Page 77 of What We Don't Say: Part Two

The kiss isn’t careful.

It starts that way for half a breath because Sloane is trying. I feel him hold back, feel the tremor in his hands where they hover near my waist, feel the apology already forming in the way he doesn’t take. Then I make a broken sound against his mouth, and his restraint shifts into something warmer. His hands settle at my sides without closing too tight, and he kisses me like a man who’s been starving at the edge of a locked room, like every answer he needs is in the press of my lips and the fact that I came to him.

I kiss him harder, rising on my toes and dragging him down with both hands fisted in his shirt. The scent of him wraps around me, smoked cedar and brown sugar, familiar enough to ache in my teeth. My bond mark throbs under my blouse, and Sloane makes a sound when he feels me shiver.

His forehead drops to mine when I finally pull back. His breathing is unsteady, but his hands loosen immediately, giving me the space before I have to earn it with words. “I’m going to be very honest,” he whispers, his mouth still close enough that I feel every syllable. “I don’t want to let this goodnight be small.”

My laugh comes out wet and almost soundless. “I don’t know how to make anything small right now.”

“Then I will.” He brushes his thumb along my waist once, only once, then lets his hand fall. “Goodnight, sweetheart. I’m right here if you need me. I’m still right here if you don’t.”

What breaks me a little is the fact that he lets the moment end without making the ending feel like rejection. I step back, and he stays where he is, throat working, eyes bright. I want to crawl back into his arms so badly my whole body feels pulled forward by it, but I make myself turn toward the hall.

The bedroom door is half open.

I should keep walking. I know that. I have my own room here, Dash’s room, the place where I learned to sleep without flinching at every sound. But the hallway light falls across the bed, and the sight inside roots me in place.

Idris is on his back with one arm folded beneath his head, asleep or close enough to it that the room has softened around him. Theo is half sprawled across his chest, dark hair messy, one cheek pressed over Idris' heartbeat. His hand is curled near the temporary bite at his shoulder like even sleep wants to guard it. He mumbles something I can’t make out, a sleepy, irritated little sound when Sloane steps in behind me, and Idris' hand shifts automatically to Theo’s back.

Sloane pauses at my shoulder without touching me. He looks into the room, then at me, and something in his face changes when he sees what I’m seeing. The bed isn’t peaceful. Grief is in it, exhaustion, the strange uneven breathing of people who have been afraid for too long. But it’s warm. It’s real. Theo’s body knows where to go. Idris' hand knows how to settle him. Sloane slips past me only after I step aside, and Theo reaches blindly for him before his eyes open.

“Sloane,” Theo mumbles into Idris' shirt, petulant and soft with sleep.

“I’m here, pretty boy,” Sloane whispers, climbing onto the mattress with the same careful heaviness he’s been using around all of us. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Theo makes a satisfied sound and hooks one foot over Sloane’s thigh like that settles the matter. Idris opens his eyes just enough to look at me through the dim room. He doesn’t ask me to come in. He doesn’t ask me why I’m standing in the hall with my heart in my throat and my hands still remembering Sloane’s shirt. His gaze holds mine for one quiet second, then drops to my mouthand back up again with such controlled hunger that I feel it low in my stomach.

I turn away before wanting carries me across the threshold.

Dash’s room is warm when I reach it. He’s awake in the armchair by the window, book open against one thigh, glasses low on his nose. The lamp beside him turns his hair soft at the edges, and there’s something about the sight of him waiting without waiting at the door that makes my breath stutter. He knew I would come here. He gave me space to decide it anyway.

He closes the book when I step inside. “Come here,” he says gently, and the softness in his voice makes the last hour of holding myself together finally slip.

I go to him without ceremony. He shifts the book onto the table and opens his arms, and I curl into his lap with my knees tucked against the side of the chair and my face in his neck. He smells like bergamot and sandalwood, warm skin, clean cotton, the faint trace of the coffee he must have reheated and forgotten to drink. His arms come around me with the kind of familiarity that doesn’t ask whether it’s allowed because I’ve taught him this shape with my own body night after night.

Dash lets the silence sit until my breathing steadies. Dash’s hand moves slowly along my back, over the blazer I never took off, down to the place where my shirt has wrinkled from sitting in meetings too long. He eases the jacket from my shoulders only after I lift one arm, then the other. It falls to the floor in a dark heap, and I should care about wrinkles. I don’t.

His fingers skim the nape of my neck, the side of my throat, the edge of my collar without hurrying toward anything. The touch is sensual because Dash never touches me like he’s absent from his own hands. Even comfort from him has heat in it.

“You kissed him,” he says after a while.

My eyes close. “I did.”

“Did it feel good?” His hand keeps moving at my waist, slow and warm, and the question has enough room inside it for the truth.

“It felt like I’d been holding my breath for three months,” I whisper. “It felt like my body knew him before my fear could stop it.”

His hand stills for half a second. Then it starts moving again, steady enough to keep me from apologizing before I’ve even finished telling the truth. “That sounds like a hard thing to punish yourself for.”

I lift my head. His face is close, his expression too gentle to hide the hurt in it completely. That makes it worse. I could handle anger. I could handle a boundary, a demand, something clean enough to push against. Dash gives me honesty and doesn’t make me bleed for it.

“I want them so bad,” I say, and the confession comes out ragged. “I want Sloane. I want Idris. I want Theo in the middle of it like he belongs there because he does, and I hate that wanting all of that makes me feel like I’m doing something wrong to you. I thought for so long that wanting them made me pathetic. Then I thought wanting you meant I’d survived them. Now I want all of you, and I don’t know how to hold that without turning it into something ugly.”

Dash cups the side of my face. His thumb moves under my eye, catching wetness I didn’t feel fall. “Go to them, sweetheart,” he says, voice low and rough around the tenderness. “I can almost feel you wanting to.”

My throat closes. I shake my head, but the motion is weak because some part of me has already leaned toward the hall. “I don’t want to leave you here like you were temporary.”

His mouth tightens. He's hurt. Not cruelly, not dramatically, but honestly enough that I feel the flinch in his chest beneath mypalm. Then he leans forward and kisses me, slow and deep and warm, his hand firm at the back of my neck.