Good.
I want her drunk on me.
I want Jeremy’s name burned out of every place he left it. I want her body to learn a new language, one made of yes and stop and more and mine only if she says it first.
I pull back, breathing hard. “Bedroom.”
She nods.
I lift her off the table, and she wraps her legs around me for two steps before I set her down because if I carry her the whole way, I may forget everything except getting inside her. She takes my hand instead.
Leads me.
That matters.
She opens my bedroom door, then stops.
The bed is mine again. Dark sheets. No dinosaur blankets. No child’s toy on the pillow. But August is close enough that the house still holds motherhood in its walls. She glances toward the small room down the hall.
I wait.
The hardest thing I have ever done may be waiting while a woman decides whether she can belong to herself in my doorway.
“He’s asleep,” she whispers.
“I know.”
“If he wakes…”
“We stop.”
“If I need to check…”
“You check.”
“If I panic…”
“I stop.”
She looks at me. “If I cry?”
My chest tightens.
“Then I hold you if you want. Or I leave if you want. Or I sit on the damn floor and hate every man who taught you to apologize for crying.”
Her face twists.
Then she steps into the room.
I follow and close the door halfway, not all the way. She notices.
“Cracked?” I ask.
She nods.
So it stays cracked.
She turns to me in the dim light, and suddenly the heat turns heavy. Sacred is too clean a word for it. This ain’t clean. It’s dark and complicated and full of ghosts. But it’s hers. I can feel that. Whatever fear rides under her skin, whatever pain sits behind her eyes, she is choosing the next step.