Page 31 of What We Become

“I’m not done. You wanted the good stuff. Sit still.”

She huffs a laugh that cracks in the middle. I guide her head back and start the rinse, shielding her eyes with my palm.

“I have Micah back,” I say. “Really back. Not the version where I stood three feet away and called it closeness. I know things about him now I never let myself know before. I fall asleep beside him most nights and it feels like mine. You did that. Loving you taught me how to let him love me—how to let any of them love me. I spent years pretending to exist in the light while I actually lived in the dark. Now I have a life that’s full. Messy. Both halves in the same room, and nobody has to leave.”

I turn the water off. The silence afterward rings.

“You knew before I did,” I say quietly. “You put it on my back. The monster breaking out of the cage. I thought it was about accepting what I am. It wasn’t. The cage was never keeping the monster in, Sage. It was keeping everything else out. You were just the first person I let reach through the bars.” I press the water out of the ends of her hair. “And you put six birds above it. I thought that was you being generous. It wasn’t. You’d already worked out that when the cage broke, it wasn’t only the monster that got loose.”

When I look at her, she’s crying. Silent, steady tears cutting through the damp on her cheeks.

“That’s the good stuff,” she whispers. “That’s the really good stuff.”

“There’s more. But you’re shaking, and Shahid said fifteen minutes, and I refuse to explain to Holden that I let you get hypothermia mid-speech.”

“Eli Ward, if you stop talking now, I will stab you with my own IV port.”

I laugh—actually laugh—and press my forehead to hers, wet hair between us, her bandaged hands finding my jaw.

“I wanted to tell you that you’re extraordinary. That I love your temper. I love that you put knives in every room and steal our clothes and refuse to wait quietly while the rest of us debate over every little decision.” My throat tightens. “I love the way you challenge me. I love the way you trust me with the part of you that wants control and pain, even after I gave you every reason not to.”

“Eli.”

“I love you.”

She goes very still, and I pull back enough to wrap a towel around her to keep her warm.

“I’ve loved you for longer than I knew what to call it. I think part of me loved you on the beach when you stood there covered in Brock’s blood and refused to fall apart for any of us. Maybe before that. I don’t know.” I shake my head. “I spent so long trying to establish exactly when it happened that I missed the part where it no longer mattered.”

Water drips from the ends of her hair.

The shower ticks quietly behind us.

“I don’t want to be halfway in this anymore,” I continue. “I don’t want to be the man who leaves coffee on the counter and stands outside your door because that’s the closest he’ll let himself get. I don’t want scenes to be the only place I give you everything.”

“What do you want?”

The answer comes easily.

That’s new too.

“I want to be your partner. Fully. Not only your Dom. Not the man you let back into the house because you felt sorry for him. Yours.”

“I don’t feel sorry for you.”

“Good.”

“And you’re already my partner.”

“You made room for me,” I say. “I haven’t always stood in it.”

She studies my face, and I pick up another towel so I can dry her hair.

“I want mornings with you,” I tell her. “Dates. Arguments. I want you complaining about my coffee and leaving your shoes where I’ll trip over them. I want to wash your hair when you haven’t almost died first. I want the club. The leash. The parts of us that don’t make sense anywhere else. I want all of it.”

Her eyes shine, and I move on to drying the other side of her head.

“Even after last night?” she asks.