Jac had never had a girl in his own apartment before, and a flush crept up his face as she examined it, messy and bare. Suddenly, it was him who felt exposed. She’d been worried he’d think she was shatz. Now she was probably wondering why he lived like this, like he was barely living at all.
“I don’t...own many things,” he said awkwardly. “I lost it all when they put the bounty on my head.” But even before then, he’d never had much.
“I don’t either, since I ran away,” Sophia told him, her back pressed against the door. They had both left pieces of their lives behind, for better or for worse.
Still, Jac resisted the urge to pick up discarded clothes off the floor. “I thought this would be temporary.”
“I know,” she answered.
“I mean, I could’ve gotten a new place, but I—”
“Jac,”she said, and he stopped. She rarely called him by his actual name, as though everything about their relationship was a game. But it had never felt like one to him.
“Stop looking at me like that,” she told him.
Jac tried to mold his face into something unreadable, but it was difficult. She’d somehow managed to reapply her cherry lipstick in between tears. He liked how it looked a little smudged.
“Like what?” he asked.
“Like I’m dangerous. It’s very hot.”
Jac laughed as he walked toward her. Shewasdangerous. Already, the burden of her secrets weighed down on him, as though nestled in the space between his bones. But as he leaned forward and pressed his mouth to hers, he knew he would never take any of it back.
Her lipstick even tasted like cherries.
Jac had kissed—and more than kissed—several girls before. But never in his own apartment, never with so much shared past and future between them.
He’d always thought of what he’d overcome as the broken pieces of himself, but even damaged as they were, he could still build something good upon them. With every kiss, he felt a little closer to collapsing. But with every kiss, he also felt more secure. The weight of her burdens supported his own.
Sophia stumbled as she kicked off her boots. Once she did, they stood at eye level. It made it easier to brush her hair to the side and kiss a trail down her neck. She sighed as she leaned into him, and her fingers dug into his back. She pulled him closer to her, so that there was no space between them—not for secrets, not for second guesses. Every moment of empty flirting and teasing, moments that had originally seemed like a game between them, now felt like promises, waiting to be collected.
Sophia pulled clumsily at the buttons of his shirt, but it was hard to undress him when he was already focused on undressing her. The breeze from his open window sent goose bumps prickling across bare skin. Jac shivered, but not from the cold. Then she pulled him into the bed and climbed on top of him, so she could make him shiver some more.
Her dark hair draped over the both of them, and while he soon discovered how much he liked to run his hands through it, it nearly made his heart stop dead to watch her do it. She might’ve been dangerous and cursed, but he still smiled against her lips when he said, “Do that again.”
Those words, however satisfying to say, proved far more so to hear from her.
“Do that again,” she commanded several minutes later, clutching at his wrist as his fingers wandered upwards. Jac obliged and trailed back down.
All or nothing, it turned out, did not mean one thing or the other. It meant whatever could be contained with the grasp of a single night. It meant giving now what the future could take away.
* * *
Many hours later, Jac carefully crawled out of bed so as not to disturb Sophia sleeping beside him. He had a lot of practice with that, but this time, he didn’t intend to sneak out.
Jac reached into his discarded jacket and pulled the invitation out of the pocket. He held it up to the moonlight and squinted as he attempted to make out the words. His eyes skipped over the letters to a date scribbled on the bottom.
11/8/25
Three months. That gave him time.
Jac needed to find Levi, to ask him for help—even advice.
And, if it came down to it, he needed to play.
LEVI
“Two weeks?” Levi barked angrily into the phone. “The Irons already missed their shifts yesterday. They have more tonight. We need those papers now.”
