“Still with me?” I ask quietly.
“Yeah,” he says, a fraction too quick.
I don’t push. Instead, I slide my thumb slowly over his knuckles, grounding.
“They were loud,” he adds after a beat.
“They’ll get louder,” I say honestly.
He exhales. “I know.”
I watch the city roll by outside the window. The Bay is calm today, deceptively peaceful. Everything looks normal. That’s the thing about public storms—they don’t change the skyline.
Inside the car, though, my chest feels like it’s hosting its own weather. We just had sex. We just decided to date. We just held hands in front of half the Bay Area press.
And I’m here preaching “slow” like I didn’t just break my own rule within hours.
I’m full of it.
The truth is simpler and more dangerous.
I love him.
I never stopped.
Every time I said “protect your heart,” what I really meant was “don’t let him have it again.” But it’s already his. It always has been. And I hate that part of me is already imagining tearing up the divorce papers. Calling the lawyer. Pretending those months of hesitation never existed.
That’s reckless. That’s the old me. The one who ran headfirst into a Vegas chapel and thought intensity was the same as permanence. I can’t do that again. I won’t. Not because I don’t want him, but because I want him enough to do it right.
Vinny pulls into the drive. The gate slides open smoothly.
This time, there are no cameras. Privacy swallows us whole again.
The second the car door shuts behind us, Ollie exhales like he’s been underwater. “Jesus,” he mutters.
“Yeah.”
He looks at me, and there’s something vulnerable there—raw from the press, from the sex, from the years of not doing this. “You sure about this?” he asks quietly.
“About what?”
“All of it.”
I hold his gaze. “No.”
That startles a laugh out of him.
“But I’m sure about you,” I add.
That quiets him again.
Inside, the house feels different now. Charged. Like the walls absorbed what happened earlier and are still processing. It’s just the two of us. Lindy and Phil took Amelia out for the afternoon—exploring, they said. Giving us “space.” Which is generous and slightly terrifying.
I toss my keys into the bowl and head for the kitchen. “You hungry?”
He nods. “Starving.”
“Good. You can chop.”
