What We Can’t Take Back

CHAPTER SEVEN

POV: Zara

Ryan arrived at six.

He came through the door with snow on his jacket and a wide smile and pulled her into a hug that was warm and solid and completely real. She hugged him back. Held on maybe a second longer than usual.

“I missed you,” he said into her hair.

“I missed you too.”

She meant it. That was the thing that made everything worse. She genuinely meant it.

Damon came in from the living room, hand extended. “Ryan. Good to see you man.”

Ryan shook it. “Damon. Hell of a weekend to get snowed in.”

“Tell me about it.”

They smiled at each other. Easy. Unbothered. Two men who had met a handful of times at Marcus’s gatherings and had no reason to be anything but friendly.

Zara watched them shake hands and felt the floor tilt slightly under her feet.

Camille arrived forty minutes later. Pretty in that effortless way she always was, dark coat, red lips, pulling Damon into a kiss at the door that was long enough to make a point without being obvious about it.

Zara looked away.

Ryan’s hand found the small of her back.

She leaned into it.

Marcus called during dinner. On speaker, loud and chaotic, complaining about the roads and their dad’s cooking and promising he’d be back by morning. The four of them sat around the kitchen table and ate the pasta Damon made, again, effortlessly, infuriatingly, and talked about nothing dangerous.

Work. The storm. A film Ryan had seen. A restaurant Camille wanted to try.

Normal. All of it perfectly, suffocatingly normal.

Zara laughed at the right moments. Refilled wine glasses. Kept her eyes away from the one place they kept wanting to go.

Under the table Ryan’s hand found her knee. She put her hand over his.

Across the table she felt rather than saw Damon go still for half a second.

She didn’t look.

By ten Ryan was exhausted from the drive. He showered, got into bed in Marcus’s room, was asleep before she’d finished washing her face.

She stood in the bathroom doorway and watched him sleep and felt something she couldn’t name settle heavy in her chest.

She went to get water.

The kitchen was dark except for the light above the stove. She didn’t turn anything else on. Just filled a glass and stood at the counter and drank it slowly and told herself to go back upstairs.

She heard him before she saw him.

Bare feet on the floor. The particular weight of his step.

She didn’t turn around.

“Camille asleep?” she asked. Quiet.

“Yeah.” His voice was low. Rough like it got late at night.

“Ryan too.”

Silence.

She should have gone upstairs then. Should have put the glass down and said goodnight and walked away and that would have been it. One decision. One second.

She put the glass down.

Didn’t walk away.

He came to stand beside her at the counter. Not touching. Just there. Both of them staring at the dark window and the snow blue night outside and the version of themselves reflected back in the glass.

“Zara.” Just her name. A warning and a question at the same time.

“Don’t say anything,” she said.

“I have to—”

“Damon.” She turned to face him. In the low light his face was all shadow and jaw and those dark eyes that had been taking her apart all weekend. “If you say something sensible right now I will never forgive you.”

He looked at her for a long moment.

Then his hand came up and his thumb traced along her jaw, slow and deliberate, and she felt it everywhere, down her throat, her chest, lower, and her breath left her in a rush.

“We can’t come back from this,” he said. Low. Almost gentle.

“I know.”

“You sure?”

She reached up and grabbed the front of his shirt.

That was her answer.

He kissed her like he’d been keeping it locked up for years because he had. No buildup. No gentle start. His mouth on hers was immediate and deep and demanding and she made a sound against him that she’d never made before in her life, something desperate and relieved at once, like finally and oh god in the same breath.

His hands were in her hair. Hers were gripping his shirt, his shoulders, anywhere she could reach.

He walked her backward into the counter and she went willingly, pulled him with her, and the edge of the counter bit into her lower back and she didn’t care at all.

“Zara.” Against her mouth.

“Don’t stop.” Her hands found the hem of his shirt, pushed underneath, palms flat against his stomach and she felt every muscle there contract under her touch. “Don’t you dare stop.”

He pulled back just enough to look at her. Eyes black in the low light, chest moving fast, hair slightly wrecked from her hands.

“Not stopping,” he said.

Then he lifted her onto the counter like she weighed nothing and stepped between her knees and kissed her again and this time there was nothing careful about it. His hands pushed under her shirt, warm and certain, spanning her waist, her ribs, moving up like he was learning her by touch and intended to remember every detail.

She arched into him.

His mouth left hers and moved to her jaw, her neck, the place just below her ear that made her grip his shoulders hard and bite down on her lip to keep quiet because upstairs…. upstairs.

“We have to be quiet,” she breathed.

His laugh was low against her throat. “Then you need to be quiet.”

“That’s your fault not mine—”

He did something with his mouth on her collarbone that cut the sentence clean off.

They made it to the hallway before they stopped again.

Her back against the wall, his body against hers, both of them breathing hard and barely keeping it together. His forehead dropped to hers.

“Room,” she managed.

“Which one.”

A beat. Both of them thinking the same thing. Her room was closer. Ryan was in Marcus’s room at the end of the hall.

“Mine,” she said.

Something moved through his face. He understood what she was saying. Her room. Her choice. Her risk.

He took her hand and they moved through the dark house like people who knew they were doing something irreversible and had stopped caring.

Inside her room, door locked, the world shrank down to just this.

Just him.

He took his time now. All the urgency from the kitchen still burning underneath but he slowed it down deliberately, like he wanted her to feel every single second of it. He pulled her shirt over her head and looked at her in the dark and the way he looked made her feel like something worth looking at.

“You’re—” he stopped.

“What?”

“Nothing. Come here.”

She reached for his shirt. He let her pull it off. She put her hands on his chest, his stomach, the ridges there, learning him back. He watched her do it. Jaw tight. Completely still except for the muscle flickering in his throat.

“Damon.”

“Yeah.”

“Stop holding back.”

Something in him released.

He walked her to the bed and they went down together and his weight over her was exactly what she’d been trying not to think about for three days, substantial and certain, like being chosen, like being wanted in a way that had nothing performative about it.

His hands moved everywhere. Learning. Finding. She arched up into every place he touched and stopped trying to be quiet and started just pressing her mouth to his shoulder instead, muffling everything there.

When he finally pushed into her she gasped, couldn’t stop it, and he stilled immediately.

“Okay?” Low in her ear.

“Yes.” She pulled him closer with both hands. “Move. Please.”

He moved.

And she understood then why she’d been so careful for so long. Why she’d kept her eyes away and her distance close and her feelings locked in a box that she’d never opened.

Because this, him, was the kind of thing you couldn’t put back.

She felt it everywhere. In her bones. In the back of her throat. In every place she’d been going numb for longer than she’d realized.

He said her name once. Just once, low and broken against her temple, and it undid her completely.

Afterward they lay in the dark and didn’t speak for a long time.

His arm was around her. Her head on his chest. Listening to his heartbeat slow.

Outside the house was silent. Upstairs, down the hall, Ryan. In the guest room, Camille.

She should have felt destroyed by that. Maybe she did and it was just buried under everything else.

“Zara,” he said softly.

“Don’t.” She pressed her face into his chest. “Five more minutes.”

His arm tightened slightly around her.

Five minutes became twenty.

She fell asleep and didn’t mean to.

She woke at four in the morning to the sound of movement upstairs.

Ryan. Getting up. She heard the bathroom. The flush. The footsteps going back.

Her heart stopped for a full three seconds.

She sat up in the dark. Looked at Damon beside her, already awake, eyes on the ceiling, listening.

They waited. Silence settled back over the house.

She exhaled.

He sat up slowly. Found his shirt on the floor. Pulled it on without a word. She watched him and the reality of the last few hours landed on her all at once, heavy and permanent and completely hers to carry.

He stood. Looked at her in the dark.

“Go back to sleep,” he said quietly.

“Damon—”

“We’ll figure it out in the morning.” He said it like he believed it. She didn’t know if she did. “Sleep.”

He unlocked the door. Eased it open. Checked the hall.

Then he was gone.

She sat in her dark room and listened to his door close softly down the hall and pressed her hands flat on the bed where he’d been and felt the warmth still there.

Her phone lit up on the nightstand.

Unknown number.

“Time’s up”.