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And she lets it go. Just like that. Goes back to her thesis, leaves me the room, doesn’t push — and I stand at the counter drinking water I don’t want and I love her so much it’s a physical thing, this woman who knows exactly when to stop asking, and underneath the love is the dread I’ve been carrying since the second period, the half-a-stride dread, the something’s-wrong-and-I’m-hiding-it dread, and the two feelings sit in my chest at the same time and don’t resolve.

I should tell her about the shoulder.

I think it, standing there, clear as anything: I should tell her. She’s right there. She’d know what to do with it — she’s the most clear-eyed person I’ve ever met, she’d help me think it through, she lives with the evidence anyway, the ice and the ibuprofen, she’s not stupid, she’s already half-clocked it.

And I don’t.

Because telling her makes it real, and real means a trainer, and a trainer means it’s not mine anymore, and I have spent my whole life keeping the things that could undo me to myself. I’m good at it. It’s the same muscle that hid the dyslexia for thirteen years — the handle it alone, don’t make it anyone’s problem, perform fine until fine is true. I know it’s the muscle. I can feel myself using it. I use it anyway.

A beat late, I notice the irony — that I’m doing the exact thing to her that she did to me with the dyslexia. Knowing a thing and holding it. Deciding what the other person gets to carry.

I notice it. I don’t stop.

We go up to bed and I’m wound too tight to sleep and she can feel it coming off me like heat.

I kiss her in the dark and it’s not the slow kind, it’s the other kind, the kind with the whole bad night behind it, and she makes a sound and kisses me back and I’m already pulling the hoodie off her, already getting my hands on her bare skin, already chasing the one thing that reliably shuts my head up. She lets me. I get her shirt off and my mouth on her breast and she arches, her hands in my hair, and I drag my teeth over her nipple just to hear the noise she makes, and I’m rough about it tonight, rougher than usual, and she doesn’t tell me to stop. She comes up onto her knees on the bed and I get behind her, my chest to her back, my mouth on her neck, one hand closing over her breast and the other sliding down her stomach and between her legs, and she’s already wet, already there, and she pushes back against my hand with a sound that goes straight to my cock.

“You’re wound up,” she says, breathless, as my fingers work her.

“Yeah.”

“Bad night.”

“Don’t want to think about it.” I rub slow circles over her clit until she’s gasping, until her thighs are shaking and she’s grinding back against me chasing it, and then I push two fingers into her and feel how ready she is and have to bite down on a groan against her shoulder. “Christ, Sloane. Look at you. So wet for me already.”

“Beau—”

“I’ve got you.” I tip her forward onto her hands, line my cock up, and push into her in one long stroke, all the way, and she takes me with a cry she muffles in the pillow, and I have to stop for half a second, buried in her, just to keep from finishing right there.

It’s good. It’s always good. But it’s different tonight and we both know it — I’m fucking her like I’m trying to outrun something, hard and fast and a little desperate, one hand gripping her hip hard enough to mark and the other braced on the headboard, driving into her, chasing the place where my brain finally goes quiet, where there’s no half a stride and no O’Grady looking at me from a doorway and no question buried in my shoulder. I’m not making love to her. I’m using the one drug that works. I fist a hand in her hair and pull just enough to arch her back and she moans and clenches around me and I curse, filthy, into the dark — that’s it, take it, fucking take it — and the worst part is the shoulder won’t even let me have it clean. It screams when I brace on the headboard, a white flare down my arm, and I grit through it and don’t stop and don’t let her see, change my grip, keep driving into her.

“Beau.” She turns her head, and even bent over the bed with my cock buried in her and my hand in her hair she’s reading me, because she always reads me. “Hey. Slow down.”

“I’m good.”

“You’re not. You’re—” she catches a breath as I push deep “—you’re somewhere else. Where are you?”

And I can’t answer that, because the answer is I’m half a stride behind on a UConn rush and my shoulder is asking me a question I’m afraid of, and I’m not going to say that buried inside her at midnight, so I don’t say anything. I just slow down because she asked. I pull out, and she makes a sound of protest. I pull her up against my chest so we’re both kneeling, her back to me, and I guide my cock back into her slow this time, all the way, and wrap an arm across her chest to hold her against me. She reaches back and grips my thigh. I move slower, deeper, my face in her neck, my free hand sliding down to find her clit again, and it gets better — quieter, closer, less like running. Less like a man fucking his way out of his own head and more like the thing it’s supposed to be.

“There you are,” she breathes, because she feels the difference, because she feels me come back into the room.

I work her clit in slow circles in time with my hips and she falls apart like that, clenching around my cock with her head dropped back on my chest and a long, shaking moan, and I follow her over a few strokes later, buried as deep as I can get, pulsing into her with my mouth on her throat and her name in it. The shoulder screams the whole time and I don’t make a sound about it, and for about thirty seconds after, breathing hard with my face in her hair and both of us wrecked, I get the quiet I was chasing.

It doesn’t last.

The after is wrong and I feel it before I can name it, the way I feel everything, a beat late.

Normally this is the best part. Normally the after is her letting me hold her, the dry comment, the warmth, the thing where she stops managing for a few minutes and just exists against me. Normally I drop straight into the good kind of tired.

Tonight she rolls away.

Not far. Not cold, exactly. But she rolls onto her back instead of into me, and she’s looking at the ceiling, and I’m looking at the side of her face, and there’s a foot of space between us that’s usually not there, and neither of us closes it.

“That was different,” she says, to the ceiling.

“Yeah.”

“You weren’t here for it. Not really.” She’s not accusing. She’s observing, the way she observes everything, flat and accurate and impossible to argue with. “You were somewhere else the whole time and you wouldn’t tell me where.”