Page 10 of Crash’s Secret

That’s what I keep thinking about. The fact that I wanted to apologize for things I did before she ever came home. Like I owe her an explanation.

Then there was that guy. That fucking drunk.

Big sunburned bastard, hand on her thigh, and I don’t remember crossing the room. I remember the bathroom door, and I remember crouching over him with my knuckles split. The middle is gone.

I’ve hit men before. I’ve killed men before. Club life. A one-percenter.

Every time before tonight, I decided to do it first.

Nobody fucking touches her.

That feeling was primal. I wasn’t only trying to protect my best friend’s sister.

And then the other thing. The sentence I cut off, because I couldn’t say the words.

She doesn’t belong⁠—

I couldn’t say that she doesn’t belong to me.

Every cell in my body disagrees.

I drag my hands down my face.

The girl I knew left four years ago and never came back. The woman who took her place is somebody I’m meeting for the first time.

Nothing wrong with that part. I met a woman, and I want her. Simple as it gets.

The problem is whose sister she is.

Decades of friendship, and not once have I given him a reason not to trust me.

He left this morning and made me promise to protect her. But maybe she needs protection from me.

There’s no version of this where I get what I want and keep being the man Saber thinks I am.

The ice machine rattles down the hall. Somebody kills the music downstairs.

It’s even quieter now. And the quiet gives me space to think about her arms around my waist when she was on the back of my bike.

On the way back from Rosa’s, she reached around me and flattened her palms against my stomach, and her thighs opened around mine, and for six minutes she was pressed against my back with the engine running through both of us.

Every gear change rocked her into me. Her chin at my shoulder. Her thighs spread around mine, and her pussy pressed against the small of my back. Two layers of denim did nothing. I felt the heat of her the whole six minutes.

She held on tighter than the road required. And I was hard the whole fucking ride.

She knew. She had to know.

I sit up. My boots hit the floor.

I need a shower. A cold one.

That’s what I need. Freeze it out, go to sleep, wake up tomorrow, and be her brother’s best friend again.

I go into my bathroom and strip down, turn the left tap all the way, and step in before I can talk myself out of it.

The cold shocks my system, and I stand in it with my hands flat on the tile, head down, water hammering the back of my neck. Breathing through it. My knuckles ache where they split on the drunk’s face, and the cold makes them ache worse.

Good. I need to focus on the pain to forget about her.