Page 37 of My Enemy Biker

"Yes you can." The combination of his pace and his fingers and his voice is devastating. "Come for me one more time and then I'm done. Promise."

The promise pushes me over. I come screaming into the pillow, clenching around him so hard it almost hurts.

He follows immediately, groaning my name, collapsing over my back.

We stay like that for long seconds, both breathing like we've been running. Eventually he pulls out, rolls us to our sides, pulls me back against his chest.

I'm completely spent. Can't move, can barely think, body satisfied in a way I've never experienced.

"I meant what I said," he says eventually. "About keeping promises. About you mattering."

"I know."

"You believe me?"

"I'm choosing to." I turn my head enough to see his face. "But I meant what I said too. One more broken promise and this is over."

"Won't happen."

"It better not."

His arm tightens around me. We fall asleep like that, tangled together, sweat still cooling on our skin.

Epilogue — Cain

Three Years Later

The dishwasher is open and Anna's standing in front of it with her arms crossed, staring at it like it personally offended her.

"That's not how you load a dishwasher," she says.

I look up from my laptop at the kitchen table. The same table where we first sat across from each other, where she presented case law and I countered with operational need, where I realized I wanted to keep arguing with her indefinitely.

"It's loaded," I say. "Dishes go in, get clean, come out. System works."

"The system is inefficient." She gestures at the top rack. "You put the mugs facing the wrong direction. Water won't reach inside them properly."

"They get clean."

"They getadequatelyclean. There's a difference."

I close the laptop. This is happening whether I want it to or not, and if I'm honest, I don't want it not to. This is what we do. How we work.

"Show me the correct way," I say.

She pulls out the top rack, starts rearranging mugs with the precision she brings to everything. "Handles facing down and to the side. Allows maximum water coverage. Also prevents pooling in the concave bottom."

"You researched this."

"I observe patterns and optimize systems. That's not research, it's basic competence."

"You researched dishwasher loading efficiency."

She doesn't look at me but I catch the corner of her mouth twitching. "There was an article in my news feed."

"You read an article about dishwasher loading."

"It was well-cited."