Page 74 of Handful

“You speak this. What’s this mean?”

He looked at the video. Looked at me. And a filthy grin spread across his face.

“IICYIFU.” He said the letters like he was savoring them. “If I catch you, I fuck you.” He pushed the phone back across the bar. “Your old lady is not being subtle, brother. She is telling you to get on your bike, go find her, and—” He spread his hands. “You want me to draw you a diagram?”

“No.”

“She’s speaking the language. That’s a Wren-level text, that is. I’m a little proud.” He was already turning back to his laptop. “Go. I’ll lock up.”

I was at the door before he finished the sentence.

“Handful.” He didn’t look up from the screen. “Took you long enough. Both of you.”

❧

Austen lived twenty minutes across town in a building with a buzzer and a flight of stairs. I did the twenty minutes in fourteen. Hit the buzzer once. Didn’t even get to say my name — she just let me in, like she’d been waiting.

I took the stairs two at a time. She was already in the doorway when I got there.

She was wearing an old t-shirt of mine and nothing else as far as I could tell. Hair down. She leaned in the doorway and looked at me. “You came,” she said.

“You told me to.” I held her eyes. “Told you I’d be waiting for the word.”

“I wasn’t sure you’d understand the meaning.”

“I had to have it translated.” I didn’t move yet. Six weeks I’d spent learning to keep my hands off this woman, and every bit of me was dying to touch her now but I held off. “Glitch says hi. Says he’s proud of you.”

She laughed. Then she reached out, got a fistful of my shirt, and pulled me over the threshold.

“I called you here because I’m done.” She kept walking me backward, her hands still in my shirt, and my hands finally - finally - coming up to her hips.

For half a second my whole world dropped out from under me when she said done. But the playful look in her eyes and that COME summons told me there was more to this.

“I watched you. Every day I told myself I wasn’t looking, but I was. The cameras, the panic buttons, the way you treat those women. I watched you choose, over and over.”

“Austen—”

“You told me that you’d missed this body.” She glanced down at herself, then back up at me. She got the door shut behind us with her heel, and there was the dare in her eyes — the one from the wedding, the one from the bar, the one I’d loved before I knew what it was. “You said it was all mine.” Her eyes dropped, slow, all the way down and back up my body, like she was taking inventory. “Prove it.”

That was all I needed. I pushed her up against the nearest wall and got my mouth on hers, tongue sliding against hers, both hands in her hair. She started making those little sounds against my mouth — the ones I’d been jerking off to every morning in the shower — only the real thing was so much better than the memory I’d been working from. I pressed into her so she could feel exactly what she’d done to me, making her gasp. She arched against it and kissed me harder.

Her hands found the hem of my shirt. She broke the kiss long enough to drag it over my head and throw it somewhere behind her. Then she went quiet.

Still.

Her eyes were on my chest. For one terrible second I thought she’d changed her mind but then she reached out and touched the ink over my heart with two fingers. Light. Like she had the night she’d touched the cut on the back of my door.

I couldn’t help it. I grinned.

“When?” she said.

“Three weeks after the others.” I covered her hand with mine, held it flat against my chest. “Wanted you close to my heart always.”

She looked up from my chest to my face. “You had Ice put my name over your heart?” She stared at me like I’d just told her I’d jumped off a building. “What if I hadn’t sent you that text tonight? What if we never got back together? What if some poor woman had to look at my name on your chest every time she saw you naked — every time she fucked you — for the rest of your life?” She stared at me. “Are you crazy?”

“Crazy for you.”

“Be serious.”