Page 198 of The Off Limits Captain
“I want you. All of it. Not the careful version.” Her hand fists in my hair. “I want to feel you come.”
“Fuck, Peyton.” It comes out cracked. I have not planned to say it; I have not planned most of tonight. I stop planning entirely the moment I push inside her and she gasps my name like it is the only word she has left.
I move hard, then harder when she demands it, one hand fisted in the sheet beside her head and the other at her hip, over the mark that has faded and the one that will replace it. Somewhere under all of it is the old reflex: hold something back, keep an exit in reach the way I always do. I let it go. There is nothing careful left in me. No captain. No distance. Just the two of us and the headboard knocking the wall and the unbearable relief of being wanted back.
“Ryan.” Her nails bite into my back. “Don’t stop.”
“Not stopping.” My voice breaks on it. “Not leaving. Not this time.”
“Fuck.” She says it like a vow and a surrender in the same breath, her whole body drawing tight around me. “I missed you. I hate how much.”
“I know.” I press the words into her mouth. “Me too. Me too.”
I feel her go over the edge around me, feel her cry the sound into my shoulder, and let myself follow with her name in my mouth and both arms locked around her like distance is a thing a man can physically refuse.
After, I stay inside the circle of her arms until our breathing evens out.
Then I move only far enough to pull the blanket over us.
Peyton curls against my side, palm flat over my heart.
“Question at the window,” I say quietly.
Her eyes open.
“Off the record?”
“Always.”
“When did you know you wanted this?”
She is quiet long enough that I feel the answer forming.
“The porch,” she says. “The morning after your mother’s first surgery. You sat down beside me and did not fill the silence. I had spent my whole life around people who weaponized empty space. You just let it be there.”
My hand moves down her arm.
“Your turn,” she says.
“The plane. After the article.”
“That was not exactly our best moment.”
“You sat beside me anyway. Told me the truth anyway. You did not ask me to make it easy for you.”
Her cheek rests against my chest.
“Ryan?”
“Yeah.”
“What happens tomorrow?”
Game Six. The drive back. The arena. The headlines. Her name in the wrong mouths. My mother in a hospital bed across town.
All of it waits.
“Tomorrow I go back,” I say. “Tonight I stay.”
