Page 67 of Heat Unscripted

Not because I ran out. Because the weight that had sat on my chest since I was eighteen had lifted enough that I could feel the gap where it used to be.

I stood up. The studio felt different. Not smaller. Rearranged. The desk and the foam and the silver mic reorganized around something else. The room where I’d performed somebody who wasn’t me had turned into the room where I’d told the truth into a clean file and let the men who loved me hear all of it.

I crossed the floor. Cillian turned full toward me as I reached the board, and I put my hands on his face the way I’d put them on Bram’s, cupping his jaw, the warmth of skin over bone. He looked up. The silver in his ears caught the desk lamp. He let his hands stay on his knees. Not reaching. Waiting, the way he’d waited for years.

“You heard me,” I said. My real voice, warm and full, in the small space between us. Not performed. Just said, to him. “All of it. Even the parts I was hiding.”

“Yes,” he said.

“Even when I didn’t know you were listening.”

“Yes.”

His face held everything he’d never said out loud. The years of longing. The choices made without telling me. The thing he’d built and tested and refined until it soothed my breathing through the fever nights.

I leaned down and pressed my forehead to his, close enough that every word would go through his skin before it reached his ears.

“I want you to hear the rest of it,” I said. “Without equipment between us.”

His breath went out of him. Not a gasp, quieter than that. The sandalwood opened up in the small room, warmer, less the steady broadcast of a man holding level and more a man letting himself answer something.

His hands came up off his knees. Slow. They found my waist the careful, exact way he touched everything, not gripping, just making contact. His fingertips pressed through the fabric.

“I’ve been listening to you for six years,” he said, very quietly. “Through every piece of tech I know how to build. Every filter. Every waveform. Every single thing I could put between what you were and what the world got to hear.”

His thumbs moved in small circles at my waist.

“I don’t need the equipment anymore.”

I kissed him.

Not the relief-soaked collisions of the past week. This was chosen, clear. A man who’d been listening to me across distance and years of secrets, and was now finally close enough that there was nothing left to listen through.

He kissed me back the way he worked, taking in every variable, unhurried, nothing like Bram’s slow method or Tuck’s heat. A man with the patience to take the time.

Still listening, even here. Reading every small sound I made with all the attention he’d spent years pointing at waveforms, now pointed at me.

A sound came out of me. Low. Involuntary. The whine that doesn’t carry past the room, the small private one that means yes, here, I hear you hearing me. It went between our mouths and I felt him answer it, felt the sandalwood go richer, felt his careful hands ease a fraction.

He pulled back a fraction. His eyes, very close, held mine.

“Again,” he said, barely sound at all.

“What?”

“That sound. Make it again.” His thumb traced my jaw. “I want to feel it.”

The same thing Bram had asked for in the library, just in Cillian’s language. Not the voice he’d loved through speakers. Not the instrument. Not even the mate-call that had blown everything open. The sound I make when I’m being heard and I know it. The one with nothing to perform and nowhere to broadcast, that only exists for the person close enough to feel it.

I tipped my face into his hand and let it come up out of my chest. Soft. Pitched to the gap between two people, not to a room.

His breath caught. Not the professional stillness. Something that had been gathering behind the calm for six years and was arriving now, straight into his hands.

“There you are,” he said.

His arms drew me in. My hands found the back of his neck, the warm skin over his collar, the short hair at his nape. The silver ring in his ear was cool under my fingers.

“You’ve been protecting my voice for years,” I said against his cheek. “I’m going to spend a lot longer than that letting you hear it.”