It was so deep and intimate. Such a peek of all that they were.
When she thought it couldn’t be more, he shivered. Shook. Thrust hard into her one last time and filled her with himself.
She clung to him, breathing hard, holding his shoulders and fighting to keep tears at bay.
She felt altered. Shifted. As if the very makeup of what she was had changed. But then, the roots of the world had become something new since Ryder Daniels had touched her, so why wouldn’t she be different also?
She moved away from him, swinging her legs over the side of the bed, clinging to the mattress as she breathed hard, trying to collect herself.
“Sammy,” he said, and she heard the rustle of the covers behind them.
Suddenly, it was like the room tilted. And she could see clearly the past, when she would come in here as a girl, running away from life, and the present.
Dammit.
She was just the same.
She was running away from something in her life. Pursuing this whole idea of a baby because she wasn’t happy with what had happened with herself. And... And then she had done it. She had climbed through his window, and she’d had sex with him, and they’d done it without a condom.
She was always doing this. To herself. To him.
Running and using him as a shield, and she had flung all those things at him, and she had been defensive when he had flung things at her.
But the problem was she suspected that from the beginning she had wanted it to be him.
Because she was using him.
The way that she did.
She squeezed her eyes shut, regret washing over her.
What if she had ruined them? What if she had ruined this forever?
“I...” She started to collect her clothes off that familiar bedroom floor. That scarred wood that she had walked across so many times. Just a few days ago she had followed him in here and seen him get out of the shower in a towel.
Had that been only a few days ago? It felt like a lifetime ago. And that everything between them was so unutterably altered that she could never get back to that person. That moment.
All the moments ever that had come before.
She had thought she’d known what sex was. She had thought she’d understood what she was asking him.
She was asking the man to let her carry his baby.
A piece of Ryder. A piece of her. All of it growing inside her. And the way they had...
She got dressed as quickly as she could.
“Don’t run away,” he said.
“Why not? You got to run away last night.”
She didn’t face him when she said that. Instead, she just wrapped her arms around herself and stood there, waiting for him to argue. Waiting for him to push. Waiting for him to say more, because he got to be stubborn and unhappy whenever he wanted to be, but he would never let her do it.
Except no reprisal came. He didn’t push. He didn’t tell her she was silly. He didn’t tell her she was wrong.
She didn’t know what the hell to do with that.
What was she supposed to do if not even Ryder would push? Did that mean that they were broken? Did it mean that this was a mistake? In ways that she couldn’t have fully anticipated? It all felt a lot like he knew things that she didn’t. It all felt a lot like dying.
But she believed in rebirth, she really did. The problem was, she’d been trying to force one, and she didn’t know what came from that.
If the phoenix lit herself on fire, did she get to rise from those ashes?
Sammy feared the answer might be no.
And she feared that she had turned her best friend to ash right along with her.
She had no perspective, and she needed it.
She went over to the window and pushed it open.
“You’re not climbing out the window,” he said, his voice hard.
“You want me to take the stairs?”
“Don’t break your neck on top of everything else, please.”
She was going to argue, but he had a point. The window had been a gesture.
She walked to his bedroom door and opened it, walking out into the hall. And as she closed the door behind her, she felt the sense of change settle over her.
Because Sammy, his friend, would’ve always climbed in and out the window.
He was sending her out the door.
Like a lover who was on a walk of shame. Like someone altered, changed