Footsteps on tile, getting closer.
Stay. Please.
CHAPTER 30
HARVEE
That's the freshest I've felt after a shower in a long time.
The water didn't just rinse off the grime. It peeled away something else, the last sticky layers of fear that had been clinging to my skin since I woke up in that storage unit. I stand with the towel around me and take stock of myself in the fogged mirror and I feel almost new. Like the girl who woke up chained to that couch isn't quite the same one looking back at me now.
The last several days unspool behind my eyes while I dry off. The chains biting into my wrists. The drip in the corner keeping time. His mouth on my skin. His confession murmured against my ear. Raul. His mother. All of it blurs together, sharp and soft at the same time, like my brain can't decide whether to file it under nightmare or something else entirely.
I didn't expect to feel this much.
I've been turning that over since the storage unit, this unsettling awareness that I feel more for the man sitting in my bedroom right now than I ever felt when my boss died. When the office went frantic that Monday morning — the whispers, the pale faces, the officers moving through the lobby — I waited for the shock to arrive. The grief, the guilt, something. It didn't come. Just a quiet, steady relief sliding down my spine like coolwater, and then a low-grade dread that I'd gone numb. That the job and the move and Tennessee and everything my ex stripped out of me had finally finished the job and scraped me hollow.
A shell going through the motions of a woman.
And then DJ walked into my life. Bumped into it, technically, outside the mail room, and caught me before I fell, and then caused me to fall in every way that actually counts.
Loud and rough and dangerous, with eyes that see too much and hands that can hurt and hold in the same motion. He chained me up and somehow unchained something in me I'd given up on finding. I am more terrified and more safe and more furious and more wanted than I have been in years, and all of it traces back to him, which should make no sense and somehow makes the only sense.
I step out of the bathroom.
He's on the edge of my bed, elbows on his knees, staring at a point on the floor that isn't really there. In this light, with the edges softened, he looks younger. Scared. Like a boy in a man's body waiting for someone to tell him it's going to be okay.
My hand reaches for his shoulder before I can talk myself out of it.
He jolts like I've pulled him back from somewhere far away, muscles going rigid, eyes snapping up to mine. For a moment we just hold there, me with my hand half-extended, him looking like something trying to decide if I'm danger or shelter.
"Can I hug you?" The question comes out awkward and fragile, like I've never asked anyone anything before.
He doesn't answer with words.
I watch the wall come down. His shoulders drop, the practiced distance in his expression cracking at the edges. He reaches for me, hands finding my waist, and pulls me in.
It's not tentative. It's not polite. It's the kind of hug that feels like it could hold someone together and stitch someoneelse back up at the same time. His arms lock around me like he's afraid of what happens if he lets go. I bury my face in his chest and breathe in soap and sweat and something that already, impossibly, smells like home.
His hand slides up to cradle the back of my head, fingers threading carefully through my damp hair. He presses a kiss to my forehead and holds it there, warm and steady.
He shouldn't feel this right. The chains, the lies, the blood on his hands. The list of reasons is long and well-documented and none of it stops me from melting into him completely.
And God, he makes me feel safe. Secure in a way I haven't been in so long I'd forgotten what it felt like. Which is also terrifying, because if this is real — if we are real — then losing it would break me worse than anything that came before.
"Goldilocks." His voice, low and rough, his body going slightly tense beneath me like he's bracing.
"Yeah?" I tilt my head up.
He exhales slowly, thumb brushing my cheek. "Stay. With me. Don't go back to your old life. Not yet."
The rawness in it cracks something open in my chest.
"That old life, that old me," I say quietly, "it doesn't exist anymore." The words taste like ash and truth. I'm almost embarrassed by how completely he's rewritten something in me. "DJ, no one has ever felt this much like home. And that scares the hell out of me."
"I know the feeling." His voice drops rougher. "I wasn't supposed to fall for you. This was supposed to be simple."
"I'm here for complicated, if you are."