I open my eyes.
“But I’m not running,” I say.
Something leaves his body all at once. His arms tighten around me and he lets out a breath against my back.
“That’s enough,” he murmurs. “That is enough, Sky.”
He pulls back slowly, his cock sliding out of me, and his cum leaks down the inside of my thigh.
I turn carefully in his arms.
When I face him, the look in his eyes almost takes me completely apart. Open and unguarded. It is a look I have caught glimpses of over the years and talked myself out of believing was real.
I lift my hand to his face.
His eyes close the second my fingers touch his cheek. His jaw is rough under my palm and the muscle there tightens briefly before it relaxes.
“I don’t know what tomorrow holds for us, Zane,” I say quietly. “But I know I don’t want to go back to pretending I can live without you.”
The breath leaves him before his arms come around me, pulling me fully against his chest. His chin drops to the top of my head and he holds me in the middle of the kitchen as if he is not planning to let go anytime soon.
I press my face into his chest and listen to his heartbeat—steady, fast, and real. I let my eyes close and my arms wrap around his waist. I hold him back just as hard.
I let myself have this. All of it. Without turning it into something I have to survive first, brace against, or hold at arm’s length until I decide whether it is safe. I let it be what it is, which is him, me, and this.
And for the first time in longer than I can remember, I am not waiting for it to hurt.
Chapter 19
Zane
Ileave Skylar’s apartment with her taste still on my tongue and the kind of stupid smile on my face that should probably get a man like me punched on principle.
It is not even a full smile. More of a smirk. But something is sitting in my chest this morning that will not shut the fuck up. And for once it’s not dread or guilt or that usual restless, ugly thing that wakes up before I do and starts listing all the ways I have fucked up my own life and dragged everyone else’s down with it.
It is Skylar. She fucking loves me.
I don’t know how a thought that small can still take up an entire fucking body, but there it is, sitting in the center of my chest like it owns the place and has decided to start making changes.
I step out onto the street and the cold morning air hits me in the face with the enthusiasm of something that has been waiting to do exactly that. It still does nothing to knock sense back into me. I should feel exhausted. My body is heavy, my eyes are gritty, and I slept like absolute shit because sleeping was not exactly high on the list of things we managed to get around to last night.
We talked. Then we touched. Then we talked again, with her head on my chest and my fingers in her hair, both of us saying things that would have killed us to say out loud a week ago. Things that had been locked away in both of us for so long they came out half-blinking in the light. Then I fucked her again because apparently getting the woman I have always wanted back into my arms has done nothing whatsoever for my discipline.
Last night felt like coming back into my own skin after years of walking around as the worst, most hollowed-out version of myself, haunting the edges of a life that never quite fit because she was not in it.
I shove my hands into my jacket pockets and keep walking, because if I stop now, I will turn around and go straight back upstairs. I will find her still asleep or half awake, hair a mess, face soft, mouth swollen from mine, and I will crawl back into that bed and lose the entire day with her without a single regret. Plus, facing Cassie in the cold light of morning is not something I am emotionally prepared for, not after she came home and found us last night.
Jesus Christ. I scrub a hand over my jaw and the almost-smile gets even worse.
The front door had opened sometime after midnight. Skylar and I were on the couch because after we had showered together after fucking in the kitchen, we had every intention of talking,when we sat down on the couch. Then somehow we ended up fucking again instead.
We were naked, tangled together, half covered in nothing but sweat and bad judgment, when Cassie’s keys rattled in the lock.
Skylar froze.
I froze.
Then the door opened.
