Page 65 of Thunder

Tonight I set the pace and hold it, moving in her deep and unhurried, feeling her come apart in slow degrees under hands that finally do what I tell them again.

The hip burns the whole time, a hot wire down my left side with every stroke, and I ride it the way I've learned to ride all of it now, breathing through the worst of it, refusing to let it take this from me.

Some things are worth the pain. This is at the top of a short list.

"I love you," she says, wrecked, at the edge of it. "God, Thunder, I love you⁠—"

"I know it." I press my forehead to hers. "I know you do. Feel it every time you look at me."

My voice goes rough. "Let go, Presley. I've got you. Always got you."

She comes apart under me with my name on her lips, and I follow her over a few strokes later, buried deep.

Her legs locked around me and her arms around my neck and the hip screaming and none of it mattering at all, because this—her, here, mine, the whole warm weight of her wrapped around me in the straw—this is the closest thing to peace I've ever known.

After, we lie tangled up on the blanket, sweat cooling, her head on my chest right over the heartbeat that's hers now whether she knows it or not.

"We should get dressed," she says, not moving.

"Should."

"Somebody really could come out here."

"Yeah, they could."

I don't move either.

I stroke her hair and stare up at the dark rafters, holding the best thing I've ever had against my side and let myself, for one more minute, be a man with everything.

It's later, driving her back to her cabin on the side-by-side under a sky gone thick with stars, that the other thing settles back onto me.

Because as good as tonight was, as far as we've come, there's a piece of me that never fully stands down, and it's the piece that remembers what came back on that last run.

The men still won't say much about it.

But I know how Rogue's face goes when he thinks nobody's watching, and I know we didn't find what we went looking for, and I know the Firm is still out there somewhere past the good, patient, building their book, waiting on a season of their own choosing.

We handled the investigator. The family's whole.

My hip's mending.

But that silver-truck feeling never fully left, and a man who's survived as long as I have learns not to argue with it.

I drop her at her door and kiss her long enough that she laughs and pushes me off, and I watch her light come on inside, and I ride home under all those stars telling myself what men like me always tell ourselves.

That we've earned a little peace.

That the worst is behind us.

That we get to keep this.

I almost believe it, too.

That's the trouble with happiness.

It makes you careless.

It makes you stop watching the dark quite as hard as you should.