Even the light seems to hold its breath—that warm amber glow from the overheads catching her like a spotlight and holding there, as if it, too, has been waiting.
She is so fucking beautiful it knocks the breath clean out of my lungs.
That’s the thing I’m not prepared for, which is idiotic, because I’ve always known Sky is beautiful and should’ve been prepared for it by now. Beautiful in that dangerous, bruising way that used to stop me mid-sentence and piss me off, because no girl should have been able to steal words straight out of my mouth unless her hand was wrapped around my cock.
Skylar at twenty-six is not the Skylar I left at eighteen, and my body is making that abundantly and inconveniently clear. Fuck me, my body needs to calm down.
The features I memorized have settled into something more certain, more fully herself, as if the years had not diminished her but carved her into a work of art. Her hair falls loose around her shoulders, darker than I remember, though that could be the shadows and the workshop light playing tricks on me. Her eyes are the same, though. Those beautiful fucking eyes that always looked at the world as if it had personally offended her.
My gaze lingers on the small scar above her brow. The one I once touched with a hand roughened by work and told her wasproof she had made it through everything this shitty fucked up world threw at her.
I stare at her mouth for exactly one second before I force myself to stop, because that is a road I can’t afford to go down right now, given how my body is reacting. I remember that mouth laughing on a rooftop with the whole town spread out. It spitting fire at me across a foster home kitchen table, her eyes daring me to fire back. Whispering I love you against my jaw in the dark, with such raw, terrifying honesty that I nearly came apart under the weight of it. Taking my cock under the open sky, her eyes locked on mine until I forgot my name and every ugly thing I had ever been, before she looked at me like I was worth something.
Heat punches through me, low and merciless.
Silence stretches between us, thick and crackling, like a live wire pulled too tight. It hums in my teeth and burns low in my gut. It makes the air feel unstable, as if one wrong breath could bring the whole place down.
Her eyes move over me slowly.
They take inventory the way she has always taken inventory of everything. They land on my shoulders, my arms. The grease on my hands. The cut across my knuckles. I fight the urge to tell her it is from the wrench, not from what she might be thinking, because I need her to know that even though I’ve no right to need anything from her, it is not from fighting.
“Sky,” I manage to say.
Her name comes out rough, scraped raw from somewhere deep in my chest. Seven years, and it still tastes right in my mouth. That might be the cruelest fucking thing about all of this.
Her lips part, but she says nothing.
For one suspended second, I think she is going to turn around and walk back out under the roller door. I think I would deserveexactly that. In fact, after what I did to her, I would deserve worse than that.
Instead, she takes one step forward.
“Zane,” she says.
My name on her lips almost brings me to my knees.
I clear my throat.
Say something, you dickhead. Anything.
My mouth, that unreliable, cocky bastard that has never once failed me in my life, offers absolutely nothing.
She looks away first, and that small movement hurts in a place I was fairly certain had already been destroyed beyond the capacity to feel anything new.
“Rainer’s not here,” I say.
Of all the fucking sentences I could of said, that is the one my brain produces.
Not even close to what I want to say here. But it is what comes out when every circuit I have has been rerouted to the singular task of remaining upright in the same room as her.
“I know,” she says. “I mean, I didn’t know.”
She takes a breath and her eyes drift to the old car I’ve been working on.
I watch her stare at it and wonder if she is somewhere else entirelyright now, the same way I am, if memory is doing to her what it is doing to me.
“I was just driving.”
“Okay.”
