“Fuck.” It is barely a word, breathed against my jaw, and it undoes me faster than anything he could have said on purpose. Ryan McAllister does not swear. Ryan McAllister is coming apart in my kitchen with his forehead dropped to my shoulderand his hips driving into mine hard enough to rattle the cabinet behind me.
“Harder, I am not glass. I won’t break.”
He gives it to me. One hand slides between us, fingers sure, and he works me higher while he moves, relentless and exact, the same focus he turns on everything, aimed now at taking me apart.
“Just like that.” The words keep coming, unedited, the one running commentary I cannot file or revise, and every blunt syllable of it drives him harder.
His breath breaks against my mouth. Somewhere behind him the basil lies unrescued. I come with my face turned into his neck and his name breaking apart against his skin, both of us long past the point of being quiet about it.
Ryan follows a few strokes later, my name muffled against my hair, both hands gripping my hips like he needs the hold to stay upright.
Afterward, neither of us moves fast.
He cleans up with the same grim competence he brings to everything, then comes back and stands between my knees, thumb tracing the hem of my sweater where it has fallen back into place.
Then he gives me a look I have seen exactly once before. The first day. Across a rink, after a shutout, when he turned away like he had won an argument I had not started yet. The same grin. Less an expression than a verdict.
I won.
On day one it made me dig my pen into the page hard enough to leave a mark.
Tonight I lean back on my hands and let him have it.
“You win,” I say. Day one, the shutout, all of it. The whole argument I never agreed to have.
He shakes his head. “Not tonight.”
“The basil is dead,” I say.
Ryan looks down.
“It had character,” he says.
Peyton
Dwyer agrees to a second meeting.
That tells me something before he says a word. The first time, he gave me eleven minutes and the shape of a thing with no center, then left four dollars on the table and walked out before I could ask the question that mattered.
He did not have to come back.
The diner off I-35 is almost empty. Two men in work shirts at the counter. A waitress wiping the same clean table three times while a muted morning show argues with itself. The booths are cracked red vinyl, the kind that remembers every person who ever sat down meaning to tell the truth and decided against it.
I take the booth in the back and wait.
He comes in ten minutes late. Ball cap low. Denim jacket too heavy for the weather. He sits across from me without taking it off.
“No recorder,” he says.
“I know.”
“No name.”
“I know that too.”
His eyes move over the empty diner. He looks less like someone afraid of being overheard and more like someone afraid of having already said enough.
“Two guys I called this week stopped answering,” he says.
