The bedroom was dark except for the streetlight through the curtains. He sat on the edge of the bed and I stood in front of him and took off my shirt. Let him look. Six months and he still looked at me like that, like he was taking inventory, like I was something worth studying. That hadn’t gone away.
“Your turn,” I said.
He pulled off his shirt. I pushed him back against the mattress and climbed over him, and he made a small surprised sound.
I kissed his jaw, his throat, his chest. He had his hands on my hips and I could feel him holding back — waiting to see what I wanted. That was one of the things I loved about him. Always paying attention, always reading me.
Tonight I wanted to do the reading.
I worked my way down his body and took my time with him. I felt the moment he stopped holding back — the catch in his breath, the way his hands loosened in my hair. I took it all in, just like he did — especially the sound he made when he’d gotten past careful and into real.
Eventually he pulled me up and turned us over. I felt him tug at my jeans, then his own — and I let him. He kissed down my stomach with that same thorough attention he gave everything — deliberate, unhurried — and I stopped thinking. When I came apart I wasn’t quiet about it. Didn’t try to be.
He came back up to me and I pulled him over me. When he pushed inside I made a sound I wasn’t expecting and felt him go still.
“Good?” he murmured.
“Very good.” I pulled him down. “Don’t stop.”
He moved slowly at first, his forehead against mine, his weight exactly right. I wrapped my legs around him and exhaled against his neck and let it all come loose. Everything I’d been holding quietly all day — theI’m fineI’d given Indira, the steady voice I kept giving him — came undone all at once, and what was left was just this.
I memorized his hands. The smell of him. The small sounds he made against my hair when he’d stopped holding back. I memorized all of it deliberately, the way I did when I knew a moment mattered.
The second time I came, it rolled through me slowly. He finished a moment after, forehead against mine.
Afterward I didn’t move. Just lay there with his arm across my waist and let myself have it.
He was asleep before I was. I could tell by the weight of his arm, the way his breathing slowed and deepened. I lay still and listened to it.
Four years I’d held the line. Good reasons, real reasons — I’d believed in them every time I’d said no. But lying here now, his arm across my waist, I kept waiting for it to feel complicated. To feel like the thing I’d always told myself it couldn’t be.
It didn’t. It felt right.
Chapter 3
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— Bea —
Seven months ago
The session ran late. That happened sometimes — a client arrived already gutted and all you could do was sit with them in the wreckage and wait. Forty-five minutes in, I’d quietly let the next hour go. Sixty minutes in, I’d locked the rest of the afternoon.
He’d stopped talking not because there was nothing left to say, but because he was empty. He left without looking at me. No goodbye, just gone.
I tidied the tissues from the small table beside his chair, folded them away without touching the ones he’d used. The room was a converted space off the main corridor of the Venom Riders MC clubhouse. Dutch had given it over to me four years ago, when he’d first called looking for someone discreet — a brother who needed help, he’d said. Glitch. A man who could read any system ever built but was finding people a harder language.
That was how it had started. Others had come after, quietly, the way word moves in a closed community. By now they knew me well enough to sit in this room without their guard at full height because they were on their own ground, because Dutch had vouched for me - and in this world that carried. That was the relationship I had with the club — professional trust. I’d been invited to things over the years, the occasional party or event,and I’d gone to some of them. But I’d kept myself to the edges. The social world behind those walls wasn’t mine, and I hadn’t tried to make it so.
The room was quiet now. Just the hum of the air unit and the muffled sounds from the main building filtering through the wall. I sat back in my own chair and looked at the opposite wall until my chest settled.
His wife had been sick for three years. They’d lived off the grounds, and he’d kept it close — hadn’t said a word to his brothers, hadn’t asked for anything. Near the end it had become impossible to hide; they’d seen it in him, in her, in the way he’d started turning down runs. They’d understood, and they’d stood back. Given him the dignity of not making it a thing. That was its own kind of love, the MC way of it. But it meant he’d carried it alone all the same, and at the end he’d been too exhausted to grieve. Now it was catching up. He still talked to her photograph in the mornings. He’d told me that today like he was confessing something. Like he wasn’t sure if it was still allowed.
She used to bring me coffee before I was even out of bed. I didn’t thank her enough.
I’d told him to keep talking to her. That love doesn’t end when a person dies. That the photograph wasn’t something to apologize for.
I believed in this work. I believed in these hours. But some sessions lodged somewhere it took time to shake loose.
