70. Sage
SEVENTY
SAGE
Holden takes a long time, but when he answers, the words are deliberate.
“I used to dream of being a good guy. Not in the badge-and-gun sense. Just . . . someone unremarkable. A man with a wife and a couple of kids, a dog, maybe a grill he spent too much on.” He shrugs.
“I thought that was the finish line. Have a family, watch them grow, be boring as fuck and proud of it. Turns out I didn’t have what it takes to be average. ”
“You could never be average.” I curl my knees up, hugging them. Steam rises, curling my hair into spirals around my face. “Maybe that’s a good thing.”
“Maybe.” The corner of his mouth lifts. “What about you, Sage? What did you dream about?”
He returns the question like he’s passing a torch, and it’s too honest not to answer.
“I wanted to matter. That’s all.” I keep my chin tucked to my knees.
“I didn’t have the capacity to imagine a future where I was loved, or important, or even just not invisible.
My dreams were small. They were barely even daydreams.”
“You matter,” he says, simple as gravity.
“I know. It’s fucked up, how much I feel like I do.” I close my eyes and sink my face all the way under the surface. When I come up for air and open my eyes, Holden is still there—solid, real, not going anywhere. It’s ridiculous how much better that makes everything.
He picks up a washcloth and dips it in the water.
“Lean forward.” I do, and he wrings it out and rubs the cloth along my back, the spot right above my spine where I always get sore after a shift.
He doesn’t talk while he does it. I wonder if he even realizes how gentle he is, or if it just leaks out of him without his permission, the way some men leak violence.
“Did you ever want to go back?” I ask quietly, eyes tracking his reflection in the gleaming faucet. “To the person you were before?”
He runs the washcloth over my shoulders, then pauses, considering.
“No. There’s no going back. Everything I am now, I became because of the choices I made.
I can’t hate the man I am and love what those choices gave me—what they gave you.
” He meets my gaze and something raw flickers there.
“You can’t amputate the bad without killing the good, wildcat. ”
Something in the way our eyes lock anchors me, stops my thinking for a beat. There’s a softness in him that most people would never see, and I want to bury myself in it and pretend the world isn’t a place where people leave nooses in living rooms.
I want to be selfish and greedy and weak for a minute and not be left alone with my own head.
I reach for him.
“Get in with me,” I say, and my voice is probably pathetic, but I don’t care.
He freezes, the ocean-blue of his eyes holding me in a direct line. “Wildcat, I don’t think we should—”
“I know,” I say, urgent, interrupting, “and I’m not asking for that. I just want you. Right here with me, wrapped around me. Please. Just . . . don’t make me be without you tonight.”
The argument lives on his lips for one second, then fades.
He stands, not even breaking eye contact, and peels off his shirt.
The tattoo winds up his ribs and around his back, dark and intricate, lines I’ve traced with my fingers a dozen times these last weeks and still haven’t mapped completely.
Here in the bright bathroom light every bit of it stands out against the tan of his skin.
I want to follow it with my tongue, line by line, until I know the whole of him.
His hands move to his waistband. He undoes his belt, not taking his eyes off mine, pants following slow, then boxer briefs.
I trace my eyes down the length of him, over the ink and the hard planes of muscle, and think the thing I always think when he’s bare like this—that this is a body built for exactly what he’s about to do to me.
“This good?” He settles behind me, his legs bracketing mine, his chest warm and broad against my back.
“It’s perfect.” His arms wrap around me, pulling me flush against him, and I feel the tension in his body—the rigid control he carries everywhere, all the time—start to loosen. His chin rests on the top of my head. His thumbs trace slow arcs across my stomach under the water.
We stay like that for a long time. Long enough for the water to cool a degree and the steam to thin. Long enough for my breathing to sync with his, rise and fall, rise and fall, a rhythm so steady it feels like it could hold me together even if everything else fell apart.
I turn in his arms.
The movement brings us face to face, my knees straddling his hips, the water sloshing against the sides of the tub. His hands settle on my waist—automatic, instinctive—and he searches my face with a question he’s too careful to ask out loud.
I answer it by kissing him.
It’s slow. So slow. A press of lips that builds by fractions, his mouth soft at first—testing, letting me lead—and then opening when I lick along his lower lip.
He tastes like beer and warmth and the low groan he makes when I sink my fingers into his hair reverberates through both of us, and the sound, holy hell, the sound of this man coming undone at a pace that’s torturously gentle does things to me.
“Sage.” His hands tighten on my waist. Not stopping. Holding.
“I need you,” I whisper against his mouth. “Please.”
His forehead drops to mine. His eyes close. And when they open again, the way he looks at me is so freaking soft it makes my heart bleed.
“Okay,” he says. “Okay.”
He lifts me, water streaming off both of us, and carries me out of the tub. Bracing me against the bathroom counter, he grabs a towel with one hand and wraps it around my shoulders, then folds me into him so tightly all the fear in my body drains out through my toes.
His skin is hot, chest to my chest, my knees locked around his hips and my arms up around his neck. He just holds me there, not rushing anything, not pushing.
Every part of our bodies is pressed together so I can feel how hard he’s holding back. The mirror behind us fogs up, turns us to blurs—just color and shape and motion. That makes it easier to let him touch me. To let myself want him back.
He doesn’t lift me or lay me out like an object. I move because I want it—because it’s the only way to feel grounded now.
My thighs lock tighter around his hips and his hands cradle my face, his thumbs moving over my cheekbones until I shudder.
He kisses me, all tongue and patience, and my head falls back, arching instinctively to meet his mouth when he drags it down my throat, biting and sucking with enough pressure to leave reminders.
His hands travel my body. The towel drops to the floor. My skin is still damp, my hair dripping down my back, and he sinks his teeth gently into my shoulder, as if he can’t help wanting to consume even more.
I ride the insistent current in my body, the way it wants him, the way it answers every question he asks with his hands.
The hard length of his cock presses against my belly, and I feel it pulse, twitch with every shallow breath he takes.
He’s not the only one holding back—I bury my nose in the crook of his neck, inhaling his scent, clean and damp and so damn perfect.
He breaks away, just enough to whisper, “Tell me what you want, wildcat.”
I squeeze his waist with my thighs. The towel is somewhere over my shoulders, but I don’t care. I’m shivering for all the right reasons. I want to say everything, everything, but all that comes out is, “I want you inside me. Slow. Please, Holden.”
He shudders, and it’s a real effort for him, keeping it together. I see it in every restraint, every measured movement—he wants to take me apart, but tonight, he loves me enough to let me come together first.
He tilts my chin up, searching my eyes. “You’re sure?”
“Yes.” My answer is instant.
Holden holds me steady, one hand cradling my ass as he bends his knees, bringing our bodies level.
The blunt head of his cock nudges me, and I reach between us, guiding him home, wet heat meeting him and opening for him because I’m ready and I’m not afraid.
He presses in. Slow. Steady. Each inch burns in the best way, stretching out the ache, making it into something I can love.
When he’s buried to the hilt, he stops, forehead to mine. “Jesus, Sage.”
“I know,” I breathe. Because I do. I feel it too. The enormity of this, the way it’s different from every other time. Like a conversation stripped down to the words that actually matter.
He moves. Slow, like he promised. One hand braced on the counter behind me, the other wrapped around my lower back, holding me flush against him.
Every thrust is measured—deep enough to make me gasp, controlled enough that I feel every inch of him, the drag and push, the way my body opens for him like it was always supposed to.
My arms tighten around his neck. My forehead presses to his. We’re breathing the same air, sharing the same steam, and I close my eyes and just focus on sensation.
“Don’t disappear, wildcat,” he murmurs. “Stay with me.”
I do. I keep my eyes on his while he moves inside me, and it’s the most exposed I’ve ever been—more than the group, more than being watched, more than any act of kink or performance. This is just us. Two people, skin to skin, looking at each other with nothing left to hide behind.
His rhythm stays unhurried, even as I feel the tension building in his shoulders, the way his breath goes ragged.
“Holden.” His name leaves my mouth in a whimper. My fingers dig into his shoulders, hips rolling to meet his, chasing the slow, devastating build. “Right there.”
“Good girl.” He buries his face in my neck, his mouth hot against my pulse, and I feel his whole body shudder when I clench around him. “Fuck, wildcat. You feel—” He groans, the sound vibrating through my chest. “You feel like everything.”
The orgasm doesn’t crash, it rises. Like a tide coming in, slow and relentless, filling every hollow place inside me until there’s no room left for fear or doubt or the memory of rope swaying in an empty room.
I come with his name on my lips and my face pressed into his shoulder, my whole body pulling tight around him, and he holds me through it, steady and unwavering, his arms locked like he’ll never let anything touch me again.
“Holden!”
“Fuck, Sage.”
He follows a moment later, his hips stuttering, a low groan buried against my collarbone, and I feel him pulse inside me—warm, real, alive. His arms tighten, his breath ragged in my ear, and for a long moment neither of us moves. Just heartbeats and steam and the slow drip of the faucet.
“You okay?” he asks eventually, his voice rough.
“More than okay.”
He kisses me softly, then pulls out slow and steadies me on the counter.
“Let me get something to clean you up.” He reaches for a fresh washcloth and runs it under warm water, wringing it out.
When he brings it between my legs, he’s impossibly tender.
He cleans me with slow, careful strokes, his free hand resting on my thigh, thumb brushing back and forth against my skin.
He doesn’t look away. Doesn’t rush. Just takes care of me like it’s the most important thing he’s ever done, and when he’s finished he presses a kiss to the inside of my knee that undoes me more than the sex did.
He wraps me in a fresh towel—warm from the rack—and dries me off section by section.
My arms, my shoulders, my back. He towels my hair gently, squeezing out the water, and I just sit there and let him, because fighting Holden’s caretaking is like fighting the pull of gravity.
Pointless and exhausting and why would you even want to?
“Arms up.” He pulls my sleep shirt over my head, guiding my arms through like I’m five and he’s got infinite patience. Shorts follow. He dresses himself in a pair of sweats and nothing else.
Then he scoops me off the counter and carries me to bed.
The sheets are cool and clean, and when he lowers me onto the mattress, I roll onto my side and curl up, already half-gone. The pillow smells like him. The whole room smells like him, a scent I’m starting to think might just be safety.
He climbs in behind me. One arm slides under the pillow, the other wraps around my waist, pulling me back against his chest until there’s no space between us.
His body curves around mine like a wall, his chin tucked against my hair, his knees fitting behind mine.
I can feel his heartbeat against my spine—slow, steady, the most reliable rhythm I’ve ever known.
The house is quiet now. The voices downstairs have settled into silence, or close to it—a murmur here, a creak there.
I lace my fingers through his where they rest on my stomach. He squeezes once.
For a while, we just breathe.
Then his lips press against my shoulder, and he speaks against my skin.
“Do you remember what you said last night? Before you fell asleep?”
My heart kicks. I do remember. The words that fell out of me, half-conscious, too wrecked to hold anything back. I’d meant every syllable, even the ones I didn’t know were coming.
“I remember,” I say quietly. “I said I love you guys.”
His arm tightens around me. Just a fraction. Just enough.
“Well.” His voice is low, almost rough, like the words have to travel through something dense to reach the surface. “I do too. Love you, I mean.”
My breath catches. Not because I didn’t know—I think part of me has known for a while, in the way he looks at me, in the way he steps in and takes care of me when I’m too stubborn to admit I’m hurting.
But hearing it—hearing Holden say it, this man who built an entire life around control and competence and never needing anyone—means everything.
I roll over to face him.
His eyes are right there. Blue and steady and a little terrified, like he’s handed me a weapon and is waiting to see what I do with it.
I bring my hand to his face. My thumb traces the line of his jaw, the stubble rough under my fingertip, and I don’t look away until I’m sure he can see every single thing I mean.
“I love you, Holden.”
Not you guys. Not the group. Just him. Just this man, in this bed, in this house he built for a life he thought he’d never have.
His eyes close. He exhales—long, shaky, the sound of twelve years of loneliness leaving his body in a single breath—and when he opens them again, they’re bright.
He kisses me. Slow and deep and tasting like forever, his hand cradling the back of my head, and I melt into him, into the warmth, into the certainty that whatever comes next—the noose, the threat, the faceless danger circling closer—I will face it with this man beside me. With all of them surrounding me.