Page 92 of The Off Limits Captain

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“Then what do you want?”

He turns his head. My face is close, soft in the low light and still too sharp to lie to.

“To be allowed to love it without becoming only it.”

The words land somewhere in me and stay.

“That is a better answer than most men give naked.”

“You have a sample size?”

“Do not become insecure now. It would ruin my theory of your emotional repression.”

He smiles despite himself.

I kiss him once. Not heat this time. Not exactly. A seal over the thing he gave me and the thing I have not taken.

“My turn,” he says.

“That sounds ominous.”

“Tell me something no one gets.”

Ryan

Peyton’s breath shifts.

For a moment, I think she will make a joke and I will let her because people survive in the ways they know.

Then she says, “I am still afraid my father is right.”

I stop.

“Not about you,” she says quickly. “About me. That I make things harder because I do not know how to be loved without treating it like a negotiation.”

I turn toward her fully. “He is wrong.”

“You cannot know that.”

“I can.”

“Ryan.”

“You made my life harder,” I say. “You also made it truer. Those are not the same thing.”

She stares at me.

Then she puts her face against my chest, and I hold her until she stops shaking.

At some point, Peyton sleeps.

Before dawn, I wake.

I do not mean to leave like a thief. I tell myself that while I find my clothes in the dark, while Peyton sleeps on her side with one hand under her cheek and the sheet low across the curve of her back.

I stand beside the bed past the point of pretending I’m not.

Staying feels impossible.

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