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“I did not.”
“You absolutely did. You were mumbling something about garage schedules. It was very romantic.”
A laugh catches me off guard, rusty from disuse. “You’re relentless.”
“You love that about me.”
“I do.”
She traces a slow line down my chest with one finger, unhurried, like there’s nowhere either of us needs to be. “You look tired, Wolf.”
“I am tired.”
“Tell me why.”
I don’t want to say it, not here. Not in this version of us where the words haven’t happened yet. But something about her voice pulls it out of me anyway.
“Because you’re gone and I don’t know how to keep doing any of this without you.”
Her hand stills over my heart. “I’m right here.”
“I know that’s not true.”
“Does it have to be true to help?”
I don’t have an answer for that, so I pull her closer instead, burying my face in her hair, breathing in black vanilla like it might actually anchor me here if I hold on hard enough.
“Stay like this with me,” I whisper. “Just for a while.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
Her mouth finds mine before I can argue with the lie, slow and certain, and I kiss her back like a man who understands exactly how borrowed this is and has decided to take it anyway. Her hands map the parts of me that are still healing, careful over bruises she shouldn’t be able to see. Every place she touches comes alive in a way I haven’t felt since long before the creek.
For a while there’s no clubhouse. No tremors. No Cullen. No whiskey. There’s only her, unhurried and certain, like there was never any reason to rush toward an ending neither of us wanted to look at directly.
She’s alive beneath my hands when I pull her against me, her heart beating where my chest meets hers. Her mouth opens beneath mine, and she kisses me. No sadness. No goodbye. Just Raven, soft and hungry, making that quiet sound in the back of her throat when my fingers slide beneath the hem of her shirt.
I need to see her. All of her.
She lifts her arms, letting me draw the shirt over her head, and I stop breathing. There are no sharp bones. No bruises from needles. No evidence of everything her body endured before it finally gave up. Her skin is smooth and warm, her cheeks flushed, her eyes bright as she reaches for my shirt.
“I love you,”
We undress each other slowly, our clothes falling somewhere beyond the bed, though I never hear them land. I run my hands over every inch of her I thought I’d lost. Relearning the shape of her hips and the curve of her waist. I press my mouth to the hollow beneath her ear, then lower, following the path my hands make across her body.
Her fingers slip into my hair when I settle between her thighs. She says my name as my mouth finds her, and the sound moves through me like a pulse. I take my time, needing every broken breath and trembling movement, needing proof that she can still feel me. That I can still give her something besides pain.
She meets me every step, whispering my name like an anchor, like a prayer, and when we find our rhythm together, the rest of the world falls away completely.
When she comes, she cries out and arches beneath me, alive and so fucking beautiful it hurts to look at her.
I move off of her, bracing myself on one arm as she cups my face. Her thumb brushes beneath my eye, catching a tear I hadn’t realized had fallen.
“Stay,” I whisper against her hair. “Just stay like this a little longer.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
I know it’s a lie even as she says it. Some waking part of me already knows it. But I let myself believe it anyway. The same way I’ve let myself believe every small impossible thing since the creek, because believing is the only thing keeping me tethered to wanting to survive the night.
