. A movie none of us will actually watch. Two men who have no business making sense together and somehow do—a lit match and a folded blade. They bicker like it’s foreplay and look at me like I’m the punchline and the prize and the one problem they both want to solve with their hands.
I’ve been circling it all day. What it would feel like to be between them. To let Milo talk until the nerves burn off. To let Holden watch the thought arrive on my face before I’m brave enough to say it out loud.
By the time my building swings into view I’m warm all the way through and restless in a way the walk had nothing to do with.
My hands shake as I ready my keys.
Not from fear.
For once, not from fear.
Tonight, I might be brave enough.
I take the stairs two at a time. My keys are in my hand, but the door is already unlocked. They’re here. They beat me home. I knew they would—told them they could—and still, the knowledge sends a thrill through me that I feel all the way to my toes.
I push through the door.