Page 94 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

Instead it feels —God help me— like the safest I've been inside any room in five years, folded into the shadow of a man who ran eight blocks in the wrong shoes to reach me first.

He shifts forward.

Brings the seat up close behind him, curves his big frame over the wheel, and the shape of him closes over my little dark hiding place like a hand cupped over a candle.

From the road, he's a man alone in a truck, catching his breath.

I'm nothing. I'm nowhere. I'm gone.

"They'll be here in a minute," he murmurs down to me, barely a sound. "Maybe less. Stay still. Stay quiet. Let me handle the rest."

The engine noise behind us swells. Tires on dry dirt, slowing.

He looks down.

For a moment his eyes just lock on mine in the dark of the footwell, close enough that I can see the amber the day has burned into the brown of them, and whatever he finds down here softens every hard line the run put on his face.

His whole expression opens.

His hand comes off the wheel. Very gently, so gently it undoes something I'd nailed shut years ago, his thumb moves along my cheekbone.

It comes away wet.

I didn't know.

That's the thing that finally cuts the last cable in me.

I did not know I was crying.

I have cried maybe four times in five years, always scheduled, alone, and in the two-minute dark of a locked supply pantry. I did not feel these leave me.

They've been running silent down my face for a mile on a dark road, and it took a stranger's thumb to tell me they were there.

"Don't cry, Blooming Apricot." His voice has gone so soft it barely stirs the air between us. Nothing performed in it. Nothing angling for anything. "Don't you cry over this. You hear me?"

"I'm not—" I start, out of pure habit, and the lie dies before it clears my teeth.

"Why?" I whisper instead.

It's the only word I have left, and it has to carry all of it — why are you here, why are you gentle, why does the wanting feel like this.

"You don't even know me."

"I know enough." His mouth moves against my temple. "I know you build forever for strangers and never keep a single hour of it for yourself. I know you walked eight miles into the dark rather than let one of them do you the courtesy of a ride. I know you're folded into a footwell right now with more dignity than most people manage on a throne." The ghost of a smile. "The rest I'll learn. I'm planning on it."

The admission warms something deep inside me.

"You're worthy of being loved," he says then, like he's correcting a mislabeled file, like it's a specification that was always true and simply got entered wrong. "Just as much as you're worthy of being fought for. Those are not the same thing. I think somebody let you believe they were."

He leans down.

In the cramped dark, with headlights sliding up the road behind us, he lowers his head and presses his lips to my forehead — warm, unhurried, certain.

Then to one wet cheek.

Then the other, catching the salt, kissing it away like it costs him nothing, like it's the most natural act in the world to gentle a crying woman under a steering wheel while her ex-pack's truck rolls onto the shoulder outside.

I have been touched by Alphas who wanted things.