CHAPTER 46: Still

POV: Selene Castellano

They didn’t once talk about Edward Hale.

No one said let’s not talk about it — it was simply understood, the way certain things between two people who’ve been through enough together become understood without negotiation. Avalon put his phone face down on the counter when they got home. Selene didn’t open her laptop. The legal pads stayed in the bag.

By some quiet agreement, the night belonged to neither of them.

He ordered food without asking what she wanted.

Thai, it turned out. From somewhere three blocks away that clearly knew him — the order arrived in twelve minutes, which meant it had been placed before she’d finished taking off her shoes. Paper bags, lemongrass, something fried that smelled like the best decision anyone had made all day.

“You ordered without asking me,” she said.

“You would have said you weren’t hungry.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“And yet.” He put a container in front of her.

She ate three spring rolls before she said anything else.

They sat on the kitchen floor. Her idea — she’d looked at the dining table with its associations of strategy and paperwork and bad news delivered over coffee and said the floor, and Avalon had simply grabbed two cushions from the couch without commentary. That was something she’d been noticing lately. He’d stopped raising an eyebrow at the small things. Somewhere in the last several months he’d made a private decision that whatever she needed was reasonable by default, and he’d never announced the decision, just started living it quietly.

She didn’t know when it had happened. As a matter of fact, she didn’t know when a lot of things had happened.

“Stop,” he said, without looking up from his food.

“Stop what?”

“Whatever you’re doing with your face.”

“I’m eating.”

“You’re thinking and using eating as cover.” He looked up. “What is it?”

She considered that deflecting would have been easy. 

“I file things away sometimes,” she said. “Moments. People.” She moved a container slightly to the left, straightened it, moved it back. “It started when I was young. When my mother got sick and I understood that things don’t stay. So I started cataloguing noting things carefully.”

He was quiet.

“Old habit,” she added, as though that made it smaller.

“What are you filing right now?”

She looked at him. His tie was gone — she’d watched him pull it off in the elevator, that particular violence of a man finished with formality for the day. His shirt was untucked and there was a crease along his jaw from where he’d rested his face in his hand during the ride home. He looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with the hour.

“You,” she said simply. “Just you.”

He reached across the containers and took the spring roll out of her hand, set it down and her hand instead.

“File this too then,” he said.

It was such a simple thing to say. She laughed — genuinely, from somewhere unguarded — and it pulled at her wound and she pressed her free hand to her side and kept laughing anyway because some things are worth the small cost.

“That was terrible,” she said.

“I know.”

“Genuinely terrible.”

“Eat your food, Selene.”

She stood at the bathroom mirror later with her shirt lifted and looked at the scar.

The doctors said it was healing well. The tissues are knitting correctly and in a year it would be a pale line, barely there. In ten years she might not think about it at all.

She didn’t believe that, but she appreciated the optimism.

It wasn’t the pain she kept returning to — that had faded into background noise weeks ago. It was the moment itself. The way her body had moved before her mind had caught up. She hadn’t decided to step in front of Maya. There had been no decision. It was just— movement. Her body already knowing what her mind was still processing.

She’d been thinking about that a lot lately about the things we do before we know we’re doing them. The choices that were already made in some deeper room before we had the language for them.

The bathroom door opened.

Avalon appeared behind her in the mirror.

He saw what she was looking at. She watched him register it — the scar, her expression, the particular quality of her stillness. He didn’t say anything reassuring, he just came and stood behind her and looked at it with her.

Which was exactly the right thing she hadn’t known she needed it until he did it.

“Does it hurt tonight?” he asked.

“A little but definitely less than last week.”

“Good.”

They stood there in the mirror together. Her and her reflection and him behind her. She became aware, gradually, of the weight of the day — Diana’s voice, the phone on the desk, Edward Hale’s name spoken aloud for the first time, all of it settling now that there was quiet enough to feel it.

She turned to move to the beroom as she looked at him properly.

Up close his face showed everything the public version was designed to conceal. The exhaustion and something beneath that — a way of looking at her that she’d come to recognize as the specific expression he wore when feeling was outrunning language and he’d stopped trying to close the gap.

She knew because she probably looked the same way back.

“We don’t have to—” he started.

“I know.” She put her hand against his face. “I want to.”

“Your side—”

“Is healing. I’m not made of glass, Avalon.” She held his gaze. “We’ve been through depositions and board rooms and I got shot and our lawyer looked us in the eye for months while she — “ She stopped. Started differently. “I just want one night where none of it’s in the room. Just us. No case, no company, no one else.”

He looked at her.

Then he turned his face and pressed his lips on her cheek. “Okay,” he said quietly.

Like a door closing on everything else.

At twenty-two they’d been urgent. New to each other, fueled by discovery and the particular hunger of people who hadn’t yet learned that things end. She wasn’t diminishing that time. It had been real.

But this was built on the full knowledge of loss.

The way he looked into her eyes communicating emotions he couldn't express in words, using his palm to circle her back as a quest for permission 

Selene kissed him, a deep longing kiss that carried everything she had been holding back—the quiet questions, the unspoken fears, and the fragile hope she barely dared to name. For a moment, the world seemed to pause around them, the air felt heavier, charged with emotion, as if even time itself didn’t want to interrupt.

Her fingers trembled slightly where they rested against his shoulder, not from uncertainty, but from the intensity of finally letting herself feel. Before she could fully process what she had done—before the weight of that kiss could settle into something she could understand—he pulled her back in.

This time, he wasn't hesitant, his kiss was deeper, more certain, carrying a quiet urgency that caught her off guard. It wasn’t rushed, but it was intense—like he had crossed a line in his own mind and wasn’t turning back. One hand found her waist, steadying her, while the other hovered for a moment as if unsure where to rest, before gently drawing her closer.

Selene’s breath hitched, her thoughts scattering. The world around them blurred into something distant and unimportant. All she could feel was the closeness, the warmth, the way everything suddenly felt too real.

He broke the kiss only slightly, his forehead brushing hers, as if grounding himself. There was something in his expression—something deeper than desire. A kind of hunger, yes, but layered with restraint, conflict, and something almost vulnerable.

For a second, it felt like everything hung in balance.

Like whatever happened next would change everything. His eyes searched hers with a seriousness that cut through the heat between them.

“Are you sure?” he asked quietly.

Selene didn’t look away and without hesitation—she gave a small, steady nod.

The hesitation between them dissolved, replaced by something more consuming, more certain. Clothes became an interruption neither of them wanted anymore, and the space between them vanished completely.

Her neck was his favourite play point, he sucked, kissed and bit her as she continually moaned hungrily for more…. He gently placed soft kisses on her body before parting her legs and resolving to her core.

He gently took her yoni in his mouth, twirling his tongue around, moving like he found his favourite candy she moaned more, tilting my head back to give him better access. His hands clamped on my waist, then moved—one going to cup her breast.  His tongue went deeper into her yoni calling out the ecstasy she craves, she  gasped, her back arching. His tongue swept her mouth again just as he slipped a finger inside of her. Her hips moved in a rhythm she wasn't sure of, demanding more, craving the fullness of him, and his growl reverberated in my chest as he added another finger.

 Lightning lashed through her veins, and her focus narrowed to his fingers, his mouth, his body on hers. His palm pushed against the bundle of nerves at the apex of her thighs as she groaned his name and came undone.

Before she could process what just happened, he did something that left her breathless.