He says my name like it's a clean thing. Like it was never anything but clean.
"Sophie," he breathes, and the awful weight of the parking lot and the dried egg and Patricia's lowered eyes—all of it goes quiet under the weight of him.
He starts to move.
A slow, sure rhythm.
A man making sure I know I'm wanted by the one person whose opinion I've decided matters.
His hips roll into mine, deep and deliberate, and each thrust feels like a promise. Like he's rewriting me from the inside out.
"You feel so good," he groans against my neck. "So fucking good."
I wrap my legs around him, pulling him deeper, needing more. Needing to feel owned in a way that doesn't feel like ownership—just belonging. Just this.
"Harder," I tell him, because I want to feel it tomorrow. I want to feel it when I'm standing in front of all of them.
He gives me what I ask for.
His pace quickens, his hips snapping against mine, the sound of skin on skin filling the room.
He braces himself on one arm, his other hand gripping my thigh, angling me exactly where he wants me.
His cock hits that spot inside me with every thrust, and I'm climbing again, building toward something that feels like absolution.
"Come for me," he says, his voice rough. "I want to feel you."
I do.
I come so hard, my vision blurs, my whole body clenching around him, and he follows me over the edge, burying himself deep as he groans my name again.
Just my name. Nothing else.
We lie there afterward, tangled together, catching our breath.
I don't think about a single one of them. I think about him, and the way he says mine, and how for once in my life I belong to something I chose instead of something handed to me in a pew.
After, he holds me the way he's learned to. My back to his chest, his arm heavy over my ribs, his mouth pressed to the back of my neck.
"How you feeling?" he asks.
"Held," I say, and I feel him smile against my skin.
He gets up once, brings me water, and turns off the lamp.
When he settles back in, he pulls me close.
I lie there in the dark, in the wreckage of the worst day of my life, getting marked as his instead of branded as theirs. I wait for the old shame to come.
It doesn't.
The sky outside his window holds itself up the same as it ever has.
Indifferent and ordinary, not the least bit interested in punishing me for being loved.
"They're going to keep coming," I say into the dark, because somebody has to. "It's not going to stop because we had a good night."
"I know it." His arm tightens around me. "We're not going to take it lying down, either. Dag's already moving up in Tallahassee. Esperanza's got her teeth in the school board so deep they don't even feel it yet." He presses a kiss to my shoulder. "You spent today on defense, Soph. Getting through it. Surviving them." His voice goes low and certain. "Tomorrow, we start figuring out how to make every last one of them sorry. The clean way. The way that holds up in a courtroom and takes everything they've got."