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I draw back to let him breathe.

Poet licks his lips, watching my mouth as he takes an inhale, watching me, as if I’m a puzzle he’s yet to solve.

I do not blame him for that. The last time I saw him, I told him I was straight and then kissed him anyway. Tonight, we are on the ground because that is where I fell and I’ve yet to find the will to get up.

Go home.

I need to. Sol and I sail at dawn and I know he will already be tired from closing the Joker tonight. But my hands are fused to Poet, my body so entwined with his I can’t seem to disentangle myself, and it’s so removed from how I thought my day would end, that somehow, clinging onto him feels as inevitable as kissing him became the moment the hypo fog shifted and I saw him clearly.

Poet rubs his thumbs on my shoulders, startling me to awareness when I thought I was hyperaware of everything in my universe right now. “We can do this again, you know. Somewhere better than the side of the road.”

“Where is better than this, my friend? I like this very much.”

I’m teasing and Poet honours that with the same grin he left me with the night we met. Dazzling and settling me in equal measure.

I steal another kiss.

Then I swallow a groan and lever myself off him, rising to my feet and bringing him with me on instinct.

It lands us chest to chest, beside my car, like we were two summers ago. My head is heavy from the low numbers that sent me to the ground in the first place, but the rest of me crackles with unspent energy. Inexplicable vitality. I was dead on my feet before I dropped off Aras and attempted to drive home. Now I feel like I could swim the Baltic Sea.

Or kiss Poet Whitlock until the sun comes up.

And then what?

Possibilities dance through my mind. None of them new, but each and every one things I’d never thought of until him. “I like your skin.”

I speak Lithuanian by mistake, which should tell me I’m tired, not that I am picturing a man naked in the sunshine. In the summer rain. In the red-gold leaf fall of my grandfather’s plum trees.

Poet frowns at my mouth. I consider repeating myself, but he’s so close, and he smells so good, I can’t resist tugging him into my arms again.

I don’t kiss him.

Instead, I take a slow breath he mirrors and profound calm settles in my bones—the kind I trust, the kind that usually tells me I know exactly what I’m doing.

But what is that, here? Exactly?

I’m a single parent with a job that takes me away for days and days. I barely manage to visit my brother and I have not seen my parents in more than a year. Even without the promise I made to Aras when he was born, a line I drew for myself about where the best parts of me would go, there isn’t space for this—I don’t want to make space for it or anything else that isn’t taking care of Aras and building a future for him.

It is that simple.

Except my mind won’t stay still. After months and months of heavy days and sluggish thoughts, it skips and skids, moving faster than I’m prepared for, pulling ahead of me in ways it never has, even before.

Before the Sirona floundered.

Before Poet Whitlock.

I want to eat dinner with this man. Walk with him. Drink more of the gin we shared the summer we met. I want to lay my hands on him with no thought to propriety and open spaces.

Thoughts I shut down.

All of them.

Because this is not how I think or how I live.

And Poet, he watches all this as though he can see the exact moment I put the clutter in my head back where it belongs, and his smile is wry and easy. “You okay to drive?”

“Taip. Sorry. Yes.” I loosen my hold on him. “It’s not far.”