Page 54 of Someone To Claim
“I’ll never get tired of this,” I tell her. It’s the truth, and maybe it reveals too much. But when her breath hitches, that alone is its own reward.
She wraps her legs around me, urging me closer, and I slide into her in one long stroke. We’re past the part where I need to be careful. She takes me like she was waiting for this. The sound she makes—half gasp, half sigh—is better than a fucking angel choir. The first time I heard it was in a Nashville hotelroom, then in a rain-soaked tent, and in this same bed last night. It gets me every damn time, a bigger rush than a stadium full of screaming fans.
We find our rhythm, her hips rising to meet mine, and I lose myself in the heat and friction and the desperate noises she makes against my neck. Or maybe those noises are coming from me.
“More,” she whispers, and I give it to her. Deeper and harder, my thumb finding the spot that makes her cry out and grab my wrist like she did in the tent because she’s afraid I’ll stop.
I won’t stop. She should know that by now, but I’m happy to prove it as many times as she’ll let me.
She comes with my name on her lips, her body clenching around me. The sight of her falling apart like it’s still a surprise drags me over the edge right after. I bury myself deep and let go, pleasure crashing through me in waves that leave me panting and wrecked.
We lie tangled together, her head on my shoulder and my hand tracing lazy circles on her spine. Outside the window, the last light has faded to full dark.
“Should I stay?” I ask as if I mean tonight in her bed rather than the one in the second bedroom. I doubt Sloane realizes it, but I mean tomorrow and next week and longer. Beyond this cabin and this mountain and everything I thought I knew about myself. I’m talking about a version of my life that has her in it, full stop. The one I can’t stop building in my head when she hasn’t given me any indication she wants it too.
Her blue eyes are dark in the dim light when she lifts her head. “You’re not going anywhere.”
I kiss her forehead and think about how right she is. I’m hers for as long as she’ll have me. And I’m going to hold onto that with both hands.
20
SLOANE
The ATV swaysthrough another switchback, and I tighten my grip on the roll bar more out of habit than necessity, because the grizzled local who’s our ride down the mountain drives the dirt road like it’s paved.
“You doing okay back there?” Darren calls over his shoulder, steering around the next switchback with total confidence while I resist the bone-deep urge to scold him about keeping his eyes on the road. When he pulled up to the cabin this morning, he quickly reassured us we were in good hands. That he’s been running the Beartooth roads for close to fifty years. And I absolutely believe him.
“Fine,” I answer. It’s mostly true, if you don’t count the fact that my heart has been skipping and stuttering since we started our descent. A fact that has nothing to do with him navigating this washboard trail from a muscle memory that belies conscious thought.
I didn’t want to leave.
When Darren’s ATV appeared in the clearing, I had to physically stop myself from telling him there’d been a mistake. That we weren’t ready. Could he come back in a week? Orpossibly never? I wanted to stay in the little-house-in-the-big-woods fever dream for a while longer. To wake up tomorrow with Jensen’s arms around me. Bump into each other while he made coffee and I handled everything else. The man is truly useless in the kitchen, but his skills in the bedroom more than make up for it.
I loved the writing I’ve been doing. Pages and pages of hurried handwriting, filling my golden notebook with thoughts and emotions that come from a deeper place inside than I’ve been willing to mine before this trek. Maybe they could be a book. Not a bestseller, probably not even a shelf-sitter beyond Cover to Cover, but proof that I have something to say worth sharing with the world. Something that’s mine.
That part snags in my brain as the ATV rattles down the mountain. All my life, I’ve given the credit away. The bookstore was successful because of Grandma’s trust fund, not because I pulled it out of the red with fourteen-hour days and a stubborn refusal to let it fail. My positive attitude during treatment was because of Kristen Quinn’s book, not because I’m a person who cracks jokes while a nurse is threading a PICC line into my arm.
It was always my mom’s voice, her personal brand of dismissal playing on a loop in my head whenever I tried to take credit for anything.
That’s nice, Sloane, but let’s be realistic about who you are and what you can do.
But maybe the credit was mine all along, and I kept handing it to other people because it felt safer than admitting I might be good enough on my own.
It’s entirely possible I’ve been the hero of my own story this whole time, but I was too scared to read the pages.
Jensen is part of that story now, and my heart hurts when I think about this chapter ending. But it has to end. I know it does.
I refuse to be the sick girl who needs someone to take care of her. I won’t become the thing everyone already assumes I am—fragile, dependent, a burden someone carries because I’m not strong enough on my own.
“You sure?” Jensen looks over his shoulder at me from the front seat, and the annoying butterflies that have set up shop in my stomach riot once again at the way his gray eyes go soft when they meet mine. “We can switch.”
“I’m good back here,” I tell him, then add, “Maybe a little tired.”
When the softness in his expression shifts to assessment, I realize my mistake. When a person with cancer says she’s tired, that word carries about forty pounds of subtext that a healthy person’s version doesn’t. It could mean anything fromI didn’t sleep welltothe disease is back and it’s eating me alive and you’re going to have to watch me fade away.
It might sound ridiculous to assume he’s thinking that, except the shadow that crosses his face tells me he’s absolutely thinking it. My brother gets the same look when I yawn too many times or cancel plans or say any word adjacent to exhausted. I’ve spent the last year resenting every variation of that look. From the furrowed brow, the tightened mouth, the way people feel obligated to care when they think you might be dying and are too polite to ask outright. I’m so goddamn tired of seeing all of it.
Based on Jensen’s history and mine, which we’ve only scratched the surface of, would I ever be able to tell the difference between him worrying because he cares and worry stemming from watching his mother get sick and not survive it?
