Page 259 of What We Bury

His expression softens, and he straightens slowly.

“Okay, wildcat. I’ll stay.”

He takes my hand and walks me into the bathroom, where the tub is filling with hot water, steam curling toward the ceiling. He leaves the door open—not wide, just enough that the bedroom light bleeds in—and sits on the closed toilet lid while I undress.

There’s nothing sexual about it. Not yet. I pull my shirt over my head and step out of my jeans and he watches with a steady, grounding presence that makes me feel less like I’m being looked at and more like I’m being held. When I lower myself into the water, the heat hits every sore muscle and I hiss through my teeth, sinking until it’s up to my shoulders.

“Good?” he asks.

“So good.”

He leans forward, elbows on his knees, and we sit in the steam and quiet. The water laps against the sides of the tub. Downstairs, I can hear the muffled voices of the others—Milo’s laugh, the low rumble of Knox, the cadence of what might be Eli on the phone. Sounds of a house that’s full. Of people who are here because of me.

“Holden?”

“Yeah.”

“Tell me some more about your dreams. The ones you had before the darkness got in.”

SEVENTY

SAGE

Holden takes a long time, but when he answers, the words are deliberate. “I used to dream of being a good guy. Not in the badge-and-gun sense. Just . . . someone unremarkable. A man with a wife and a couple of kids, a dog, maybe a grill he spent too much on.” He shrugs. “I thought that was the finish line. Have a family, watch them grow, be boring as fuck and proud of it. Turns out I didn’t have what it takes to be average.”

“You could never be average.” I curl my knees up, hugging them. Steam rises, curling my hair into spirals around my face. “Maybe that’s a good thing.”

“Maybe.” The corner of his mouth lifts. “What about you, Sage? What did you dream about?”

He returns the question like he’s passing a torch, and it’s too honest not to answer. “I wanted to matter. That’s all.” I keep my chin tucked to my knees. “I didn’t have the capacity to imagine a future where I was loved, or important, or even just not invisible. My dreams were small. They were barely even daydreams.”

“You matter,” he says, simple as gravity.

“I know. It’s fucked up, how much I feel like I do.” I close my eyes and sink my face all the way under the surface. When I come up for air and open my eyes, Holden is still there—solid, real, not going anywhere. It’s ridiculous how much better that makes everything.

He picks up a washcloth and dips it in the water. “Lean forward.” I do, and he wrings it out and rubs the cloth along my back, the spot right above my spine where I always get sore after a shift. He doesn’t talk while he does it. I wonder if he even realizes how gentle he is, or if it just leaks out of him without his permission, the way some men leak violence.

“Did you ever want to go back?” I ask quietly, eyes tracking his reflection in the gleaming faucet. “To the person you were before?”

He runs the washcloth over my shoulders, then pauses, considering. “No. There’s no going back. Everything I am now, I became because of the choices I made. I can’t hate the man I am and love what those choices gave me—what they gave you.” He meets my gaze and something raw flickers there. “You can’t amputate the bad without killing the good, wildcat.”

Something in the way our eyes lock anchors me, stops my thinking for a beat. There’s a softness in him that most people would never see, and I want to bury myself in it and pretend the world isn’t a place where people leave nooses in living rooms.

I want to be selfish and greedy and weak for a minute and not be left alone with my own head.

I reach for him.

“Get in with me,” I say, and my voice is probably pathetic, but I don’t care.

He freezes, the ocean-blue of his eyes holding me in a direct line. “Wildcat, I don’t think we should?—”

“I know,” I say, urgent, interrupting, “and I’m not asking for that. I just want you. Right here with me, wrapped around me. Please. Just . . . don’t make me be without you tonight.”

The argument lives on his lips for one second, then fades. He stands, not even breaking eye contact, and peels off his shirt. The tattoo winds up his ribs and around his back, dark and intricate, lines I’ve traced with my fingers a dozen times these last weeks and still haven’t mapped completely. Here in the bright bathroom light every bit of it stands out against the tan of his skin. I want to follow it with my tongue, line by line, until I know the whole of him.

His hands move to his waistband. He undoes his belt, not taking his eyes off mine, pants following slow, then boxer briefs. I trace my eyes down the length of him, over the ink and the hard planes of muscle, and think the thing I always think when he’s bare like this—that this is a body built for exactly what he’s about to do to me.

“This good?” He settles behind me, his legs bracketing mine, his chest warm and broad against my back.