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He's hard. I can see it straining against his wet jeans when he braces both hands on the bench on either side of me. He doesn't do anything about it. He just stands there looking at me, laid out on his workbench, half-dressed, undone, still catching my breath.

"You're so goddamn beautiful." He says it like it's costing him something. Like the words are being extracted against his will. "Every day you show up here and wreck me a little more and I don't know what to do about you."

I reach up and touch his jaw. Rough with stubble, still wet from the rain and from me.

"You could start by not ignoring me for days afterward."

He turns his head and presses his mouth against my palm. Eyes closed. Just for a second.

Then he pulls back. Straightens up. Hands off the bench. The shutters come down so fast I can practically hear them slam.

"Get dressed."

I sit up on the workbench and pull my shirt closed. My hands are clumsy on the buttons. Wet cotton, wrong buttonholes, fingers that won't stop trembling.

He's by the big sliding door with his back to me. Both hands on his hips. Head down. His shoulders are still heaving.

I get my jeans up. The denim is cold and stiff against my skin. Everything he just touched is still buzzing, oversensitive, like my body hasn't gotten the message that we're done.

The guilt is already on me. It was waiting its turn the whole time, patient, sitting in the corner of the workshop like a dog that knows it's not allowed on the furniture. Now it climbs up and settles in.

I just came on the mouth of a man I'm lying to. The same mouth that called me beautiful. The same mouth that pressed a kiss to my inner thigh like I was something sacred. And the entire time, every second of it, I knew something he didn't. I knew his name before he told me. I knew his dock before I stood on it as an employee. I know who signed the letter that almost cost him this place, and it wasn't a stranger.

He deserves to know.

"Aiden."

"No." He doesn't turn around.

"I need to tell you-"

"Whatever you need to get off your chest, I can’t hear it right now." He's still facing the door. The rain is pelting down outside, and his shoulders are a straight, tense line across the dim workshop. "I need space."

He's not shutting me out because he knows. He's shutting me out because that's what he does. The man goes to his knees for me and then can't look at me afterward. Forward, then punish. It's a pattern I've watched three times now and I should be angry about it.

Instead, I feel relief.

It floods through me, warm and sickening, and I recognize it for exactly what it is. He closed the door and I didn't fight to open it. I was going to tell him and he said don't, so I let the word land like a deadbolt and I am so, so grateful that he stopped me.

I button my shirt the rest of the way, then reach back in to fix my bra. I push my wet hair off my face becoming, piece by piece, a woman who looks like she hasn't just had her world rocked on a workbench.

"I'll close up the office," I say.

He nods without turning around.

I walk across the workshop floor on legs that aren't entirely mine yet, and the rain hits me the second I step out, cold and hard, and I stand in it for a moment and let it do what it's going to do.

I’ve come on the tongue of the man I’m lying to.

The thought knots itself beneath my ribs. It's still there when I lock the office. It's still there when I drive home. It's still there when I shower and stand in front of the mirror and see the places his stubble scraped my skin pink, my collarbone, the insides of my thighs.

I could have told him. He would have listened. Eventually.

I didn't want to.

Chapter 13

Aiden