Page 48 of Fake Marriage Mafia Triplets

She considers that, then lets it go. “Fine, but the north room here needs a rug before it needs anything else. You’ve got shelves on a list somewhere. I’ve seen the list, and there’s no rug on it.”

“The room needs shelves. It’s an empty room.”

“It’s a cold empty room. A rug first, then you can stack your dead men’s ledgers on whatever you want.”

“I don’t know how to buy a rug,” I say.

“That is obvious from the entire house.” She says it without looking up from her cup, deadpan, and it catches me sideways.

I laugh. Actually laugh, out loud, in my own kitchen, and the sound of it is so unfamiliar I nearly stop to examine it. I can’t remember the last time. Years, maybe. Before the water, before the four years of being a name on a headstone.

She grins at the sound like she’s won something. “There it is.”

“Don’t.”

“I’m framing that. First laugh. I was here.”

We argue about it after that, rugs and shelves and whether October belongs in Istanbul or on the coast, and neither of us is trying to win. She says the coast, I say the city, she says I have no taste, I say I have excellent taste and simply no rug, and she laughs at me this time.

The coffee goes cold between us, and I don’t reheat it, because reheating it would mean moving, and moving would mean this ends. I want every morning after this one to start exactly here.

She sets down her cup and watches me until I stop talking too.

“I need you over here,” she says.

She kisses me in the kitchen, and we don’t make it past the hallway.

We’ve been gentle before. This morning, she kisses me after seeing exactly what fear makes me do and choosing to stay through it, and that’s the difference, the only one that matters.

I back her against the hallway wall, and she pulls my shirt up and over before I take her mouth slow, and neither of us is rushing toward anything or away from anything.

I get her out of her clothes against the wall, and she gets me out of mine, and then I lift her and carry her through the nearest doorway and lower us both onto the rug. Neither of us hurries. I put my mouth on her throat, her collarbone, then the soft rise of her breast, and she groans. She traces the scars across my back, the ones she knows by now, without flinching, and we’re in no rush.

I take my time with her because she almost left last night, and every second she stays now is hers to choose. I kiss my way down her body until I settle between her thighs, and she’s already wet when I put my mouth on her pussy. She arches up off the floor and says my name like a warning she doesn’t mean. I work her clit with my tongue and slide my fingers into her while holding down her hips and stay there until she’s shaking, until she fists both hands in my hair and a broken sound escapes her. Only when she’s right at the edge do I move back up her body and press my cock against her opening.

I tip her chin up when I push into her, one slow stroke until I’m buried to the hilt and she clenches around me. “You look at me,” I say, and she does, and I hold there, all the way in, both of us still. Her breath catches. Mine does too.

She saw the worst version of my fear last night and walked out the door, and this morning, she walked back through it. She holds my gaze now like she means to stay through whatever comes next.

I move, and she moves with me. It builds slowly, deep and certain, the two of us finding a rhythm that has no rush to it because nothing is chasing us.

She says my name again, then a string of things that aren’t words, her nails at my shoulders, her heels pressing me closer, as she raises her hips to meet each stroke. I brace on one forearm and watch her face the whole time, the flush climbing her throat, her gaze on mine and refusing to leave. She clenches around my cock and I hold her through it, my mouth at her ear. “You’re mine because you chose me,” I say, and she pulls me closer with her heels locked behind me. “I chose you,” she says, and then she comes apart saying yes into my neck. I follow her a few strokes later, buried deep, her name the only thing in my mouth, and I press my forehead to hers when I come.

Afterward, I don’t move off her right away, and she doesn’t let me. We stay tangled on the floor of a room we chose at random, her fingers tracing idle lines across my chest, and for a long while neither of us says anything because nothing needs saying.

We make it to a bed eventually. She lies against my side with her head on my chest until her muscles loosen. Then she tenses and lifts her head. She lowers one hand to her stomach and opens her mouth.

I wait. I don’t fill the silence, because I’ve learned that when Piper is deciding whether to hand me something, the worst thing I can do is reach for it before she’s ready. I can tell it’s large, whatever it is. She holds herself still and searches for the words. I want it, all of it, every last thing she’s keeping. I make myself lie still and let her come to it.

She searches my face a moment longer, then closes her mouth and moves her hand from her stomach to my chest, and whatever it was, she decides to keep it a while longer.

I have a guess. I’ve had it for a week and refused to hold it up to the light, because a guess like that changes every calculation I make about her safety, and because it isn’t mine to confirm. She stopped drinking weeks ago and blamed her stomach. She turns gray in the mornings and calls it the schedule. I’m the most observant man I know, and I have chosen, against every instinct I own, not to finish a pattern I can see forming, because the one time it matters most, she gets to be the one who says it out loud.

“You can tell me when you’re ready,” I say, because I want her to know I saw it but I’m not chasing it. “Whenever that is.”

She doesn’t answer but laces our fingers together, holding on like the grip itself is the thing she couldn’t say, and I close my hand around hers to let it be enough for now.

For four years I handled every unknown by reaching for it first, taking it apart before it could take me apart. She presses her forehead to my chest and keeps our joined hands between us, and I leave the unknown where it is. I pull her closer and don’t ask again.