“Fuck,” I breathe. The word slips out before I can stop it.
He says my name against my throat, then, “I’ve got you,” and that’s what undoes me. I wrap my legs around his waist and meet every thrust, hips lifting to take him harder. The couch creaks under us. Skin slaps against skin. His hand grips my ass, holding me open as he drives into me with that steady, relentless rhythm—deep, rolling strokes that drag perfectly along my walls. I missed his cock like this, missed the way he fills me so full I can barely think.
“Tell me what you need,” he rasps against my cheek.
“This,” I moan. “Harder. Don’t stop.”
He gives it to me. The pace picks up, deeper, more urgent. Every thrust pushes a broken sound out of me. My thighs tremble. The pressure builds fast and overwhelming until it breaks—my orgasm crashes through me, pulsing hard around his cock as I cry out against his shoulder. He follows a few strokes later, burying himself deep with a low, guttural groan, hips jerking as he comes.
We stay like that, locked together, breathing hard. He doesn’t pull out right away. He stays inside me, heavy and warm, brushing slow kisses along my jaw and into my hair while the aftershocks tremble through us.
After a minute he rolls to the side and pulls me against him and I put my face against his chest and somewhere inside me, beneath the heat and the aftermath, something starts to cry. Not out loud. Not sadness. The crying that comes when you've been holding something alone for too long and someone takes the weight.
He feels it. He doesn't say anything. He pulls me closer and puts his mouth in my hair.
I don't have to explain it. He already understands.
six
Colm
Sundaymorning,Milaisat the motel with Macie for the morning routine. I'm on my porch with a coffee that's gone cold, looking at the yard.
The yard needs work. I've known that for years, but I've done nothing about it because a yard is a place for other people — for kids to run in, for a garden someone tends, for a dog that belongs to a family. I live alone. The spare room is used for storage.
That's what I'm thinking about this morning: the spare room. The boxes in it. Whether there is enough floor space between the boxes for a toddler's bed, and whether Macie likes the dark or needs a nightlight.
I am going to have to trust Mila with these answers, and that is where the crack in the trust is, and I know it and I've been circling it since Friday.
She came back. She made a choice at twenty-two that was about her own survival and her own pride and her legitimate fear, and those things are real and I understand them and theyalso cut. She was scared of being the woman who shows up with a consequence. So she showed up with a consequence two years late, when the choice was hers to make on her own timeline, when she felt ready. While I changed tires and ran competition schedules and looked at the mountains from my porch without knowing I was looking for something.
It's not that I think she's a bad person. She isn't. She's a good mother and a clear-eyed woman who made the best decision she could with what she had. I understand that.
I go back inside, and I call her.
"I want to ask you something," I say when she picks up.
"Okay."
"Not on the phone. Come to my place, tonight. Bring Macie."
There's a pause. "All right."
They come at five. Macie runs the property perimeter immediately with the systematic thoroughness of a building inspector. She checks the porch, the yard, the edge of the tree line, the side of the house where a spigot drips. She finds two beetles and a piece of rope that apparently belongs to her now.
Mila sits on the porch step and watches her and I sit next to her.
"Why didn't you try harder?" I ask. “To find me?”
She's quiet for a moment.
"Because I told myself I was doing the right thing," she says. "I told myself I was protecting you from an obligation you never agreed to. But if I'm being honest —" She pauses. "I was also protecting myself. From what it would mean if I found you and you didn't want to know. That would have been worse than notknowing. So I told myself it was impossible and I almost made myself believe it."
"You were scared."
"Yes."
"I've been scared too," I say. "Since Thursday. I'm scared I'm going to get a week with her and then watch you drive back to Kelowna."
