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A laugh slipped out of me, quiet and real. “She did.”

Ryan finished cleaning me before throwing the cloth toward the bathroom door. It landed several feet short.

“Excellent shot.”

“I’m tired.”

“I can tell.”

His glare lacked its usual force.

I expected him to stand, fix his clothes, and remind me which wing contained my room.

Instead, he lay beside me.

Ryan remained on top of the blankets with his stained shirt still covering his chest. I stayed beneath them, naked except for the sheet I pulled over my body. Several inches of mattress separated us.

Then his hand found mine.

He didn’t lace our fingers together. He only rested his palm over the back of my hand as though the contact had happened accidentally.

I knew Ryan too well to believe that.

I also knew better than to point it out.

Mi hada remained alive inside my chest, bright enough to frighten me. It didn’t mean he had forgiven me. It didn’t change Sunday or unlock the door he believed his pain could keep closed.

But he had carried the name through fifteen months without me.

Some part of him had reached for it when control disappeared.

I turned my face toward him. Ryan’s eyes were closed, but his thumb moved once across my knuckles.

I allowed myself one private thought without asking him to carry its weight.

The door was still locked but he had forgotten his hand was resting on the key.

13

Ryan

The replacement shirt Bliss left outside my door was powder blue with bold black lettering reading BEST MAN across the chest and MERCER PARTY FOR TWO monopolizing the back. It was an improvement only because the first one had been stained with grease, salsa, and enough masa to qualify as destroyed.

Charm had left my room ten minutes ago wearing her ruined shirt and shorts, headed back to the east wing to shower and change before the remaining VIP guests arrived. I had let her go because following her would have made it painfully obvious that somewhere between the scavenger hunt, the kitchen, and getting inside her again, I had lost any interest in keeping physical distance between us.

The room still smelled like her.

Her scent remained in my sheets. The washcloth I’d used to clean my come lay near the bathroom door, and the discarded condom in the trash offered physical proof that I had followed every rule I set last night. None of it explained why I still felt exposed.

Then there was the part I couldn’t blame on my dick.

I had called her mi hada.

The name had escaped before I could stop it, soft enough that I tried to bury whatever followed beneath something filthy. Charm heard it. I knew she had because her eyes changed, but she hadn’t grabbed the moment and tried to turn it into more. She hadn’t asked what it meant for Sunday, demanded I explain myself, or treated one endearment like forgiveness.

She had simply let me have it.

That bothered me more than if she had pushed.