Page 45 of In the Dark of the Past

Thunder rolled again, closer this time, rattling the windows in their frames. The lights overhead flickered once, then twice, like the house was arguing with the power lines.

Then they went out.

While the day was just starting to crest, it was still almost as dark as night outside, and the dimness inside swallowed us whole.

The storm outside roared louder without the buffer of humming electricity. Rain lashed the windows. Somewhere, a tree branch scraped against the siding with a sound like fingernails.

My eyes adjusted slowly. I could just make out the blue smear of the clock on Finn’s smartwatch and his shoulders across from me.

I heard him move before I felt him. A whisper of T-shirt fabric. The soft scuff of bare feet on hardwood. A shift of air that announced his presence just before his hand found my waist.

His fingers settled there, firm but careful. Not trapping. Anchoring.

Like he thought I might run.

My breath and any words I might have had got stuck in my throat. I knew I should move away, stop whatever was about to happen, but I found I couldn’t.

His forehead came down to rest against mine. In the dark, the touch felt shockingly intimate. No visual cues, no distraction—just the shared heat of breath, the quiet syncopation of our heartbeats, the storm screaming around us while this tiny space stayed still.

“You don’t have to say anything, but please don’t push me away,” he murmured.

We stood like that, breathing each other in. His heartbeat thudded against my chest where we touched, fast and hard, matching the drum in my own ribs.

“Finn, I—” The words got caught in my throat.

“River.” My name sounded wrecked on his tongue. “I need⁠—”

“I know.” It wasn’t what I’d meant to say, but it was at least the partial truth. I didn’t know what he needed, exactly. Not sex, not comfort, not absolution. All of it. None of it. Him. Me. This.

I tilted my face up at the same moment he dipped his.

Our mouths met in the dark on shared gasps.

No hesitation. No cautious testing of edges. This was years of anger and grief and wanting, compressed into a single point of contact after too many consecutive moments of stress acting like the world’s best romantic tension. Teeth and tongue and desperate, uneven breaths.

He tasted like spiked coffee and storm and something uniquely Finn—steady and wild all at once. His hands slid up my back, fingers fisting in the damp fabric of my shirt, dragging me closer until there was no space left between us. I clutched his shoulders like I was drowning and he was the only solid thing left in the world.

Lightning cracked close, the flash strobing through the kitchen windows. For one blinding second, I saw his face. Eyes wide and unguarded, pupils blown, mouth already swollen from my kisses.

Then the dark swallowed us again.

He broke the kiss only long enough to murmur, his voice rough, “Couch. Now.”

I huffed out something that might have been a laugh, breathless and shaky. “Bossy.”

“Accurate,” he shot back.

His hand found mine in the dark, fingers threading between mine, and I let him lead me. We stumbled over a rug, shoulders knocking into something that clinked, laughing under our breath in that half-hysterical way that only comes when the alternative is crying.

Another flash of lightning lit the living room, illuminating the couch for a heartbeat before plunging it back into shadows.

We crashed onto it in a tangle of limbs and soaked clothes.

His mouth found my neck, my collarbone, the hollow just beneath my ear. Each drag of lips and teeth left a trail of heat that made my toes curl. My hands shoved under his T-shirt, fingers tracing the ridges of muscle and the faint raised lines of old scars I wanted to learn like a language.

He made a low sound in his chest when my nails scraped lightly along his spine.

Outside, thunder rolled, so close it vibrated through the floor.