Page 143 of Wells

"You're going to kill me."

"Breathe, Wells."

So I breathe, and she rocks against me slow, no space between us anywhere, and it's nothing like the frantic half-clothed nights against my desk when neither of us could say what we were. This is every wall down at once. She moves, and I move with her, and we pull the same breath.

Her eyes stay open on mine the whole time, and I understand what she's doing. She's making me stay. Stay present, stay seen, stay in the one place I spent thirty years inventing ways to leave.

The slow doesn't last, because it never does with us. Her breath breaks first, her hips lose the patient rhythm, and she fists a hand in my hair and rides me harder.

I grip her hips and meet her, driving up into her while she gasps my name into my mouth.

"There," she breathes, "right there, don't stop."

I couldn't if the building came down around us. When she comes, she keeps her eyes locked on mine and doesn't hide a second of it. That look is what tips me over, and I follow her with my face in her neck and her skin in my teeth.

For a while, we stay tangled like that, her in my lap, her heart slamming against my chest and slowing by degrees. She pulls back enough to look at me, hair wild, cheeks flushed, that lazy smile she gets.

"New pose," she says. "I'm claiming it."

"How do you think that will go over in class?"

"I'm pretty sure the middle-aged women at Om will eat it up."

I kiss the corner of her smile. "I love you."

"I know." She presses the next part into my mouth. "I love you, too."

We lie together, me holding her, her breath tickling my chest.

"I take it back. That'd traumatize them." She laughs into my skin. "If they're diligent in their practice like we are, they'll figure it out."

"Are you glad you've decided to keep teaching two classes at Om?"

She runs Sol House now as the permanent general manager, but still does a few classes at Om. Lin was only ever the acting director, the steady hand to get the doors open and the program standing. The day it was standing, he was the one who came to her, not me, and asked her to take it for good.

"Yes. They each fill me in different ways."

The whole operation is hers, the schedule and the staff and the kids and the building she once pointed at through a chain-link fence.

I'm still the chairman of the foundation arm under Argentum, which means my name is on the paperwork and I sign what the Stone lawyers tell me to sign. Otherwise, I stay the hell out of how she runs her house.

I love how confident she's become. I knew her as Peoria once, behind a mask, fumbling, trying to carry a life that was meant to fill her. Eighteen months on, she's a woman who knows exactly what she wants and doesn't perform for anyone anymore. I learn from her every day how to live out in the open.

"Those kids love you more than they love me, and I'm the one who runs the place." She says it with no jealousy in it, and it still undoes me. It isn't true, but she loves setting me up as a play prop for the kids, and I've come to look forward to those afternoons more than anything in my week.

She stretches against me, not getting up, just folding in closer. "I have to swing by Sol later. Now that school's back in, the schedule is a mess. Those new intake forms are going to be the death of me."

She tips her face up. "Come with me. You can carry things and look good while I organize them."

"Can't. I'm going into the office to meet Ridge."

"On a Sunday?"

"Yeah. Something came up. I need to walk him through."

She doesn't ask what. A year with me has taught her there's still work I do for the family that doesn't belong in this bed, and she lets me keep it without turning it into a wall.

The something has been dead ten days. The trace I've kept quiet on Vin went still, and when I pulled the thread, it ended in a rented room in a town an hour outside London.