For a moment, nothing happens.
The shock crosses his face before he tucks it away, but I see it. His gaze flicks to Zane for the briefest moment, before it comes back my way.
I sense both of their eyes on me the whole way down.
“Morning,” I say to Rainer as I come to stand in front of him.My arms wrap around him.
“Hey, kid,” he says quietly.
Kid. My chest caves.
I’m twenty-six years old. I have a job, a car, and a life I have built with his help. I also have a fresh hickey from the man who broke my heart, which is its own separate conversation. But when Rainer says kid, something in me folds straight back to eighteen, standing in the wreckage of everything, looking at the one man who helped me more than I have ever known how to repay.
I pull back before I cry, which takes more effort than it should and costs me something I’ll deal with later, in private.
Rainer’s eyes move over my face with his quiet, unhurried attention, before moving to the mark on my neck. My hand twitches with the instinct to cover it, but I stop myself before I do.
“You alright?” he asks.
The question carries the weight of a specific conversation, the one we had the day he helped me carry boxes into my new apartment, standing in an empty kitchen that smelled of fresh paint and possibility, when he told me quietly that I had to do what was best for me. That nothing else mattered until I figured that out. That the rest would come when it was ready.
I had not known at that time how long it would take to be ready.
I force a small smile. “I’m fine.”
I smooth my hands down my skirt for something to do, anything to keep from standing here feeling everything at once. “I should go.”
Rainer nods. “Don’t be a stranger, kid. This door is always open. You know that.”
I do know that. I’ve always known that. The knowing of it sits in my chest, warm and one of the very few things in my life that has never once required proof.
I turn toward the door.
Zane moves immediately, falling into step beside me.
We walk through the workshop together. I keep my distance because right now I don’t trust myself not to reach for him.
Outside, the light sits warm across the hood of my car.
I stop beside the driver’s door, before turning to face Zane.
For a moment, neither of us speaks.
His eyes drop to the mark on my neck and linger there for exactly one second too long.
My cheeks heat. “Don’t look so proud of yourself.”
His mouth smirks. “I’m trying very hard not to.”
“Well you’re failing.”
“I know.”
I stare at him standing there in the morning light. All of him, the jaw and the eyes and every line of him, and I feel it all settle in my chest—that specific, exhausting war between the part of me that would walk back through that roller door right now without a second thought and the part of me that knows I cannot survive another round of Zane Rivera.
I can’t say it out loud because if I do, it becomes something he can respond to, and I can’t afford his response right now. I need to work this out in my own time, when he cannot reach me, when his eyes, his voice, and his hands are not variables I have to account for.
His throat moves as I watch him.
