“Sky.” His voice is low.
I lift a hand. “No, I am still mad at you.”
“I know.”
“And I need to protect myself.” I hold his gaze because he deserves the full weight of this and I deserve to say it. “I can’t survive another time of you deciding what's best for me. I cannot do that twice.”
Something shifts across his face. The honesty of it landing exactly where I meant it to and I watch it move through him. Watch his jaw tighten, his eyes darken, and the particular way a man absorbs a truth he already knew but had not yet had to face in the full light of morning.
“I will regret that for the rest of my life,” he says.
I open the car door, but I don’t get in just yet. I stand with my hand on the frame, the morning air around us, and everything still unresolved.
He steps back.
That might be the most dangerous thing about this new Zane. He knows when to stop. The boy I loved never knew when to stop, pushing every boundary until it either held or broke.
I get into the car before I do something stupid, like kiss him goodbye and undo every boundary I spent the last two minutes trying to build with my bare hands and whatever dignity I had left.
He closes the door for me before stepping back.
I start the engine and the car grumbles to life. I pull out of the parking lot.
As I drive, I check the side mirror. Zane stands where I left him on the strip of concrete outside the workshop. Next, Rainer appears, moving out of the building to stand beside him. Those two men, side by side in the morning light, watching me go.
The two people who made the word home feel both possible and impossible in the same breath. Now they are watching me drive away from something I am not sure I have the strength to keep driving away from.
My eyes burn. I turn the corner before the tears can fall, before the mirror can show me anything else I am not ready to see.
But I still feel them there, sitting at the edges of everything that was my life before.
I drive and let the city close in around me, the way it will be long after I have figured out what to do with a heart that has apparently never, not for a single day in seven years, stopped belonging to Zane Rivera.
By the time I reach Cassie’s building, I have wiped my face twice and convinced myself I look completely normal. Composed. Fine. A woman who spent the night making excellent decisions and has no regrets whatsoever.
Cassie is on me the moment I open the front door.
She is wearing an oversized sweatshirt and tights, with the expression of a woman who has been awake for several hours, constructing elaborate theories without adult supervision. Her gaze drops to my neck before I have fully closed the door behind me.
Her eyes widen. “Oh.”
“Don’t,” I tell her.
“I haven’t said anything.”
“You said oh.”
She lifts one shoulder with the casual innocence of someone who has never been innocent a day in her life. “Oh is a gateway noise. It is not legally binding.”
“It was judgmental.”
“It was observant.” Her eyes drop to my neck again, and her mouth twitches at the corner. “Very observant. Skylar James,that is not a hickey. That is a crime scene with romantic lighting.”
I shut the door and move past her into the apartment. “Cassie.”
“No, seriously. Should I be calling someone? Because that thing looks like he tried to leave a forwarding address with his mouth.”
Heat crawls up my neck, which is entirely pointless because the evidence is already there like a neon sign on a quiet street.
