Page 49 of My Reckless Biker

We collapse together breathing hard, both slick with sweat, afternoon sun warm across bare skin.

She's still underneath me, soft and boneless, and I can feel her heart racing against my chest.

"I love you," she says quietly.

"Love you too."

I roll to the side and pull her against me and we lie there on the bare mattress in the empty room of the house that's ours. No furniture. No curtains. Just us and boxes downstairs and the afternoon stretching ahead with nothing scheduled and nowhere we need to be.

"We should finish unpacking," she says eventually, but she doesn't move.

"Later."

"We have to sleep somewhere tonight."

"We've got a mattress. That's all we need."

She laughs, the sound soft and genuine, and shifts closer against me. My hand settles on her hip, thumb tracing lazy circles on soft skin.

"Remember when you said we'd get a place together?" she asks.

"Yeah."

"This is better than I thought it would be."

"Better how?"

"Just... this." She gestures vaguely at the empty room, at us on the mattress, at the whole situation. "I thought permanent would feel different. Heavier, maybe. But it just feels like us."

"It is us."

"I know. That's what makes it good."

We're quiet for a while, just breathing together, and I think about the fact that three years ago she walked through Vigil's gate with a USB drive and a plan to disappear and I thought she was lying. Thought she was a plant. Thought trusting her would cost me everything.

I was wrong about the cost. Trusting her gave me everything instead.

"Hey," she says, propping herself up on her elbow to look at me. "Thank you."

"For what?"

"For asking what I think. For seeing me. For making coffee exactly right every morning for three years without me ever asking you to. For this." She gestures at the room again. "All of it."

"You earned it."

"I know. But thank you anyway."

I pull her down and kiss her, slow and thorough, and when I pull back she's smiling.

"Come on," she says, sitting up. "We should at least get the bed frame assembled before it gets dark."

"Or we could stay here."

"On the floor?"

"We've got a mattress."

She laughs again and stands, completely unselfconscious about her nakedness, and I watch her cross to where we dropped our clothes.

The afternoon light catches her curves, the generous swell of her hips, the softness of her stomach, and I'm already thinking about tonight when we're actually in bed properly.

"You're staring again," she says, pulling my shirt on instead of her own.

"Yeah."

"Good." She comes back and offers me her hand. "Now get up and help me build our bed frame. You can stare more later."

I take her hand and let her pull me up, and we spend the rest of the afternoon assembling furniture in the bedroom that's ours, in the house that's ours, building the life we said we'd build three years ago when this was just an idea and not yet real.

Just us. Just this.

Just the permanent thing we built from a fake date.