Page 834 of End Game

“This position okay?”

“Yes.”

“I’m going to move your wrist.”

“I know.”

I pause, meeting his eyes.

He isn’t irritated. He’s just reminding me that he’s tracking what I’m doing, which is different. It matters with Ronan.

I nod and take his hand.

I’ve touched him more in the last few months than I did in all the years before them, but that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped noticing. His skin is warm beneath my palm as I rotate his arm slowly, watching the tendons shift beneath the surface while I position him.

“Here?”

He looks down at the stencil. “Yes.”

“You want to check it standing first?”

“I already did.”

Of course he did.

I smile. “Right.”

After I clean the skin again, I brace his wrist lightly against the support and start the machine.

Ronan watches me work.

Not the needle.

Me.

I notice it somewhere around the second line, when I glance up expecting his attention to be fixed on his arm and find his eyes on my face instead.

Something tightens low behind my ribs.

I look back down.

You learn quickly in this job how not to think about the intimacy of touching people. You have to. Bodies become working surfaces—skin tension, angles, needle depth, blood, ink. Stretch. Wipe. Reposition. Keep moving.

Ronan refuses to become a surface beneath my hands.

Every point of contact stays sharp in my awareness.

The spread of my fingers when I stretch the skin. My thumb braced against the inside of his wrist. The tiny movement of his tendons when I reposition his arm. His breathing, slow and controlled, close enough that every exhale brushes faintly across the inside of my wrist.

When I change my grip, his eyes track the movement of my hand before I touch him.

Always.

He sees it coming. Knows where I’m going. Lets me.

I stretch the skin again and feel his forearm remain loose in my hand. There’s no recoil, no tension beyond the body’s natural response to the needle.

Permission repeats itself in dozens of tiny ways without either of us saying the word.