His thumb skimmed her lower lip. A quiet, careful touch, as if he was committing the shape of her to memory. They lay quiet for a while. Long enough that she thought he might have drifted off. But his breathing was too even, too controlled. He was awake. Thinking.
“Can I say something?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“Something that might ruin this?”
His hand cupped her shoulder, calluses teasing her skin. “Yeah.”
She drew a breath she felt all the way down in her ribs. “We’ve known each other for barely forty-eight hours.”
The words hung in the dark.
“Yes.”
“We nearly died. More than once. Everything was loud—fear, urgency, the constant sense that everything could fall apart at any second.” A shiver raced down her spine despite his warmth. “People mistake intensity for meaning all the time.”
His breathing was regular, a constant in the dark, so she kept going.
“What if this is just that? Bodies reacting. Brains clinging to the nearest solid thing.” She shifted slightly, the sheet whispering. “When things are quiet—when there’s no countdown—what if this doesn’t hold?”
The question lingered—too close to something she didn’t want to touch.
She swallowed. “I trusted Clive.” The words stung on the way out. “Believed I was building something with him. A partnership. But I was just a resource. Something to mine until there was nothing left.”
His breath changed. Just a fraction.
“I didn’t see it because I wanted it to be real,” she went on. “I wanted it so badly that I ignored what it cost me.” She forced herself to look at him. To let him see the fear she’d carried for years. “What if I’m doing that again?”
His eyes held hers in the dark.
“What if this isn’t a connection?” she whispered. “What if it’s just proximity? Pressure. Relief dressed up as something bigger. What if I’m mistaking it for…”
“For what?” he asked.
“For something real.”
He didn’t answer immediately.
The quiet between them wasn’t empty—it was crowded with the hot beat of her pulse.
“You think that’s what this is, Jen? Adrenaline?”
“I don’t know.” She hated that her voice was small. “Do you?”
He let out a slow breath, as if he’d been holding it. “I don’t know either.”
The honesty didn’t soothe her. It clarified everything. Made the risk feel real instead of hypothetical.
“So, what do we do?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“We could walk away.” The words felt wrong even as she said them. “Tell ourselves it was the crisis. Say goodbye while it’s still clean.”
His arm tightened around her. As if his body had already rejected the idea.
“Is that what you want?” His voice roughened.
