It feels slippery.
But my body is heavy, my rage drained, my knuckles throbbing under bandages, and her warmth is against me like something I have no practice resisting.
I pull her closer. “Sleep.”
She goes still for half a second.
Then relaxes.
“Okay,” she whispers.
I sleep like a man who thinks he has been given a future.
That’s my mistake.
Chapter Eighteen
Amelia
Leaving Derby feels like stealing from a man who handed me the keys.
That is the thought I carry out of his house before dawn.
Not a suitcase. Not a clean conscience. Not courage.
Just that.
A theft.
His bedroom is behind me. His bed is still warm. His body is still heavy with sleep, one arm stretched across the place where I was lying less than ten minutes ago. His beard is mussed from my fingers. His mouth is soft in a way I never would have believed if I had not kissed every hard line out of it myself.
I should wake him.
I know I should.
Secrets turn into cages too.
The words beat against the inside of my skull with every careful step I take down the hall.
I should wake him, tell him about Lottie, Hot Mama, Lonerock, the Queens of Anarchy, and the road opening under my feet. I should let him curse, argue, rage, throw on his cut, andfollow because that is what Derby does. He follows trouble until it either runs out of road or bleeds enough to satisfy him.
That is exactly why I don’t wake him.
Because if he comes with me now, he won’t come calm.
He will come fresh out of jail, full of Jeremy’s blood and unfinished violence, with that look in his eyes that says every problem in the world is a door he can kick in. He will come because he thinks protecting me means being near enough to put himself between me and whatever comes next.
And I want him near.
God help me, I want that so badly I almost turn around twice before I reach the living room.
The couch where he used to sleep looks strange in the dark. The blanket is folded over one arm. His boots sit near the door. The dinosaur courthouse still leans in the corner, Blue Rex presiding over a shoebox jail and a cereal-box witness stand. A pack of dinosaur fruit snacks sits open on the coffee table. The cheap little keychain I bought Derby is gone from the counter because he put it on his keys.
He kept it.
That is almost what breaks me.
Not the sex. Not the way he held me afterward. Not the rough tenderness in his voice when he told me to sleep.