“Ethan—” His name catches in my throat.
He doesn’t answer. He turns my arm gently, so gently, and finds the patch on my inner forearm. The worst one. The one I cover first.
He presses his mouth there too. His thumb moves back and forth across the patch as if he’s learning the texture and committing it to memory.
“I see you.” Three words. His voice is stripped to the core, the bare bones of a man who has spent his life being seen for what he can provide, never for who he truly is. “All of you.Allof you, Jenna.”
My hand is in his hair, holding him against my wrist. “Ethan.”
He lifts his head. His eyes are bright and wet. This man, who holds everything together and hasn’t let himself want anything for years, has tears in his eyes.
I pull him back to me. The kiss tastes like salt because I’m crying, and I don’t know when I started. His arms wrap around me, solid and certain.
His heartbeat echoes against my chest, where I’ve been storing him this whole time.
My phone buzzes in my back pocket, startling us both.
I pull it out with clumsy fingers, my other hand still fisted in his shirt. Unknown number. No name, no location, just a string of digits on a bright screen.
It buzzes again. Same number.
Ethan goes still against me. Not the stillness of a man waiting, but of a man assessing. His arms don’t loosen, but I feel the shift—the caretaker recalculating.
The phone goes dark. I stare at it in my palm, my back still pressed against the door, his body still warm against mine. The screen is a cold rectangle between us, an interruption shaped like a warning, glowing in my palm like a searchlight.
It buzzes a third time.
The outside world does not care that I'm pinned against a bedroom door with kiss-swollen lips and a man’s heartbeat under my hand. It does not care that someone chose all of me. It does not care that for a few moments I forgot to be afraid.
Ethan’s hand covers mine, steadying the phone and steadying me. His jaw is tight, but his voice is calm. “Don’t answer.”
I wasn’t going to, but hearing him say it makes it real. Someone has my number. Someone is calling at a time that isn’t casual, from a number that isn’t friendly.
LandCorp knows I’m gone.
The outside world is looking. For me. And for what I took.
