I stopped mid-stride. His grip was not exactly rough—he wasn’t hurting me—but he was not letting go either. There was something deliberate in it, controlled, the kind of hold that said,I mean this.
“Let me go first,” he murmured. His voice barely carried past the two of us.
I blinked, tugged against his grip with a forced laugh that sounded empty even to my own ears.
“Seriously?” The word came out sharper than I intended. “I’ve been walking to my car alone since the ripe old age of sixteen, Callan.”
My whole life had become a testament to not needing anyone’s protection, not wanting it either. I’d built that, carefully, deliberately, and I wasn’t about to hand it over in a dark parking lot because the sirens had spooked us both.
His fingers remained in place, neither tightening nor loosening.
“Sloane,” he said.
His voice had changed. The familiar irritation was gone. The cold efficiency of the last two hours, gone. What replaced it made my stomach tighten—something bare and honest that he probably didn’t mean to let through.
“Humor me.”
I swallowed. The retort I’d been building died somewhere between my chest and my throat.
“For fuck’s sake,” he continued, his voice dropping lower, closer, meant only for the small, dark space between us. “We have no idea what’s going on. You didn’t see what I saw from that window.”
His eyes moved past me, scanning the lot, the road beyond it, the treeline past that. I watched the muscles in his jaw work as he cataloged every shadow, every corner, every placesomethingmight be waiting. When he looked back down at me, I became suddenly, painfully aware of how close we were standing, how his fingers still circled my wrist, how I could sense his pulse against mine, or perhaps that was just my own, hammering too fast.
“And you’re slightly taller than a twelve-year-old.”
There it was.
The words hit exactly where they always did—that precise, well-practiced jab he’d been landing since the day we met. I stiffened immediately, heat flaring in my chest. Irritation, mostly. Familiar and sharp, and safe.
But something else, too. Something that had no business being there.
I hated being reminded how small I was. Hated how easy it was for people to look past me, over me, or down on me. Hated that his body had the ability to block mine completely if he stepped forward, that he probably knew it.
Five feet tall.
Five useless feet of me standing in the dark with his hand on my arm and my heart doing a jig in my chest.
I crossed my arms. “I’m perfectly capable of walking to my car.”
His jaw tightened. His gaze lowered to my mouth—for a split second, so quick I doubted if I had actually seen it.
“I didn’t say you weren’t.”
His hand was still on my arm.
Warm now. His thumb shifted against my skin, tracing a small, unconscious circle just below the inside of my elbow. I don’t think he knew he was doing it, but I sensed it everywhere—up my arm, settling somewhere in my chest, slightly out of reach.
I didn’t look at him. If I did, he’d see something in my face that I didn’t want to show.
So I looked at the parking lot instead, at the dark, at nothing.
He wasn’t just teasing me.
He was worried.
Genuinely, quietly worried—about the sirens, about the darkness, about me walking sixty feet across an empty lot by myself. And he was bad at saying it, so he’d wrapped it in a joke about my height because that was easier, because that was what we did. We pushed and needled and kept each other at arm’s length, and it had always worked.
Until right now, standing in the dark with his thumb still moving against my skin and the smell of something metallic in the air and no signal on my phone, and no way to know what was happening beyond this parking lot.