Page 98 of Final Drive

“He closes the accounts at the end of the month. The Charlotte house was never in my name. He asked me to take my mother’s call when it comes.”

Her grip on the post doesn’t change.

“That’s all of it?”

“It took less than five minutes. He never raised his voice.” I get to the bottom of the stairs. “I’ve got one thing to say and I’d rather say it here in front of everyone, since that’s how you did it.”

Beckett starts to get up until Bo puts a hand out, and he sits back down.

“I’ve made every decision about you at a distance,” I say. “Every one. The gala, my father, the department, tonight. I did it since I could carry it better than you could, and I never once asked whether you wanted it carried.” My voice goes somewhere I don’t recognize. “You told me not to buy your season. I want you to know that if you’d said take the deal, I’d have taken it. That’s the entire point. It was yours to say.”

“That’s the first honest thing you’ve said to me in a month.”

“I’m aware.”

“Keep going.”

“There isn’t any more. I’ve got nothing. No money, no father, no position, no house.” I look up at her. “I’ve got a boat and I’ve got you, and I’ve been lying about the second one for months.”

Reese comes down the last steps and takes my face in both hands.

“Upstairs,” she says.

Somebody behind me makes a noise. Cameron says, mildly, “Everybody out,” and to their enormous credit, they go.

I’ve imagined this since a morning in March when a woman I’d decided to hate corrected my catch timing in front of the entire boat and turned out to be right about it.

Every version I imagined had me in control of it.

I have her against the bedroom door before it’s finished closing. She hooks a leg over my hip. I take her weight and get her higher up the wood, and two months of deciding not to do this goes in about ten seconds. She bites my lower lip hard enough to draw blood, and I growl into her mouth.

“Don’t manage it,” she says against my mouth. “Not tonight.”

“I can’t.”

“Good.”

I get the t-shirt off over her head. She goes for my buttons, and when she’s too slow about it I take over and tear two of them loose. She laughs at me. Then I get my hand between her legs while she’s still against the door, and she stops laughing.

She’s soaked. She’s been standing at the bottom of those stairs since I called her and she’s soaked, and I have to put my forehead against the wood beside her head, since I’m not going to last thirty seconds if I keep looking at her.

“Gray.”

“Give me a second.”

“No.”

She gets her hand around me through my trousers and I say a syllable into her neck that doesn’t belong to any word. I carry her to the bed and put her down harder than I mean to. She comes up on her elbows to watch me get the rest of my clothes off, and nobody in my life has ever looked at me and wanted what she wants.

I put my mouth on her and I take my time about it, since it’s the one thing left tonight I can still be good at. She has her fingers in my hair inside a minute, pulling hard. She comes with my name in her mouth and her heel dug into my back.

Afterward I work up her body and put my mouth on every mark I can reach from here. Jackson’s at her shoulder. Beckett’s above it. Eli’s on the other side. Bo’s at her nape when I turn her head, still raw at the edges. Tyler’s on the inside of her wrist when she reaches for my face. I catch her hand, hold it still, and press my lips to it.

I’ve been counting them for weeks. Every time one of them put his mouth on her I stood in that kitchen and made myself be glad about it. I wasn’t glad. Tonight I don’t have to be, and the relief of that is so enormous it frightens me.

“You’re shaking,” she says.

“I’ve got nothing left. That’s not a figure of speech.”