Miranda Jeferson. Peter Parkers ex-girlfriend, who he had broken up with under the impression that he would keep her safe. She had gotten caught up in his mess and ended up with a sprained ankle. Yes, it wasn't a serious injury, but she had gotten hurt because of him. Because she was helping him. Peter felt guilty.

Then he saw her in the record shop, completely healed. Looking for a new record to add to her collection. 'She loves her vinyls.' He thought to himself. Feeling someone staring at her, Miranda looked up. Directly into Peters' eyes. She glanced back down, rifling through the old albums, trying to ignore him.

Peter knew it was time to talk to her. He misses her. He worked up the courage to go up to her, feeling exactly the same way he did when the first time he spoke to her.

“Hey M.” Peter greeted.

“Hi Peter.” Miranda spoke, not looking up from the vinyls.

They stood in an uncomfortable silence until Peter spoke up again,

“So, how are you?” He asked.

“Do you really care?” She rebutted.

“I've always cared.” He answered.

“So you breaking up with me while I was in the hospital, was you caring?” Miranda snapped lowly with a scoff while moving to the next row of records.

Peter walked with her, “Yes. You got hurt because of me. I can't let that happen again. Seeing you in the hospital really put things into perspective for me, I don't ever want to see you hurt. Ever.” He stepped closer to her, putting his left hand on her right cheek. Their eyes connected, so much emotion behind them.

“I understand that, but it wasn't your choice to make.” Miranda sighed.

“I-I know. That wasn't- it wasn't fair to you.” Their faces were mere inches apart.

“I love you, Peter. I love you more than I've ever loved anyone else in this entire world. I know that because of that, I wouldn't change anything. It was just a sprain, Peter.” She leaned into his hand.

Peter leaned in and kissed her. When he pulled away, he bit his lip while letting out a low moan. Miranda wore a look of surprise.

“Why did you do that?” She quizzed, a dazed look in her eyes.

“I couldn't stop myself. How do you feel?” He asked.

“Like I want you to do it again.” Miranda spoke softly.

So he did. This time tonguing her down in the middle of the aisle. She moaned into his mouth, making him do the same.

“Hey! Buy something and leave, or just get out!” The cashier yelled at the pair.

They pulled away, laughing as they left. Miranda would go back another time. As they walked, Peter took it upon himself to start joking around…

“So you love me?” He smiled.

“I don't know what you're talking about.” She tried to play it off.

“You said you love me more than anyone else in this entire world.” Peter slung an arm around her shoulder.

“Shut up.” Miranda giggled and lightly pushed him away from her.

“I love you, too. It's just… I can't guarantee your safety if we do this again.”

“Well, it's a good thing I make my own choices. I’m choosing you, you just have to choose me.” She said smoothly.

Peter grabbed her hand, “I am choosing you. I just have to keep you out of whatever is bound to happen as best I can.”

“I agree, but if I can help you, I will.” She told him sternly.

He smiled, “Okay. Are we really doing this? We're getting back together?” He was shocked that she was even entertaining him.

“Yes. And don't you ever pull that shit again.” Miranda voiced, not leaving any room for discussion.

“Okay.” Peter laughed while pulling her into a hug, “I love you.” He avowed into her hair.

“I love you.” She breathed.

“More than you've ever loved anyone in this world.” Peter smiled widely.

Miranda pushed him off of her again. Peter cackled from behind her as she walked away.

Dasha exhaled and squeezed her eyes shut, but the breath did not travel far enough, did not reach the places inside her that had gone tight and wild with panic. Behind her, the bass from the building kept thudding through the walls in heavy, merciless pulses, each one landing at the base of her skull like a second heartbeat she had never asked for, loud enough to rattle her thoughts loose and send them skittering in every direction. The night air felt wrong on her skin—too thin, too sharp, too unable to hold the sheer weight of what had just been dropped on her chest. She pressed a hand to herself as if she could physically keep her ribs from splintering apart around the chaos inside them and counted the way Melinda had taught her, the way Melinda always told her to do when the world started tipping on its axis and her body forgot that breathing was supposed to be ordinary. One… two… three… one… two… three… and again, and again, and again, her lips barely moving around the numbers, each repetition more frantic than the last, not soothing but desperate now, like she was trying to stack little paper-thin integers high enough to climb out of herself.

Breathe, Dasha. You need to breathe.

She could hear Melinda’s voice as clearly as if the woman were standing beside her, palms warm and steady on either side of her face, speaking to her in that low, grounded tone that always seemed to come from somewhere older than panic, somewhere wiser than fear. Count. Slow down. Stay in your body. But her body had become the problem. Her body was the riot. Her lungs kept catching halfway, snagging on something jagged in her chest before they could fill properly, and every inhale felt too small, too late, like trying to sip air through a cracked straw while the whole world closed in around her. Her fingers had gone cold. Her knees had gone watery. Even her heartbeat felt deranged, no longer beating so much as battering itself against her ribs like a trapped bird bloodying its wings against the bars of a cage.

Why wasn’t it working?

That was the part making the panic sharper, meaner. These were the steps. This was the method. This was the good, sensible, sober-woman toolkit she had spent years building with shaking hands and clenched teeth and more discipline than most people would ever understand. Count. Breathe. Name five things you can see. Feel your feet on the ground. Remember where you are. Remember who you are. But what the hell was the breathing exercise for when your husband cheated on you? What tidy little grounding technique was meant to carry the weight of that sentence? What sponsor-approved mantra was supposed to patch the hole blown clean through the center of a woman when the person she had built her safety around became, in one brutal turn, the very thing her nervous system could not survive?

The thought tore through her again and suddenly the air felt even thinner. Her stomach dipped so hard she thought for one sick second she might be physically ill right there in the dark, might fold in half and empty herself onto the pavement while the music behind her kept playing as if the world had not just split wide open. Her throat tightened. Her eyes burned hot. She dragged in another breath, and it shuddered all the way down, ragged and uneven, before escaping her in a broken little gasp that sounded nothing like calm and far too much like grief.

Because that was the cruelest part of panic, wasn’t it? It made everything immediate. It would not let her process this in graceful little increments, in digestible emotional courses. No, it shoved the whole thing into her bloodstream at once and let it gallop. Ledger. Her husband. Ledger, with his hands and his vows and his mouth and his forever. Ledger, who knew exactly how her mind worked when it got dark. Ledger, who knew what seven years sober had cost her. Ledger. The name itself had become unbearable, a prayer turned poisonous in her mouth, and Dasha pressed the heel of her hand harder to her sternum like she could physically pin the pain down, like she could stop it from spreading if she caught it quickly enough.

But it spread.

God, it spread.

It climbed her throat, sat behind her eyes, curled icy fingers through her spine. Every memory of him seemed to rush her at once, not soft and sweet but sharp now, weaponized by the fresh horror of contrast. His laugh in the kitchen. His hand on the small of her back. His voice calling her Wonder like it meant something holy. Their bed. Their vows. The terrible ordinariness of all the places she had loved him. It all came at her in a flood so vicious she could hardly separate the past from the present, could hardly tell whether she was choking on betrayal or on the fact that she still, humiliatingly, loved him while doing it.

“One… two… three…” she whispered again, but her voice was fraying, the numbers dissolving on contact with the ache. She bent forward, bracing her hands on her knees, trying to pull air down into lungs that seemed to have forgotten her on purpose. The concrete beneath her feet felt unsteady, the whole world tilting by imperceptible degrees, as if the night itself had become unreliable. Somewhere behind her a burst of laughter spilled from the building, bright and careless and cruel in its normalcy, and Dasha could have screamed at the sound of it. How dare the world remain intact. How dare there still be music, still be laughter, still be people moving through the night untouched, when inside her it felt like every beam and rafter of her life was coming down at once.

Melinda’s voice again, persistent, loving, maddeningly calm.

Stay here. Stay in the moment. Don’t run ahead.

But the moment was exactly the problem. The moment was a house fire. The moment was a blade. The moment was the unbearable, animal realization that the person she would have reached for in distress was the very person who had caused it, and there was no breathing exercise in the world for that kind of treachery. No grounding method for when home itself turned hostile. No neat little recovery phrase for when the safest place in your life developed teeth.

A sob clawed halfway up her throat before she swallowed it back down, but it stayed there, burning, alive, making her chest hitch with the effort of containing it. She straightened only to have dizziness rush her so hard she had to lean against the cold brick wall behind her, palms flat against it, desperate for something solid, something that would not move, would not lie, would not become unrecognizable in the span of a single night. The brick bit cool into her skin. Good. Real. Here. She latched onto it because it was not him, because it could not betray her, because right now even the wall was more trustworthy than the man whose name still lived in the center of her chest like a cruel joke.

And still her body would not calm.

Still her pulse ricocheted. Still her mouth went dry. Still every breath came in thin, ragged strips.

Dasha squeezed her eyes tighter and counted again, not because it was helping, but because stopping felt worse, because the numbers were the only thin thread she had left connecting her to the version of herself who knew how to survive. One… two… three… one… two… three… her mind snagging, resetting, falling apart and trying again, the repetition turning almost prayer-like in its desperation. Not graceful. Not serene. Just raw survival. A woman trying to count herself back into her own body before grief and panic carried her somewhere too dark to find the way out of.

And all the while, underneath the counting and the trembling and the violent, shivering effort to keep breathing, one brutal thought kept flashing like lightning behind her eyes, splitting everything open each time it came:

What were you supposed to do, exactly, when the love of your life became the reason you could not catch your breath?

She heard the door slam open behind her, the sound cracking through the night like a gunshot, sharp enough to make her shoulders seize before she ever turned around. And then, almost immediately after it, came something far more familiar and far more devastating—the scent of him, that old mix of cologne and clean skin and the warm, unmistakable musk of Ledger, a smell that had once soothed her on instinct, had once wrapped itself around her frayed nerves and coaxed them quiet, had once meant home so completely that her body used to soften at the first trace of it. But now it only made her stomach drop, made something inside her twist and recoil, because there he was, the same man with the same scent and the same face, and somehow none of it meant safety anymore.

So Dasha looked up at him with her eyes rimmed red, lashes damp and clumped from the tears she had not been able to outrun, her mouth trembling with the sheer effort of staying upright through this, and Ledger—God—Ledger faltered.

He actually faltered.

His step broke mid-motion, and he took one back as though the sight of her had struck him square in the chest. As though her pain had reached out with a hand and shoved. Something in his face shifted so fast it was almost frightening, the anger and confusion and whatever half-formed words he had come out there carrying falling away in an instant, leaving only naked, horrified recognition behind. Because Dasha looked wounded in a way he had never wanted to be responsible for, not once in this life, and the awful truth of it hit him all at once: he was.

Something inside his heart cracked open then, not loudly, not cleanly, but in that slow, sickening way ice gives beneath too much weight, a fracture spreading faster than the eye can follow. Because no, he had not cheated in the crude, easy-to-name way people always imagined, had not crossed that final physical line that let cowards comfort themselves with technicalities and semantics, but emotionally—emotionally was another story, uglier for how long he had let himself pretend otherwise. Grief had gotten into his bones and stayed there like rot, gnawing and gnawing until it hollowed him out from the inside, and instead of crawling back toward his wife, instead of collapsing where he belonged, instead of laying that grief at the feet of the woman who had loved him faithfully through every ugly season of his life, he had wandered. He had left her standing there with her hands still open and poured the worst parts of himself elsewhere.

Into Kenna.

Into Kenna.

The very name felt profane in the moment, heavy and bitter in his mind, because she was not just some harmless emotional detour, not just some neutral shoulder to lean on while he figured his mess out. No, she was the woman who had brought the original devastation roaring into all of their lives in the first place, the woman whose choices had detonated everything, the woman who got behind that wheel and turned one reckless, irreversible moment into a grave. The woman who had killed Scotty.

And Ledger, in all his broken, guilt-ridden stupidity, had let his pain circle back toward the very source of it as though grief were some diseased thing trying to return to its point of origin. He had let himself become tangled in old sorrow and old guilt and old ghosts, and in doing so he had abandoned the living, breathing woman who had been right there, right there, loving him through it, waiting to be chosen over the wreckage.

So when he looked at Dasha standing there with her back half-braced against the wall as though even the air had become too unstable to trust, with her chest rising in sharp, fractured little pulls and her face blotched from panic and hurt, he saw it for what it was at last. Not a misunderstanding. Not a lapse in judgment he could later explain into something smaller. But abandonment. Emotional abandonment in its cruelest form, because he had not left her by walking out the door; he had left her while standing close enough to still call himself her husband.

And that realization moved through him like punishment.

Because Dasha had always been home, always been the one place his grief should have gone to be laid down and softened and held, but instead he had made her stand outside the house of their marriage knocking, wondering when he had locked the door. He had taken the woman who had loved him best and made her feel secondary to a ghost-choked mess she had never asked to compete with. And now here she was in front of him, all tear-streaked proof and trembling devastation, and Ledger understood with a kind of soul-deep horror that he had done the one thing he would have sworn on his life he never could:

he had made his wife look shattered because of him.

And then he saw it.

Not just the tears, not just the red-rimmed eyes or the way her face had gone blotchy with crying, but the deeper, more dangerous thing beneath all of it—the way her breaths were coming too fast and too shallow, the way her chest kept rising only to stutter halfway, as though the air itself had become something her body no longer knew how to trust. Her fingers were trembling where they pressed against the brick, not with ordinary anger, not with the clean shake of adrenaline after a fight, but with something far less containable, something raw and involuntary and spiraling. Even the look in her eyes was wrong. Too wide. Too glassy. Too far away and too close all at once.

Ledger’s entire body changed.

The grief. The guilt. The defensive little scraps of pride that had still been hanging off him by threads. All of it dropped clean out of him in the space of a heartbeat, because this—this he recognized with terrifying clarity. He knew this version of Dasha. Knew the awful, hunted look that came over her when panic got its hands around her throat and started squeezing. Knew the way she would try to fight her own body first, as if discipline alone could drag her back under control, as if counting and breathing and digging her nails into her palms hard enough could stop the tide once it had already come in too far.

“Baby,” he said, and his voice came out lower than before, stripped of every hard edge, every trace of argument, until it sounded like what it truly was: fear trying very carefully not to become another threat. “Hey. Hey, look at me.”

But her eyes darted past him instead, wild and unfixed, and something hot and sick turned over in his stomach.

She wasn’t really seeing him. Not fully. Not yet.

Ledger’s heart dropped so hard it felt like it might crack a rib on the way down. Because he knew, in one horrible flash, that she was not just crying over him now, not merely hurt, not merely furious—her body had gone into revolt. Her nervous system had taken the betrayal and translated it into emergency, into danger, into run or break or disappear. And that knowledge lodged inside him like shrapnel, because what kind of man stood there and watched his wife’s body reject the very air around her because of something he had done?

“Dasha,” he said again, softer this time, but firmer too, trying to lace steadiness through the terror rising in his own chest. “You’re having a panic attack.”

The words seemed to hang between them for a second, plain and heavy and undeniable.

Her mouth parted, and another ragged breath caught there, useless and frayed, and when she finally looked at him, really looked at him, there was something so nakedly frightened in her expression that it damn near brought him to his knees. Not because she was weak, not because panic had made her small, but because Dasha had always fought so hard to stay in control of herself that seeing her lose that battle in real time felt like witnessing something sacred being dragged through the dirt.

“Oh, baby,” he whispered, and the endearment broke in the middle.

He moved then, but slowly, every instinct in him forced into a kind of trembling discipline, because he knew better than to crowd her, knew better than to lunge toward panic and expect it not to lash back. So he lifted his hands where she could see them, open and empty, his voice dropping into the low, careful register he used only for her in moments like this, the one that never demanded, only guided.

“I’m right here,” he murmured, as though he could build a bridge back to her one syllable at a time. “I’m not gonna touch you unless you tell me to, okay? But I’m right here. You hear me? You are not by yourself.”

Dasha sucked in another breath that went nowhere, her shoulders hitching with the effort of it, and Ledger saw panic flash brighter in her eyes at the failure. That, more than anything, lit a fresh kind of horror through him. Because once the breathing stopped working, once her own body started feeling like an unreliable machine, Dasha would begin to panic about the panic, and that was when it turned vicious. That was when the fear fed itself.

He remembered it all at once—the nights before, years ago, when sobriety was still newer and thinner and she’d shaken like this from things she couldn’t name fast enough, the way Melinda had told him never to argue with the panic, never to tell her to calm down as if calm were a switch she was too stupid to find, the way Dasha needed anchoring and choices and something solid enough to keep her from floating clean out of herself.

So Ledger forced his own voice steady, though his pulse was kicking like hell inside his throat.

“Listen to me, Wonder,” he said, and this time the nickname was not soft or sexy or sweet. It was purposeful. Familiar. A handhold made of sound. “Don’t worry about taking a big breath. Don’t do that. Just stay with me. Small ones, baby. Small is fine. You don’t gotta prove anything.”

Her face crumpled harder, because of course it did. Of course the tenderness in him would break through where logic couldn’t.

He swallowed against the ache climbing up his throat and took one careful step closer.

“That’s it,” he said, as though she had already succeeded just by remaining upright. “That’s it. Keep your eyes on me if you can. If you can’t, that’s alright too. Just listen.”

The bass from inside kept pounding stupidly through the wall behind them, vulgar and careless and far too loud for what was happening out here, and Ledger shot the building a look so dark it could have scorched paint, but there was no time for fury, no room for anything except her. Only her.

“You remember what Melinda says?” he asked, gentle but deliberate, pulling her sponsor into the space because he knew Dasha trusted that voice even when she couldn’t trust her own mind. “Feet on the ground, baby. Feel the ground. You ain’t floating. You ain’t falling. Put both feet down for me.”

Dasha blinked at him, dazed, tears spilling fresh, but he saw the tiny shift anyway—the way her body obeyed before her thoughts fully caught up, her feet planting a little more firmly against the pavement as if his words had reached some part of her still capable of taking instruction.

“There you go,” he whispered immediately, praise falling from him like prayer. “That’s my girl. Good. Good.”

His chest hurt with it. With the terror of seeing her like this. With the shame of knowing he was the reason. With the unbearable softness of still wanting to comfort her even when he hated himself most.

“Look at that wall,” he said quietly, nodding toward the brick behind her. “Feel it, Dasha. It’s cold, ain’t it? Real cold. Stay with that. Tell me it’s cold.”

For a second he thought she might not answer, that she might already be too far under it, but then her lips parted and the word came out thin and shaking.

“Cold.”

Relief punched through him so fast it was almost dizzying.

“Yeah,” he said, his own voice roughening despite his effort. “Yeah, that’s right. Cold. Good. Stay there. Feel that.” He took another careful half-step, still giving her room, still making himself smaller than every instinct demanded. “Can you tell me something else you feel? The ground under your shoes maybe. Your rings. Your jacket. Anything, baby. Just something real.”

Dasha pressed harder into the wall as if it were the only honest thing left in the world and tried for another breath. It came jagged, but it came.

“The wall,” she whispered.

“I know,” Ledger said immediately, because agreement mattered, because panic hated being argued with. “You got the wall. You got the ground. You got me right here.”

At that, her eyes snapped back to him, wet and furious and frightened in equal measure, and for one awful second he thought she might say not to count on that, might tell him he had forfeited the right to be included in any list of stabilizing things. But she didn’t. Maybe she couldn’t. Maybe panic had burned past pride. Or maybe some battered little part of her still knew that even shattered trust did not erase muscle memory overnight, that her body still recognized him as the man who had once talked her through the dark.

The realization nearly destroyed him.

Because there he stood, being trusted in the middle of the very harm he had caused, and it felt less like mercy than indictment.

“Good,” he whispered again, though his voice had gone ragged now. “That’s it. That’s it, Wonder.”

Dasha’s hand flew to her chest, fingers splayed there as though she could physically force her heart to slow down, and Ledger had to bite back the instinct to catch her, hold her, fix it with his hands. He wanted to sweep her into him so badly his arms actually twitched with it, but he held himself still because this was not about what he wanted. This was about what she could survive.

“You want me closer?” he asked, each word chosen with excruciating care. “Or you want me right here?”

Her throat worked. Another trembling inhale. Then, barely louder than the night breeze, “Closer.”

The permission shattered something in him.

Ledger moved at once, but gently, so gently it looked like pain, until he stood close enough for her to feel his warmth without being crowded by it. He did not touch her, not yet, only braced one hand beside her on the wall, careful to keep his body angled, giving her an opening, a way out, a choice. Always a choice.

“There,” he murmured. “I’m closer.”

Her eyes fluttered, and one broken sound slipped out of her, almost a sob, almost relief.

“You’re okay,” he said, though he hated how hollow that phrase always sounded and hurried to fix it. “No—listen to me. You are panicking, but you are okay. This will pass. I know it feels like it won’t, but it will. I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”

And God, the phrase hurt him, because maybe he didn’t. Maybe that was the whole point, the whole wound, the whole ugly truth of tonight. But he said it anyway, because right now his self-loathing could wait its turn. Right now her body needed something steadier than his guilt.

Dasha’s breathing was still shallow, but the rhythm had begun to change by the smallest degree, not calming exactly, but becoming less chaotic, less like an animal hurling itself against a locked door. Ledger watched it with the concentration of a man trying to keep a lit candle alive in a storm.

“That’s it,” he kept murmuring, each phrase a thread tossed toward her. “Small breaths. You don’t gotta force it. Let it come how it comes. Stay with the wall. Stay with my voice. That’s all.”

A tear slid down Dasha’s cheek and dropped from her jaw, and the sight of it made something inside him ache so fiercely he could hardly stand upright beneath it. He had seen her cry before. Seen her hurt. Seen her furious. But panic was different. Panic made her look hunted by something invisible, and knowing he had put that look on her face felt like a brand pressed straight to the center of his chest.

He lowered his voice further, until it was almost a murmur meant for only the tiny space between them.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, but not in the needy, forgiveness-chasing way of earlier, not trying to make this moment about his absolution. This was simpler. Rawer. “I’m so sorry, baby. Stay with me first, and then you can hate me all you want. Just stay with me first.”

Dasha let out a shaking exhale, and this one, this one finally sounded a little more like air and a little less like breaking.

Ledger closed his eyes for half a second in relief so profound it bordered on pain, then opened them again immediately because he couldn’t afford not to witness her through it.

“That’s it,” he said, almost reverently. “There you go.”

And he stayed there with her in the dark, the bass still thudding like a cruel second pulse behind them, the night wind cooling the sweat at the nape of her neck, his own heart raw and split wide open inside his chest, until the panic began, by degrees, to loosen its hand from her throat and remember that she was still here, still on the ground, still breathing, still his wounded, furious, beautiful wife, and not yet lost to him entirely.

Dasha shoved him back before the last of the panic had even fully left her body.

Not hard enough to send him sprawling, but hard enough to make a point, hard enough that Ledger stumbled a half-step and looked at her with that stunned, offended expression men wore when they had forgotten that grief did not cancel out the damage they’d done. Her chest was still heaving, her eyes still wet, her nerves still sparking ugly beneath her skin, but now the fear had curdled into something hotter, something sharper, something with teeth.

“Don’t fucking do that,” she snapped, swiping angrily at her face with the heel of her palm, smearing tears and fury together until they became the same thing. “Don’t stand there and talk me through a panic attack like you ain’t the nigga who caused it.”

Ledger’s face hardened at once.

The softness that had just been there, the careful, terrified tenderness, went tight at the edges, not gone completely, never that, but dragged under by his own hurt. “So what, I’m just supposed to leave you out here choking on air?” he shot back, his voice rough, incredulous, his chest still rising too fast from his own fear. “That what you wanted? Me to watch you fall apart and walk my ass back inside?”

“What I wanted,” Dasha laughed, and the sound that came out of her was ugly and broken and mean in a way laughter should never be, “was for my husband not to make me feel like a side character in my own damn marriage.”

That landed.

Ledger’s jaw flexed so hard she saw the muscle jump.

“And what the fuck was Calvin then?” he fired back, the name coming out like he’d been holding it in his mouth for hours, maybe days, waiting for the chance to spit it. “Since we saying shit plain now. What was that, Dasha? You inviting that nigga around like I’m stupid, like I can’t see him damn near panting every time you walk past?”

Dasha stared at him, then let out a breathless, disbelieving sound. “Are you deadass right now?”

“I’m very deadass,” Ledger snapped, stepping toward her before checking himself. “That nigga was all up in your face at your practice, all up in your orbit, and you sat there acting like I’m crazy for clocking it. Calvin is supposed to be my former friend, and you inviting him around knowing good and damn well that man want you.”

“Oh, so now you care?” Dasha’s voice rose, sharpened by disbelief, by hurt, by the kind of fury that came from being accused by the very person who had handed her humiliation first. “Now you care who want me? Now you care who looking at me? Ain’t that some shit.”

Ledger’s eyes flashed. “Don’t do that.”

“No, nigga, you don’t do that,” she shot back, jabbing a finger into the air between them like she could pin the accusation there and make him choke on it. “You do not get to stand here and act territorial now. You do not get to be mad about Calvin having a crush on me when you was over there playing emotional house with Kenna.”

“I was not playing house—”

Dasha barked out a laugh so sharp it practically cut the night in two. “Oh, please. Please. Save that shit for somebody dumber than me.”

Ledger dragged a hand over his mouth, already looking like he regretted opening this door and was still too pissed to close it. “You know what, fine, maybe Calvin ain’t touch you, maybe nothing happened, but you knew what you was doing bringing him around me like that. You wanted a reaction.”

“Yeah,” she spat, taking a step closer, her whole body trembling now not from panic but from rage, “I did want a reaction. You know why? Because apparently that’s the only way to get through to your ass. Apparently I gotta put another man in the frame for you to remember I’m your wife.”

That one hit so cleanly his whole face changed.

For one split second she saw it, the hurt underneath the anger, the part of him that had never once seriously imagined another man with access to her. But then the moment was gone, swallowed by the ugliness of the fight.

“So that’s what this is?” Ledger said, voice low now, dangerous in that quiet way that always meant he was one good sentence away from saying something irreversible. “You wanted to make me feel what you felt, so you paraded that nigga around?”

Dasha folded her arms over herself like it was either that or shake apart. “You left me out there by myself, Ledger. You left me standing there looking stupid while you played grief-stricken martyr with—”

“With Scotty’s baby mama,” he cut in, sudden and hot. “That’s who the fuck you talking about, in case you forgot.”

“Oh, I ain’t forget shit,” Dasha said, and now her voice had dropped too, become quieter, which somehow made it far worse. “I ain’t forget she Scotty’s baby mama. I ain’t forget she the one who got behind that wheel. I ain’t forget she the one who killed your best friend. What I can’t figure out is why you seem to forget it every time she bat her lashes and say she sorry.”

Ledger recoiled like she’d slapped him.

“Watch your mouth.”

“Or what?” Dasha snapped immediately. “Or what, Ledger? You gon’ defend her some more? You gon’ tell me how hard it is for her? You gon’ tell me I just don’t understand her pain?” Her mouth twisted, mean and trembling. “Maybe I should be more compassionate, right? Maybe I should be more like you and your perfect girl.”

Something dangerous flashed in his eyes.

“Don’t,” he warned.

But Dasha was too far gone now, too hurt, too bent on dragging him into the same wasteland he had left her in.

“No, let’s talk about it,” she said, her voice suddenly bright with that brittle kind of fury that always meant a person was closest to breaking. “You and your perfect girl. That’s what this is, right? Poor Kenna. Sweet Kenna. Broken Kenna. The woman who fucked up everybody’s life but still somehow got you looking at her like she the saddest bitch in the room.”

Ledger took a step toward her then, eyes blazing. “Watch how you talk about Scotty.”

Dasha’s face went still in the most dangerous way.

“Don’t you dare put Scotty on me right now,” she said softly, and the softness made even Ledger pause. “Do not do that. Scotty has nothing to do with the fact that you stood there and made room in your heart for the woman who killed him while your wife was right there begging not to be made a fool.”

Ledger’s chest rose sharply.

“You don’t know what the fuck you talking about.”

“Then enlighten me,” she said, spreading her hands mockingly. “Please. Enlighten me. Tell me what deep, noble reason made you forget you had a woman at home.”

“It wasn’t about forgetting you!”

“Oh, but it was,” Dasha shot back, tears springing fresh to her eyes as her voice cracked down the middle. “Maybe not on purpose, maybe not in whatever twisted story you tell yourself to sleep at night, but that’s exactly what the fuck it was. You forgot me. You forgot us. You forgot what it meant to protect what was yours.”

Ledger looked like he wanted to deny it, wanted to argue it down into smaller language, but something in his face betrayed him before his mouth could. Dasha saw it and laughed again, weak and devastated and vicious.

“Yeah,” she whispered, nodding at him like a woman watching the final piece click into place. “That’s what I thought.”

“Dasha—”

“No, ‘cause I’m really trying to understand you,” she said, cutting him off with a slice of her hand through the air. “I’m trying to understand how the nigga who swore up and down I was home somehow found comfort in the same woman that left Scotty dead.”

Ledger’s whole body went rigid.

“That is not what happened.”

“It ain’t?” She tilted her head, tears hanging from her lashes, mouth cruel with pain. “So what do you call it, then? Since you always got a better name for the ugly shit you do.”

He stared at her for a long, hot second, breathing hard through his nose, then said the one thing he should’ve kept to himself.

“And what do you call running off with Calvin waiting in the wings?”

The silence after that was immediate and catastrophic.

Dasha’s face changed.

Not because the line was good. Because it was cruel enough to find a wound and press.

“Calvin was never waiting in the wings,” she said, each word clipped now, trembling with restrained rage. “Calvin was a reaction. A stupid, petty, lowdown reaction, and you know it. But you?” She touched her chest. “You felt real. That’s what make this shit hurt different. You felt real.”

Ledger’s mouth opened, but Dasha was already shaking her head, already backing away from him now like the sight of him had become too much to survive up close.

“You know what the sickest part is?” she asked, voice breaking all over again. “I would’ve forgiven a one-night fuck-up faster than this. Do you hear me? I would’ve had an easier time wrapping my mind around some random bitch than watching you slowly, carefully, intentionally invest yourself in her.”

Ledger looked like that sentence took a chunk out of him.

But pain did not make people kinder. Not always. Not when they were trying to be understood by force.

“You invited that nigga around to hurt me,” he said, quieter now, but still hard. “So don’t sit there acting like you above any of this.”

Dasha’s eyes widened.

Then narrowed.

“You know what, you right,” she said, nodding too quickly, the motion frantic and offended. “I did want to hurt you. I wanted you to feel crazy. I wanted you to feel sick. I wanted you to know what it’s like to be standing in front of somebody you love and wonder if you even matter.” She laughed, tears falling freely now. “Difference is, I couldn’t go through with it. I let that man look. I let him hover. I let you clock him. But I couldn’t become you. That’s the difference.”

Ledger flinched like she’d driven something sharp right between his ribs.

The pause that followed was ugly. Breathing. Tears. Bass still throbbing stupidly in the background. The whole world carrying on while they stood outside gutting each other in the dark.

Then Ledger said, very quietly, “You think you the only one hurting?”

And Dasha’s expression turned almost pitying, which was somehow worse than anger.

“No,” she said. “I think you’re hurting so bad you dragged me down with you and then expected me to stay pretty while it happened.”

That did it.

Whatever thread of control had been holding the conversation together snapped clean.

“I never asked you to stay pretty,” Ledger bit out. “I asked you to understand.”

“And I did!” Dasha shouted, the force of it tearing right through her throat. “I understood you right into another woman, nigga, and look where that got me.”

“Kenna is not ‘another woman,’” he snapped back, immediate, instinctive, fatal.

The second the words left his mouth, both of them heard it.

Both of them knew.

Dasha went deathly still.

Then she laughed — once, short and unbelieving, the sound of a heart finally giving up on being handled gently.

“Oh,” she said.

Ledger’s face drained. “Dasha—”

“Oh, no, that’s perfect.” She nodded, tears shining on her cheeks like something lit from within. “That is perfect, actually. ‘Kenna is not another woman.’ Wow.” Her hand went to her chest like she was trying to hold herself together by force. “You hear yourself? Do you fucking hear yourself?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“But it is what you said.” She smiled then, small and broken and brutal. “And maybe that’s worse.”

Ledger stepped toward her. “Take the ring off your tone and listen to what I’m saying.”

At that, something in Dasha’s face cracked wide open.

“My tone?” she repeated, almost laughing. “My tone is your issue right now?”

She looked down at her hand then, at the ring glinting there under the thin spill of light from the back door, and her breathing changed again. Not panic this time. Something colder. Decision sharpening in real time.

Ledger saw it a second too late.

“Dasha—”

“You know what?” she said, her voice suddenly quiet, which scared him more than if she’d screamed. “You can have all of it. You can have your grief. You can have your guilt. You can have Kenna, Scotty, all them damn ghosts you keep choosing over the living.” Her fingers reached for the ring with frightening steadiness. “Since you so busy being everybody else’s savior, you can save your damn self too.”

His eyes dropped to her hand.

“Don’t do that.”

But Dasha was already twisting it off, her hands shaking now, not because she didn’t mean it, but because she did.

The ring came free.

The sight of her holding it there between two fingers nearly made Ledger lunge, every instinct in him going violent with refusal, but pride and shock nailed his feet to the ground for one fatal second too long.

“Dasha.” His voice cracked on her name. “Don’t.”

She looked at him then, really looked at him, and whatever he saw in her face made his own go stricken.

“I loved you right,” she whispered. “And you made me feel disposable.”

Then she threw the ring.

It hit him square in the chest before dropping to the pavement between them with a sound so small it should not have been able to split the night the way it did.

Ledger stared at it like he didn’t understand what he was looking at.

Dasha didn’t wait for him to recover.

Didn’t wait for him to beg. Didn’t wait for him to explain. Didn’t wait for him to say one more thing that might make this even uglier.

She turned and walked away, fast at first, then faster when she heard him say her name behind her in that torn, disbelieving voice, the one that sounded like he was only just now realizing how far he’d pushed her. The bass from the building kept pounding. The night kept moving. Her vision blurred. Her chest hurt. But she did not stop.

And behind her, Ledger stayed rooted to the spot for one long, ruined second, staring at the ring at his feet like it was the physical shape of his own stupidity, gleaming under the light like a severed promise.

Then he bent, slow as grief, and picked it up.

But by then, Dasha was already gone.

That had been three weeks ago now—twenty-one long, punishing days—and still no one knew where Dasha had gone. It was as though the earth had opened beneath her feet and swallowed her whole, neat and final, leaving behind nothing but absence and the shape of her where she used to be. At first, Ledger had expected the silence in the petty, familiar way a hurt husband expected silence; he had expected an unanswered call, a phone shoved deep into the bottom of a bag, maybe a day or two of her refusing him the mercy of her voice, refusing him access to the damage he had caused. He had even expected not to find her at home, had pictured the dark apartment, the empty side of the bed, the closet with a few things missing just to let him know she meant it. But one day became two, and two slid sickly into three, and by then the silence had changed flavors entirely. It was no longer punishment. It was dread.

That was when he started calling people.

Not casually, not with pride intact, but with the fraying urgency of a man whose mind had begun to split itself open around every possible worst-case scenario. He called her sponsor first, because sobriety sat at the center of all his fear now like a lit fuse. He called her friends. He called coworkers. He called anybody who might have heard from her, seen her, gotten so much as a one-word text. Hell, he even called Maya—Maya, her person, her day-one, the woman Dasha trusted like blood and breath and home—and when she said she had not heard a damn thing, something cold and primitive took root in Ledger’s gut and refused to move. Because if Maya did not know where Dasha was, then Dasha had not just left him. She had vanished.

No one knew where the hell she was.

By the fifth day the police were involved, and there was something so surreal, so obscenely wrong about standing there answering questions about his wife as though she were a case file instead of a woman who still left conditioner in the shower and hair ties on the bathroom counter, as though she were not supposed to be somewhere breathing and rolling her eyes at him and making the world feel less hostile by merely existing in it. They found her car abandoned near a bus station, quiet and ordinary and empty in a way that made his skin crawl, and there were no signs of a struggle, nothing dramatic enough to soothe him with certainty, nothing except the kind of eerie blankness that let the imagination roam wild and rabid. Then the CCTV footage surfaced, grainy and cruel in its mundanity, and there she was—his wife, his Wonder, his whole damn life packed into one hooded silhouette—getting onto a bus with her honey-blonde wefts tucked up beneath a hoodie like she was trying to disappear inside herself, trying to become small enough to slip through the cracks of the world unnoticed.

They tried everything after that.

God, they tried.

Cards were tracked, accounts were checked, statements were combed through with the kind of obsessive precision people reserved for disasters they were still pretending might not be disasters at all. They found one cash withdrawal, just one, from an ATM still in town, which somehow made it worse, because it meant she had thought ahead, had given them almost nothing and then vanished with deliberate, aching intelligence. After that, there was nothing. No trail. No purchases. No transactions lighting up a screen somewhere to say here, here she is, she’s here. The money disappeared into cash and silence, and Dasha seemed to disappear with it.

She was gone.

Gone in a way that made absence feel sentient, like it had hands, like it had chosen him specifically and was now sitting on his chest day and night just to feel him choke. Ledger was losing his damn mind, and the worst part was that he had to keep doing it in public, had to keep standing upright while terror hollowed him out from the inside. Every ring of his phone made his heart stop. Every unknown number felt like a threat. Every hour that passed without news grew heavier, uglier, less survivable. He stopped sleeping properly, because every time he closed his eyes his mind offered him some fresh horror to wake into—Dasha hurt, Dasha drunk, Dasha dead, Dasha hating him enough to make herself unreachable forever. Grief had once gnawed at his bones; now fear climbed inside the hollowed-out places grief had left and made a nest there.

And the most maddening, most soul-splitting part of it all was that none of this felt accidental. Dasha had not merely run. She had erased herself with precision. She had made herself smoke.

Before the ring hit his chest, before the bus station footage and the police and twenty-one days of silence that made Ledger feel like he was being skinned alive from the inside out, there had been the bar.

It had been one of those loud, overfull nights where the whole place seemed to breathe as one animal, all heat and laughter and clinking glass and bass heavy enough to vibrate through the wood beneath your feet. Bodies pressed shoulder to shoulder near the front, the low amber lighting throwing everybody into softer, meaner versions of themselves, making eyes linger too long and smiles look more intimate than they were. The bar always had a pulse, but that night it had one nasty enough to get under the skin. It thudded in the walls. It lived in the floorboards. It turned every glance into a provocation.

Dasha had felt off from the moment she walked in.

Not visibly. Not in any way most people would’ve clocked. She was too good at carrying herself for that, too practiced in the old art of looking composed while something hot and ugly curdled beneath the surface. She wore that soft, dangerous kind of beauty she carried so naturally it seemed almost incidental, honey-blonde hair falling just right, gold at her ears, mouth glossed and set in that line Ledger knew meant she was not in the mood to be played with. She should have looked at home there. The bar had long since become one of the maps of their marriage, one of the places where their lives overlapped so completely it felt impossible to separate one from the other. But that night, standing in the warm dimness of it, with the room packed and voices crashing over each other and Kenna somewhere in the orbit of the building like a ghost wearing skin, Dasha felt less like a wife and more like an intruder in a place she had once helped make soft.

And then Calvin walked in.

He was easy to spot because he did not belong to the room the way the regulars did, did not wear the easy, familiar slouch of men who had been folded into the bar’s rituals over years. Calvin carried himself like a man used to cleaner spaces, better lighting, the clipped professionalism of hospital corridors and conference rooms, and yet even in that darker, louder environment he looked entirely too comfortable the second his eyes landed on Dasha. Tall, handsome in that polished, doctor way, a little too neat, a little too aware of how handsome he was, Calvin had the sort of face women trusted too fast and men distrusted on sight. And the second he smiled at her, Ledger—halfway down the bar drying a glass—felt something black and immediate uncoil in his chest.

Because Calvin did not just smile.

He lit up.

That was the part that made Ledger’s fingers still around the towel, made the muscle in his jaw jump once before he mastered it. Calvin looked at Dasha the way men looked at women they had already spent too much private time thinking about. Not disrespectfully, never openly enough to be called out cleanly, but with that unmistakable softness around the eyes, that fraction-too-long hold of attention, that quiet greed disguised as friendliness. It was there and it was subtle and it was enough.

Dasha saw Ledger see it.

And maybe that should have been the moment she shut it down more firmly, should have stepped a little farther back, should have put more distance into her smile or more chill into her voice, but hurt made petty little cowards out of good people sometimes. Hurt made women with broken hearts let a compliment linger one second longer than they normally would just to see if a man they loved would finally look up and remember what was his. So she smiled at Calvin, not big, not bright, but warm enough. Let him come close enough to speak over the music. Let him stand there in her orbit with that attentive expression on his face while Ledger watched from the other side of the room and felt jealousy arrive ugly and alive.

“You made it,” Dasha said.

Calvin gave a little half laugh. “You invited me.”

There was nothing wrong with the sentence itself, but the way he said it put heat around it, made it sound like an honor, like a line he’d replayed before he got there. Dasha felt the glance from behind the bar before she looked. Ledger was no longer pretending not to pay attention. His face had gone still in that dangerous way of his, the stillness that meant whatever he was feeling had become too potent for easy expression.

Calvin, oblivious or pretending to be, leaned one forearm against the edge of the bar and looked down at her with that polished concern he wore so well. “You okay? You look tired.”

Dasha almost laughed at the question because tired was the cleanest word anyone could have chosen for the wreckage inside her. “Long week,” she said.

“Then let me buy you something.”

Ledger was at their section of the bar before the sentence had fully settled.

“What she drinks, I got it,” he said, voice easy enough on the surface, but there was a blade under it, thin and bright and impossible to miss if you knew him.

Calvin looked up. There was history there, old male familiarity gone sour, the stale remains of whatever friendship had once made this encounter simpler. “Ledger.”

“Calvin.”

No handshake. No smile. Just two names laid down like cards in a game everybody already knew was fixed.

Dasha felt the room shift, or maybe it was only her body doing the shifting, tightening with that ugly awareness that comes when a private wound begins threatening to show itself in public. She watched Ledger set a mocktail in front of her, matcha and vanilla and milk, the old ritual done with maddening precision, his hand steady even now. Anyone else would have looked at it and seen care. Dasha looked at it and felt briefly, viciously like she was being managed.

Calvin glanced at the drink, then back at her. “Still making these?”

Ledger answered before she could. “Yeah. I am.”

Something in Dasha flared.

Maybe it was the possessiveness in his tone. Maybe it was the way he could remember exactly how she liked her mocktail and still somehow forget to protect her in the ways that actually mattered. Maybe it was simply that everything in him felt too familiar and too infuriating all at once. Whatever it was, she lifted the glass and took a sip, then looked at Calvin over the rim.

“So,” she said, “how’s your practice?”

Ledger’s eyes cut to her.

Calvin, encouraged, launched into some story about work, one of those doctor anecdotes told in broad strokes and tired humor, and Dasha listened just enough to answer while the real conversation in the room happened elsewhere—in the glances, in the silences, in the fact of Ledger polishing the same section of bar too long while pretending not to watch how close Calvin stood. At some point Calvin touched her elbow lightly to emphasize a point, brief enough to be deniable, and Ledger’s whole body changed. Dasha saw it. Of course she did. The line of his shoulders sharpened. The air around him cooled by several degrees.

Then, because the universe was in no mood for mercy, Kenna laughed somewhere behind him.

It was not a loud laugh. Not flirtatious, not even aimed at him necessarily, just the sound of her in the building, alive and present and stitched once again into the fabric of a place Dasha had once thought belonged safely to her marriage. But Ledger turned his head at it on instinct, and that was all it took. That tiny, thoughtless motion. That split second of his attention going elsewhere while Calvin stood right in front of Dasha looking at her like he would wait as long as he needed to.

Dasha went cold.

There it was.

The whole damn wound in miniature.

Ledger looking one way, another man looking at her, and Dasha sitting in the center of it feeling simultaneously too seen and not seen at all.

Calvin said something then—she never remembered later what—but she gave some answer by reflex, already elsewhere in her head, already feeling the floor inside herself tilt. Across the room, Ledger had turned back, eyes immediately finding her again, and maybe he saw it on her face, that hard, glittering look women got right before they either shut down or burn everything to the ground, because he muttered something to the other bartender and came around the end of the counter.

“Dasha,” he said quietly.

She looked at him. “What?”

“Come here a second.”

Calvin straightened, sensing the shift at last. “Everything good?”

Ledger didn’t even glance at him when he answered. “We good.”

Dasha laughed once, a small sharp thing. “Are we?”

That got his attention fully.

The bass kept pounding. The room kept moving. Somebody at the far end of the bar shouted for another round. Kenna passed by with glassware and did a quick double take at the tension in the air before wisely disappearing. And there, in the middle of all that noise, Ledger looked at his wife and knew with the sick certainty of a man already too late that if they didn’t move this somewhere private, something ugly was about to happen in front of God and everybody.

“Back. Now,” he said under his breath.

Dasha held his gaze for one long second, then turned to Calvin with a smile so thin it looked painful.

“Excuse me.”

She followed Ledger through the side hallway and into the back, each step making the walls feel closer, the music louder, her pulse faster. By the time the door swung shut behind them, sealing them into that narrow strip of shadow and stale cool air, they were both already bleeding from places neither had bothered to bandage. He started with Calvin. She answered with Kenna. He said one cruel thing. She said two. Scotty’s name got dragged in. So did loyalty. So did humiliation. Every sentence after that was less about being understood than about being felt, about taking the hurt swelling in your own chest and hurling it bodily at the person in front of you just so they’d stop standing there intact.

The air hit her hard.

Cold, thin, useless.

Ledger sighed and dragged a hand down his face, rough palm scraping over the beard shadow at his jaw as though friction alone might wear the last three weeks off him, might peel the panic and shame and sleeplessness from his skin and leave behind the version of himself that still knew how to stand upright without effort. A tired breath left him, heavy and worn thin, the kind of exhale that sounded less like release and more like surrender temporarily postponed. The ring hanging from the chain around his neck rested hot against his chest, a small, merciless weight that never seemed to settle no matter how long he wore it there, and if anything, the metal only made the ache worse, because every time it pressed into his skin it reminded him that his wife’s wedding band now lived where a cross or dog tag might’ve gone, close enough to his heartbeat to torment it properly.

Roman watched him from across the office with one dark brow lifted, long legs kicked out, beer untouched in his hand because even Roman—Roman, who usually treated seriousness like an allergy—knew the room was too tense for pretending. The whole bar had quieted around Ledger’s misery over the last few weeks in that strange, unspoken way places did when the man at the center of them had stopped being able to fake alright. Kenna was gone now, fired clean and final, her name practically unspeakable in the building unless somebody wanted their head bitten off, and still none of it had fixed anything. Getting rid of her had not brought Dasha home. It had not rung Ledger’s phone. It had not softened the raw place under his sternum where fear had made a home and started paying rent.

Roman tipped his head and said, with the maddening calm of a man who knew he was right and planned to enjoy it, “You are aware… this is your fault, right?”

Ledger did not even look up.

“No shit, nigga,” he muttered, thumb dragging down the screen of his phone once more to refresh the banking notifications, because apparently there was still some pathetic, superstition-soaked part of him that believed if he checked enough times, the universe might get tired of punishing him and hand him something—one transaction, one clue, one sign that Dasha was somewhere buying water or gas or a pack of gum and still moving through the world with her pulse intact. But again there was nothing. No new charges. No card activity. No neat little digital breadcrumb to follow. Just the same blank silence staring back at him, cold and smug in its refusal.

Roman took a slow sip, more for something to do with his hands than because he wanted it, and let the silence stretch. He had always had that irritating ability to sit inside another man’s discomfort without rushing to rescue him from it. Maybe that was why Ledger had not kicked him out yet. Maybe because Roman, for all his bullshit and all his well-documented weakness for women with rings on their fingers, had enough sense to understand that now was not the time for jokes half as much as it was the time for honesty so blunt it bordered on cruelty.

“You checkin’ that app like you can bully it into giving you an answer,” Roman said after a minute, his voice quieter now, less sarcastic, though the edge of it remained. “She took cash, Ledger. She wanted to disappear.”

Ledger’s jaw flexed.

“I know what the fuck she wanted.”

“Do you?” Roman asked, and that landed harder than either of them pretended. “’Cause from where I’m sitting, you understood what she wanted way too late.”

That made Ledger finally look up, slow and tired and dangerous, eyes bloodshot from too many nights spent half-awake and wholly haunted. There was a meanness living just beneath his skin these days, not because he was naturally cruel, but because fear had stripped him down to the ugliest, most reactive version of himself and left him there too long. He looked like a man who had not properly come down from a fight in twenty-one days. Like a man whose body had forgotten what peace felt like and now distrusted every quiet room it entered.

Roman, to his credit, did not back down.

The thing about Roman was that everybody knew he had a type, and that type included women who belonged to other men, especially women who carried themselves with that unavailable, don’t-play-with-me elegance that made weaker niggas mistake challenge for invitation. Married women, older women, women already built into somebody else’s life deep enough to have become infrastructure—Roman loved all of it, loved the complication, loved the ache of wanting what was out of bounds. And Dasha, with her soft mouth and sharp mind and that old-money composure wrapped around a body warm enough to make a man stupid, had always been exactly the sort of woman Roman would orbit if Ledger weren’t in the picture. Hell, maybe even because he was. But Roman’s thing for Dasha, like his thing for all married women, had long ago become one of those truths everybody acknowledged by not acknowledging too hard. It lived in the extra half-second of his greetings, in the way he’d say “Mama Stevie” with entirely too much fondness when she came around, in how his gaze sometimes lingered just long enough for Ledger to clock it and Roman to grin like the devil had taught him manners.

But even that had lines.

Roman wanted women who were unavailable, yes, but he was not stupid enough to mistake Dasha’s grace for softness. He knew, as every man with functioning sense knew, that her loyalty to Ledger had not been performative. Dasha had loved that nigga down to the bone. Which meant watching Ledger fumble her was irritating in the exact way only another man with eyes could understand.

Roman leaned forward, elbows to knees, bottle hanging from his fingers. “You know what kills me?” he said. “Not even the Kenna shit by itself, though that was some nasty work. It’s that you made Dasha feel embarrassed. That’s the part women don’t forgive easy, especially not women like her. You can hurt they feelings and maybe live to tell it. Humiliate ’em?” He shook his head slowly. “That shit get engraved.”

Ledger looked back down at his phone because if he kept looking at Roman too long he was liable to put his fist through something, and the bar had already suffered enough collateral damage from his temper these last few weeks. The office lamp cast a hard yellow glow across the desk, over stacks of invoices nobody had properly touched, over an ashtray that shouldn’t have been there because he didn’t smoke, not really, but terror made hypocrites and habits out of men in equal measure. The bass from the main room thudded faintly through the wall, dulled now by distance and the late hour, but still present enough to feel like memory. This office had seen too much of him lately—too much pacing, too much drinking coffee he didn’t taste, too much staring at surveillance footage and call logs like they were scripture that might yield new meaning if he begged hard enough.

Roman sighed.

“Diem asked for her again today.”

The words struck Ledger low.

His shoulders stiffened before he could help it, and for a second the chain around his neck seemed to grow ten pounds heavier. Of all the knives this whole situation had left lying around, that one cut deepest. Not the cops. Not the PI. Not the endless humiliating calls to people who didn’t know where his wife was. Diem asking for “Mama Stevie” in that little clear voice of hers, like Dasha was supposed to materialize at the mention, like the world could still be fixed by the arrival of one person, that was what turned Ledger inside out.

Roman, seeing he’d finally landed somewhere honest, continued more carefully. “Grace said she kept askin’ if Dasha was mad at her. Patrick had to take her outside after dinner.”

Ledger shut his eyes.

A curse left him under his breath, jagged and bitten-off, and he set the phone down before he threw it. His hand went to the chain again on instinct, fingers curling around the ring until the edges bit his palm. He welcomed the bite. Pain with a location was easier than this wide, shapeless shit.

“She ain’t mad at Diem,” he said, voice low and raw enough to make the sentence sound like it had been dragged over concrete. “She would never be mad at that baby.”

“I know that. You know that.” Roman shrugged. “Six-year-olds don’t know that.”

Ledger opened his eyes and stared at the blank wall across from him like he could shame it into becoming a map. “I’m gonna find her.”

Roman’s brow lifted again, but this time there was less mockery in it than concern. “You keep sayin’ that.”

“And I mean it every time.”

Roman rolled the bottle once between his palms, thoughtful now, measuring how much truth the room could take before it turned ugly again. “What if she don’t wanna be found yet?”

That made Ledger laugh, though there was nothing humorous in the sound. It came out flat and rough, a blade with the shine sanded off. “What she want ain’t the only thing mattering right now.”

Roman held his gaze. “See, that right there is part of your problem.”

Ledger’s expression hardened. “My problem is my wife disappeared.”

“No,” Roman said, and his tone sharpened just enough to show teeth. “Your problem is that even now, when she gone and you losing your damn mind, a part of you still talking about her like a storm you gotta outlast instead of a person who got driven clean out her own life.”

The room went tight.

For a moment it looked like Ledger might explode, might stand up too fast and let all that sleepless fury go somewhere stupid, but instead he leaned back in the chair and scrubbed both hands over his face again, slower this time, like exhaustion had finally outpaced rage. When he spoke, his voice had gone quieter.

“You think I don’t know that?”

Roman said nothing.

Ledger laughed once more, smaller now, more broken than bitter. “You think I ain’t been replaying every damn second of that night? Every look on her face? Every word that should’ve stayed in my mouth? You think I don’t know I pushed her so far she decided vanishing was safer than speaking to me?” He dropped his hands and looked at Roman then, and the nakedness of the expression would’ve startled anybody who didn’t know him well. “Nigga, I know.”

Roman’s jaw shifted.

The mini-crush, the flirtation, the little spark of male envy he’d always felt around Dasha, all of that receded in the face of what Ledger looked like now. Because this was not just a husband missing his wife. This was a man being eaten alive by the knowledge that the same person he would’ve set the world on fire to protect had run from him like he was the blaze.

“Then act like you know,” Roman said at last. “Stop checking the bank app every ten seconds like money finna tell you something her heart been screaming for months.”

Ledger’s mouth tightened.

Roman pressed on, because he could, because somebody had to, because if men didn’t force ugly truths on each other every now and then they’d all drown in their own dumbass pride and call it weather. “You want her back? You better understand what you really took from her. Not just trust. Not just respect. Home. You made home feel shaky. Dasha of all people? A woman like that? She ain’t built to live in no emotionally raggedy-ass house.”

That one sat between them for a long moment.

Out in the bar somebody laughed, a burst of sound too normal for the grief inside the office. Glass clinked. Music rolled on. The world, as always, remained offensively uninterested in any one man’s private apocalypse.

Ledger’s hand dropped from the chain and found his phone again, not to refresh the app this time, but to unlock an old photo by muscle memory alone. Roman saw the screen before Ledger tilted it away: Dasha on the barstool in one of his old hoodies, no makeup, hair half done, looking over her shoulder mid-laugh while fries sat untouched in front of her. Roman went quiet at once. Some things, even for him, were too intimate to watch without feeling like a trespasser.

Ledger stared at the picture like a starving man staring through restaurant glass.

“She looked at me,” he said after a while, voice so low Roman almost missed it. “That night before she threw the ring. She looked at me like I was the last nigga on earth she wanted to know.”

Roman shifted in his seat. “She was hurt.”

“I know she was hurt.” Ledger’s thumb moved once across the screen, a useless caress. “But that look? That look said she ain’t recognize me no more.”

There it was.

Not the surface grief. Not the anger. The real wound.

Roman leaned back and let his head knock once against the wall. “Then maybe that’s what got found first,” he said. “Not her location. You. Maybe the man she married gotta show up before she do.”

Ledger cut him a look. “You been hanging around therapists?”

“Nah.” Roman’s mouth twitched faintly. “Just around married women.”

Despite himself, despite everything, the corner of Ledger’s mouth almost moved. Almost. It died before it became anything usable, but Roman clocked it and took the small win.

“She always knew you was rough around the edges,” Roman said more softly. “Always knew you could be jealous, possessive, stubborn, all that caveman shit. That ain’t what sent her running. It’s that she could usually trust where your loyalty lived. Then you got weird, emotionally homeless, and started acting like grief entitled you to make everybody else collateral.”

Ledger looked away.

Roman rose at last, setting the bottle down on the desk with a dull little thud. He lingered there for a second, studying his former friend—the man with his wife’s ring hanging over his heart like a punishment he insisted on carrying by hand.

“For what it’s worth,” Roman said, “I don’t think she gone gone.”

Ledger looked up sharply. “Why?”

Roman shrugged one shoulder. “Because if Dasha wanted to disappear forever, none of us would’ve found that car. That bus station was sloppy on purpose. Felt like she wanted a head start, not a funeral.”

Ledger held very still.

Hope was a dangerous thing by then, thin and cutting and liable to make a man do stupid shit, but Roman saw it flicker anyway, bright as a match-strike behind all that wreckage.

“You really think that?”

“I think,” Roman said, pausing at the door, “that she wanted you scared. I don’t think she wanted you burying her.”

And with that, he left Ledger alone with the dim office light, the hum of the bar beyond the wall, and the ugly little miracle of a possibility. Ledger sat there for a long time after Roman was gone, phone in one hand, ring at his chest, fear still gnawing but no longer entirely shapeless. Outside, the city kept breathing. Somewhere out there, Dasha was breathing too. He had to believe that. Had to hold onto it with both hands or lose what was left of his mind altogether.

So he opened the banking app one more time, not because he believed in miracles, but because grief made rituals out of hopeless things, and stared at the empty feed until his vision blurred. Then he closed it, opened her photo again, and whispered into the stale office air like the night itself might carry it to wherever she’d hidden herself:

“Come home, Wonder.”

And for the first time in twenty-one days, the plea sounded less like ownership and more like a man standing outside the ruins of his own making, finally understanding that home was never the building.

It was her.

And then, on the twenty-first day, when the silence had grown so swollen and monstrous it no longer felt like time passing so much as punishment taking shape, Ledger’s phone lit up.

It happened late, almost obscenely late, at that dead, suspended hour when grief always seemed to get meaner, when the world outside the windows had gone black and still and everything inside him had begun its nightly ritual of tearing itself apart. The bar was closed by then, the stools upside down on the tables, the floors still faintly tacky from spilled liquor and tracked-in rain, the neon sign in the front window casting that weak, tired glow over everything it touched, making the room look less like a business and more like the shell of one. Ledger sat alone at the far end of the counter with a bottle of water he had not opened and his phone face-down in front of him, his whole body carrying the particular stillness of a man who had burned through panic and landed somewhere colder, somewhere worse. He had become practiced in disappointment over those three weeks, had learned to hate the sound of his ringtone and crave it in the same breath, had learned how hope could rise inside a man like a prayer and rot there like fruit left too long in the sun.

So when the screen began to vibrate against the wood, skittering a little under the force of the call, he almost did not look at it.

Almost.

Then he turned it over, and the sight of the number—one of the fraud and security lines he had spent the last three weeks speaking to until their hold music had branded itself into his nerves—sent every sleeping wire inside him live again. His hand closed around the phone so fast the stool legs scraped against the floor when he stood, the sound splitting the quiet open.

“Yeah,” he answered, but the word came out rough, jagged at the edges, as though it had had to claw its way through a throat gone tight with too many nights of imagining the worst.

“Mr. Ward,” the voice on the other end said, clipped and professional and devastatingly calm, “we’ve got a transaction hit on the card you flagged.”

For one terrible second, Ledger did not understand the sentence.

It landed in pieces, too bright and too impossible, and his mind, so accustomed now to disappointment, rejected it on instinct. A hit. On the card. The card. Dasha’s card. Not the cash withdrawal from three weeks ago that had led nowhere, not another useless automated update to remind him that nothing had changed, but a real-time transaction, recent enough to still have heat on it.

He gripped the edge of the bar.

The wood bit into his palm hard enough to hurt, and the pain was the only thing that kept him from believing he had hallucinated the whole thing.

“What?” he said, and this time the word cracked straight down the middle. “What’d you say?”

“We have an authorization request on the account ending in 4421,” the woman repeated, slower now, perhaps hearing something in his silence that made her gentler. “It just came through. The merchant is listed as Laurel Ridge Market and Fuel, and the location attached is Black Mountain, North Carolina.”

Black Mountain.

The name tore through him like light under a door.

For a second all he could hear was the blood rushing in his ears, loud and hot and immediate, the room around him shrinking until it seemed to hold only that voice and that town and the impossible, impossible fact that after twenty-one days of smoke and static and dead ends, Dasha had become real again. Not safe yet. Not in his arms. Not explained. But real. She was somewhere with pavement and fluorescent lights and a card reader and enough life left in her to buy something.

His knees nearly buckled under the force of it.

“Say it again,” he said, because grief had taught him to distrust joy on sight, because if he was going to believe this, truly believe it, he needed to hear the words until they stopped sounding like mercy and started sounding like fact. “Tell me exactly where.”

There was the faint rustle of papers on the other end, the click of a keyboard, and then the woman read it back to him in full, every syllable striking against his chest like a fist.

“Laurel Ridge Market and Fuel. 1148 Highway 9. Black Mountain, North Carolina.”

Exact.

It was exact.

Not a county. Not a blurry surveillance frame. Not some ATM still in town that told them nothing but the shape of her caution. An address. A real, breathing, earthly address. A place he could drive to. A place with a roof and a register and a parking lot. A place where his wife had stood within the last few minutes and handed over a card attached to her name like she had not meant to, like maybe she had forgotten for one exhausted second that every trail she had left behind her had gone cold on purpose.

Ledger shut his eyes, and the relief that hit him was so violent it hurt.

It did not come gentle. It came like a body blow. Like something had had both hands around his throat for three weeks and had finally, finally loosened its grip just enough to let him drag in air. He bent forward over the bar, one hand braced hard against the counter, the other clutching the phone to his ear as his head dropped and his breath left him in one long, broken line.

She was alive.

God.

She was alive.

Not a memory. Not a possibility. Not a woman dissolving by slow, unbearable degrees into the realm of missing persons flyers and police reports and people saying we’re doing all we can. She had bought something—water, gas, gum, he did not care—and in doing so she had reached one small, human hand through the dark and let the world know she was still in it.

He laughed then, or maybe sobbed, or maybe made some ugly sound that belonged to neither category cleanly, because the body did not always know how to behave when relief arrived wearing the face of resurrection. His vision blurred. He pressed the heel of his free hand hard against his mouth and tasted salt there, copper too maybe, because he had bitten himself bloody sometime in the call and had not even noticed.

“Mr. Ward?” the woman asked carefully.

“I’m here,” he managed, though he sounded wrecked, sounded like a man who had been dragged backward through hell and was only now noticing daylight. “I’m here.”

She said something else after that about authorizations and whether he wanted the charge allowed to continue and whether law enforcement had been notified, but Ledger’s mind had already shot ahead in a thousand bright, brutal directions all at once. Black Mountain. North Carolina. He saw road signs before he saw roads, saw himself driving until his eyes bled if he had to, saw the shape of her in some gas station parking lot under fluorescent light, hoodie up, head down, exhausted and furious and heartbreakingly real.

“Approve it,” he said immediately, because the words came to him with absolute certainty. “Approve anything else that comes through. Do not block the card. Don’t you touch that card.”

“Understood.”

Approve it. Let her spend every dime in the account if that was what it took. Let her buy the whole damn store. Let her charge enough groceries to feed a town if it meant one more breadcrumb, one more proof of life, one more receipt with a timestamp and a location and her invisible little ghost-hand on it.

He ended the call and just stood there for half a second, chest heaving, the phone still clutched in his hand, his reflection staring back at him in the dark mirror behind the bar like a stranger’s. He looked terrible. Hollowed out. Eyes bloodshot. Beard grown in too rough. Grief hanging off him in visible strips. But beneath all of that, for the first time in twenty-one days, something wild and electric had lit inside him.

Hope.

Not the soft kind. Not the careful kind.

The ugly, desperate, dangerous kind that sent men tearing through the night after what they loved.

His body moved before his mind finished catching up. He was around the bar and into the office in seconds, keys in one hand, phone in the other, barking out calls so fast the words nearly tripped over each other. First the detective. Then Maya. Then her sponsor. Then Grace, because if Dasha was alive then a little girl somewhere would not have to keep asking for Mama Stevie into the dark like prayer gone unanswered.

They all answered into the same stunned silence, the kind that comes when people have been living braced for bad news so long that good news feels suspicious at first, almost cruel in its brightness. Ledger gave them the town, the market, the address, his voice still shaking with a force he could not contain.

“We got a hit,” he said, over and over, like repetition might make the miracle hold. “We got a hit. She’s in Black Mountain. I’m on my way now.”

By the time he made it outside, the night felt changed.

The same parking lot. The same air. The same indifferent moon hung over the same line of buildings, and yet nothing looked quite as bleak as it had ten minutes ago. Even the cold wind hitting his face felt less like punishment now and more like movement, like the whole world had finally tilted in a direction he could follow. He got into the truck too fast, keys slipping once in his hand because his fingers would not stop shaking, and when the engine turned over, the sound roared through him like an answer.

Black Mountain.

He put the address into his GPS with hands that looked half-drunk from adrenaline, watching the little blue route bloom across the screen like a vein, a lifeline, a map back toward the woman who had made herself smoke and now, by some exhausted accident or divine intervention, had flickered visible again.

Three hours and forty-eight minutes.

He could do that standing on his head.

He backed out of the lot so fast the tires protested, then shot into the road with the kind of reckless focus only love and terror could produce. The city lights peeled away behind him in wet streaks of amber and red, the highway opening up dark and endless before him, and Ledger drove into it like a man chasing the return of his own soul.

On the passenger seat beside him sat her ring.

He had carried it every day since she threw it at him, stupidly, stubbornly, like a talisman or a punishment or both, and now the stone caught a smear of dashboard light every time he changed lanes, flashing at him with every mile as if to say not gone yet, not gone yet, not gone yet.

He looked at it once, just once, and his throat locked so hard around the breath in him that he had to grip the wheel tighter to keep from swerving.

“Hold on,” he whispered into the dark, though she was nowhere near enough to hear him, though maybe the words were more for himself than for her, more charm than promise, more plea than command. “Just hold on, baby.”

And the truck ate up the miles while dawn waited somewhere far ahead like a witness.

By the time Ledger turned off the main road and onto the narrow mountain lane that led to the cabin, the sky had gone from black to that strange, bruised indigo that comes just before morning admits what it is. Dawn had not fully broken yet, but it was gathering itself at the edges of the world, pale and watchful, stretching thin fingers of blue over the ridgelines. The mountains rose around him like old, silent witnesses, their shadows layered one behind the other in soft, unforgiving folds, and the farther he drove into them, the more the city seemed to fall away from him in pieces. Streetlights disappeared first. Then traffic. Then the last of the easy noise. What remained was the hum of the engine, the crunch of gravel beneath his tires, and the terrible, pounding certainty of his own heartbeat.

The GPS had gone useless ten minutes back, freezing in place as though even technology had decided this stretch of road belonged to another world, so he drove the last portion by the directions the woman at the market had managed to piece together after he called back half-crazed and breathless, asking if she remembered anything else about the card, the car, the direction Dasha might have gone. A local road. A split in the lane near a rusted mailbox. A weathered cabin tucked back in the trees. He had repeated it all to himself the way a man repeats scripture when he no longer trusts his mind to hold what matters without constant reinforcement.

And then he saw it.

The cabin sat a little way back from the road, half-hidden by tall pine and bare-branched hardwood, its roofline just visible through the trees at first, dark and sloped and almost blending into the mountainside if not for the faint porch light burning weak and gold against the blue of early dawn. It did not look dramatic enough to contain three weeks of his suffering. It did not look haunted, or cursed, or holy. It looked ordinary in the cruelest possible way, just a small weathered place with a gravel drive and a stack of chopped wood under one overhang and smoke curling thinly from the chimney like proof of life.

Proof.

That was the thing that nearly undid him.

The chimney smoke. A vehicle parked off to the side. A mug left on the porch railing. The details were so domestic, so mild, so offensively normal that Ledger had to tighten both hands on the steering wheel to keep the force of his relief from knocking the air right out of him. Because while he had been out there choking on dread, while he had spent twenty-one days imagining morgues and motel rooms and relapse and rivers and every other dark thing a frightened mind could manufacture, Dasha had been somewhere with woodsmoke and coffee and four walls and a front porch.

Somewhere alive.

He killed the engine and the silence that followed rang in his ears.

It was not truly silence, not in the mountains. There was the low rustle of wind moving through the trees, the far-off call of some waking bird, the creak of branches swaying overhead. But after hours of highway noise and the constant static of his own thoughts, it felt almost churchlike in its stillness, the kind that made every movement seem too loud, every breath too heavy. Ledger sat there for one suspended second with his hands still on the wheel, staring at the cabin through the windshield as though it might dissolve if he blinked too hard.

His wife was in there.

Maybe sleeping. Maybe crying. Maybe hating him enough to slam the door in his face. Maybe packing up to vanish all over again the second she saw his truck in the drive.

The thought struck him so fast he moved before it could root. He shoved the door open and got out into the cold, the mountain air hitting him hard and clean in the face, sharp enough to sting his lungs. It smelled like wet earth and pine sap and woodsmoke and distance. Nothing like the city. Nothing like the bar. Nothing like the life she’d left behind. He stood there for half a second, his boots sinking slightly into the gravel, and had the wild, disorienting sense that he had crossed some invisible border in the night and entered the geography of her hurt.

He shut the truck door more softly than he meant to, as though sudden noise might break whatever fragile spell had allowed him to find her at all, and started up the path.

Every step seemed to land louder than it should have. Gravel shifted. A board somewhere near the porch creaked in anticipation. The cold worked its way through the denim at his knees, through the thin fatigue of his body, but Ledger barely felt it. He was too aware of everything else. The ring in his jacket pocket, heavy as a stone and twice as accusing. The blood thudding behind his eyes. The fact that after twenty-one days of smoke, mystery, fear, and self-loathing, he was now walking toward the literal front door of the place where his wife had hidden herself from him.

He noticed things because he could not help but notice them. A blanket draped over one porch chair. A pair of women’s boots beside the door, muddied at the soles. A grocery bag folded in on itself near the wall, the market logo bright and stupidly familiar on the side. A ceramic planter with dead mums in it, neglected but still standing. Evidence, everywhere, of ordinary days being lived while he had been going feral with grief.

His chest tightened.

By the time he reached the steps, his pulse was no longer beating so much as battering the inside of him. He mounted the porch slowly, each board complaining under his weight with those old-house groans that always sounded more intimate than a new building’s silence. The woodsmoke was stronger here. So was the coffee. Somewhere inside, very faintly, he thought he heard movement—something set down on a table, maybe, or a chair leg scraping lightly across the floor.

Ledger stopped in front of the door.

It was painted a faded green, chipped around the knob, the kind of front door a person locked because it was what doors were for, not because the world outside had taught them anything especially elegant about fear. He stared at it as though it could answer him before he touched it, as though all the missing weeks might somehow rise through the wood and explain themselves if he waited long enough.

This was it, then.

Not the finding. The facing.

Because searching had been agony, yes, but searching at least gave him motion, gave him the punishing relief of a task. Finding her meant stepping out of theory and into consequence. Finding her meant looking at the woman he loved after twenty-one days of absence and whatever else had grown inside that absence besides. Finding her meant hearing the sound of his own name in her mouth and not knowing whether it would come out as grief or fury or both.

His hand went to his pocket by instinct, fingers brushing the ring there through the fabric of his jacket, and for one cracked second he saw again the way it had hit his chest before dropping between them, the tiny violent glint of it under the back door light, the look on her face when she threw it. He closed his hand around it hard enough to hurt.

Then he let go.

Slowly, carefully, Ledger lifted his hand toward the door.

And just before his knuckles met the wood, it swung open.

He froze.

A man stepped out first.

Not old. Not young either. Broad-shouldered, dark-skinned, wearing a thermal Henley with the sleeves shoved up and a pair of worn jeans, one hand occupied by a mug that still sent up a lazy ribbon of steam into the mountain cold. He stopped dead on the threshold the instant he saw Ledger standing there, and for one suspended, incomprehensible second the whole world seemed to tilt sideways.

Because Ledger had not prepared himself for this.

He had prepared himself for Dasha in tears, Dasha in silence, Dasha pale with anger, Dasha slamming the door, Dasha refusing to see him. He had prepared himself for emptiness, even, for the possibility that he had somehow still managed to arrive too late.

But he had not prepared himself for another man walking out of the cabin at dawn like he belonged to the morning there.

And then he saw her.

Dasha stood just behind him in the dim interior, one hand still on the edge of the door like she’d followed him to it without hurry, without fear, without any idea what waited on the porch until now. She wore an oversized sweatshirt and leggings, her honey-blonde wefts caught up carelessly, her face bare of makeup and thinner somehow, more tired around the eyes, but so heartbreakingly, devastatingly her that Ledger’s entire body went rigid with the force of seeing her in the flesh after so long with only ghosts for company.

Her eyes met his.

The man on the porch turned slightly, glancing back at her, then to Ledger again, his expression sharpening with immediate, unmistakable awareness, and in the narrow space between one breath and the next, Ledger felt something ancient and ugly and terrified rise straight out of his chest.

Dasha’s lips parted.

And the mountains, the cold, the coffee steam, the weak porch light, the ring in his pocket, the twenty-one days of hell between them—all of it held perfectly still.

Then she said, very softly,

“Ledger?”

Celeste had been testing him ever since they landed.

Not in any overt, deliberate way — she wasn’t cruel enough for that — but in the quiet, unconscious way beautiful women test the world simply by existing inside it. The Parisian air had done something to her, something soft and dangerous and entirely unfair to a man already undone. It lifted her curls just enough to make him want to tuck them behind her ear every five minutes. It warmed her skin into a deeper, richer glow that looked like honey under sunlight. It made her laugh easier, linger longer, walk slower — like she was letting the world have more of her than usual.

And she had dragged him through Versailles like this.

Through halls built for kings and queens, pointing out gilded ceilings and marble statues and oil-painted gods with a casual flick of her hand, as if she were not standing there looking like something that belonged behind velvet rope and whispered legend herself. She’d pause in front of some myth carved in stone — Aphrodite rising from the sea, Venus draped in linen — and tilt her head thoughtfully, explaining brushstrokes and symmetry and symbolism while Tyriq stood there staring at her instead of the art, wondering why nobody had yet figured out how to put Celeste Sterling inside a frame and hang her on a wall so the world could understand what reverence actually looked like.

She walked like she belonged to beauty, not like she was borrowing it.

And God, she looked good.

Good in the way that makes hunger feel philosophical. Good in the way that turns admiration into ache. Good in the way that made him want to sink his teeth into the air around her just to prove she was real. He didn’t want to touch her in a crude way, didn’t want to rush her, didn’t want to consume her — he wanted to kneel to her. Wanted to trace her existence with his eyes and commit it to memory like scripture.

And he didn’t mind it.

Didn’t mind the way she held him captive just by being present. Didn’t mind the way his world tilted toward her with every step she took. Didn’t mind that the Louvre could burn down and all he’d remember from Paris was the way she looked at him while explaining a painting, sunlight hitting her cheekbone, mouth moving around words she loved.

Now, if you asked Celeste?

She would tell you she was doing nothing at all.

She would tell you she was just walking. Just talking. Just breathing. Just pointing at art and laughing and enjoying a city she loved.

Like most beautiful things, she was unaware of the gravity she carried.

Unaware that heads turned when she passed.

Unaware that men paused mid-step just to watch her move through space.

Unaware that Tyriq was being dismantled and rebuilt by her presence daily.

She thought she was just existing.

But to him?

She was an event.

She was a disruption.

She was the kind of beauty that didn’t announce itself and therefore destroyed everything in its path.

And he followed her through Paris like a pilgrim follows light.

He took her hand as they walked along the Seine, the city breathing around them in low light and distant laughter, the river reflecting gold and silver in slow-moving ribbons beneath the bridges. After a few steps he tugged her gently back, guiding her until her back met his chest, until she was held in the circle of his arms like she belonged there.

They swayed together, barely moving, just enough to feel the rhythm of each other’s bodies, just enough to pretend there was music when there wasn’t any at all. He pressed a kiss to the base of her neck, right where her pulse lived, and she laughed softly, tilting her head before turning in his arms, curls brushing his jaw.

“If you’re tryin’ to get some tonight,” she murmured with a teasing smile as the Eiffel Tower glittered behind her like a constellation fallen to earth, “it’s workin’.”

“Oh, I ain’t had no doubts about that, baby,” he grinned, twirling her once in a lazy circle before pulling her back against him again, arms tightening like he never wanted to let her go.

They stood like that for a while, listening to the river, to the hush of the city, to the shared quiet of their breathing, swaying gently to nothing and everything all at once.

Then, almost too casually, he asked, “What do you think about marriage?”

He felt her body change before she said anything — the slight stillness, the subtle tension that traveled through her spine like a held breath. He didn’t push. He didn’t rush. He bent instead, pressing a soft kiss to her shoulder, right over the faint scar there, the one time had lightened but never erased, the small map of a past that had hurt her deeply and shaped her quietly.

A past she had survived.

“With you?” she asked finally, her voice low and careful, her breath warm against his neck as he kissed her shoulder again, slower this time, gentler.

He closed his eyes at the sound of it.

“Yeah,” he whispered. “With me.”

He didn’t say it like a demand. He didn’t say it like a plan. He said it like a hope he was brave enough to speak aloud.

And the river kept flowing, and the lights kept shimmering, and the world stayed soft around them while she considered a future that didn’t feel frightening anymore — just new, and warm, and very close to home.

She swallowed.

The Eiffel Tower blinked behind her like it, too, was holding its breath.

“I never wanted to get married again,” she said quietly, the words careful, honest, weighted with history. “Like—ever. Not even a courthouse.”

“Yeah,” he nodded, not defensive, not surprised, just present. “I know.”

“And I still don’t know if I believe in the whole… forever thing,” she continued, voice softer now, almost vulnerable. “Not the way people mean it. Not the way it gets promised and then… broken.”

Tyriq exhaled slowly, ran a hand over his jaw as if grounding himself, as if reminding himself not to rush her, not to crowd the moment with his want. He let go of her waist for half a second — just long enough for her to notice — and immediately she reached back for him, guiding his hands home again, fingers warm and certain around his.

“But if I was ever gonna do it again…” she whispered, finally lifting her eyes to his, courage and fear braided together in her gaze. “It’d be with you. Only you.”

Something in him gave way.

Not loudly. Not dramatically. But deeply — the way ice breaks on a river when spring finally reaches it.

He didn’t answer right away.

He leaned his forehead against hers instead, breathing her in, letting the truth of what she’d said settle into him properly, reverently, like you set something fragile down on velvet.

“You don’t gotta promise me forever,” he murmured, voice low and steady. “I don’t need vows or timelines or rings or nothin’ that scares you.”

His thumbs brushed slow circles into her waist, grounding, warm, certain.

“I just need now,” he said. “And tomorrow. And the next time you reach for me instead of pulling away. That’s enough for me.”

He lifted his head just enough to look at her, really look at her.

“And if someday ‘forever’ grows out of that,” he added softly, “then I’ll be grateful. But if it doesn’t… I’m still grateful I get you at all.”

Her eyes shone.

She smiled — small, tender, relieved.

And the Eiffel Tower kept blinking behind them, the river kept moving, the city kept breathing — while two people stood very still, choosing each other in the only way that had ever really mattered.

She laughed, a soft, breathy sound that curled into the night between them, eyes warm with teasing as she tilted her head at him.

“Look at you,” she murmured, thumb brushing his knuckles. “You been readin’ my poetry and stealin’ ideas?”

He scoffed, lips twitching into that familiar grin, eyes glinting with mock offense. “I don’t recall any of your characters fuckin’ on an air mattress for three months straight.”

She snorted, leaning her forehead into his chest. “That was research.”

“Sound like trauma,” he shot back easily.

They stood there laughing quietly, shoulders touching, Paris humming around them like a held breath, the river whispering secrets neither of them needed to hear aloud.

He squeezed her hands gently.

“Your stuff always been about yearning,” he added more softly, less teasing now. “About people wantin’ each other but not rushin’ it. About timing. About fear. About hope.”

She looked up at him, surprised.

“And you,” he continued, voice warm and sure, “are exactly the kind of woman that makes somebody write like that.”

Her smile faltered into something tender.

“So no,” he finished quietly. “I ain’t stealin’ your ideas.”

He leaned his forehead against hers, voice low, sincere.

“I’m just livin’ in one of your poems.”

He didn’t wait after that.

Not in a rushed way, not in a desperate way, but in the way someone steps forward when they already know the ground is solid.

His hands slid up her arms slowly, thumbs brushing over the soft inside of her wrists first, like he was asking permission with touch before he ever asked with words. He tilted his head just enough that their foreheads brushed, just enough that her breath warmed his mouth.

She looked up at him — eyes dark, smile gone quiet and real — and he felt that familiar ache spread through his chest again, the one that always came when he realized how much he loved her.

So he kissed her.

Not hard. Not hungry. Not claiming.

A kiss that was a thank-you. A kiss that was an apology. A kiss that was a promise he didn’t need to name.

His mouth pressed to hers warm and slow, lips fitting together like something they’d practiced in another lifetime, like this was muscle memory instead of choice. He lingered, just long enough to let her feel that he was there, that he wasn’t leaving, that he meant what he said about wanting her now.

She sighed into it — a soft sound, barely there — and her hands slid into his hoodie, fingers curling at his sides like she was anchoring herself to him.

He pulled back just enough to rest his forehead against hers again, noses brushing, breath shared.

“Hey,” he murmured, voice low and steady.

And the river kept moving. The tower kept blinking. Paris kept breathing.

“Hi,” she giggled.

His thumb traced slow circles at her waist, grounding, absentminded, affectionate, while his lips drifted down the side of her neck, just enough to make her tilt her head without even thinking about it.

She giggled again, soft and melodic, her fingers curling into the front of his shirt as she leaned into him. The sound of the Seine rippling behind them mingled with the shimmer of laughter that only Tyriq ever got out of her. She tilted her head just enough to feel his lips ghost over the pulse at her neck again, her gold hoops brushing his cheek.

“You really tryna do this right now?” she asked, voice low, teasing—trying to sound unaffected even as her knees dipped a little from how warm his mouth made her feel.

Tyriq smiled against her skin. Didn’t even flinch.

“I’ve been tryna do this, Celeste.”

She pulled back just enough to see his face, her arms still looped around his shoulders. Her eyes searched his, glittering in the Paris lights. She studied the boyish curve of his smirk, the reverence in the way he held her like he was scared she’d float away. And she realized: he wasn’t playing.

“Okay,” she said, quieter this time. “So how many?”

He didn’t hesitate.

“Three.”

She blinked.

“Three?”

“One for you. One for me. One that’s wild as hell and breaks both our spirits but we still love 'em anyway.”

She laughed again, burying her face in his chest.

“You want me barefoot, pregnant, and covered in babies, huh?”

He slid his fingers beneath her chin and tilted her face back up gently.

“I want you happy. I want you glowing. I want your name on all their birth certificates. I want to wake up in the middle of the night and see you in the rocking chair with one of ‘em, whisperin’ nursery rhymes in that soft voice you think I don’t hear.”

Celeste’s throat tightened. Suddenly it wasn’t so funny anymore. Suddenly she could see it. And it scared the hell out of her.

“Tyriq…” she started, but the words got stuck in her chest.

He nodded slowly, kissed her forehead.

“You ain’t gotta say nothin’ yet. Just… just let me keep picturin’ it. Let me dream it out loud until you see it too.”

And with her arms around his waist, head on his chest, and the lights of the Eiffel Tower flickering behind them, Celeste whispered:

“Alright. Dream, then.” “I already am,” he murmured.

“Me and you, Celeste.”

His voice was quiet when he said it, not dramatic, not loud, just certain, like he was placing something fragile and valuable down between them and trusting her not to let it fall.

She looked up at him then, really looked at him, eyes soft, mouth curved into that small smile that only ever showed up when she felt safe.

“Me and you, baby,” she echoed, just as steady, just as sure.

And it wasn’t a promise in the loud sense. It wasn’t fireworks or vows or declarations meant for anyone else to hear.

It was a choosing.

Right there on the banks of the river. Under blinking lights and borrowed stars. With the city breathing around them like a witness.

Just two people saying yes to each other — quietly, intentionally, and without needing anything more than that.

And later that night, when she moaned his name in that same hotel suite, in that same prone bone position with his hand wrapped around her throat and the Eiffel Tower glowing through the window… Maybe—just maybe—that’s when Solène Withers was first wished into existence.

The tall man stood at the threshold, leaning against the doorframe.

“You hungry? I made you something”

You shook your head, readjusting your resting position away from him. You didn’t have an appetite nor did you want anything Cameron made.

You were still sick at the thought of his reveal that he baby trapped you to keep you at his side.

Soon you heard shuffling on the carpet and a dip in the bed near you. Still, you didn’t look. You felt his hand on your hip and drag up to your back.

“Baby’s making you sick?”

You shook your head again. “‘M just not hungry, Cameron”

He nodded, going to caress your back in circles. “Okay.. I’ll save it for you for later. Can I get you anymore ginger ale or water? Fruit at the very least? I went to the store yesterday and got fruit the doctor recommended for your first trimester.. said the first is always the worst. I just want to be here for you as much as I can, bae”

Because you were facing away from him, you happily rolled your eyes— your now teary eyes. You were really stuck.

You made the mistake of wiping at your face, Cameron Cade knew what that meant. You cursed internally when he easily turned your body around and brought you into his arms.

“Cameron, stop—“

“No, don’t even try to fight it. Just relax”

Your head rested on his chest against your will, you tried to steady your breathing as more tears slipped down your cheeks. Your own arms cradled your body, not daring to hug Cameron back.

He didn’t care, as long as he could hold you. He rubbed your back some more.

“It’ll all be alright, I promise. You don’t gotta worry about a thing, I’ll be here for you every step of the way. It’s hard to see this for what it is now but this baby is our miracle worker”

You didn’t meet Cameron’s eyes when he cupped your face. You couldn’t.

“Just trust me. Everything will be okay”

But the next day proved Cameron Cade wrong. He sat in the living room while you surfed online on your laptop, but all wasn’t calm.

“You’ve never been as supportive as you like to say you were” you couldn’t help but to get frustrated, your phone on speaker and right next to your laptop.

Cameron couldn’t help but to tune out his football game in one ear and tune into your conversation with the other.

“I just feel like your advice is bullshit, Mikayla. Yours, Jackie’s, Kiara’s— everybody’s. This is one of the most stressful times in my life and you can’t even be a friend enough to make sure I’m good. You’re so quick to diss my relationship and I’m getting tired of that shit”

Cameron only made out a few mumbled words, assuming from Kayla through the phone. But your voice cut through once more.

“That doesn’t even matter but okay. You’re not really hearing me or trying to understand what I have to say. You’re not even focused on making things right—“

Cameron leaned in closer even going as far as turning down the volume of the TV.

“Mikayla, you called me stupid. Stupid, dumb, and an idiot, and you’re upset at me for defending myself?”

Another moment of static mumbling.

“If you aren’t going to apologize to me like a real friend— you and the other girls because it’s clear y’all are playing follow the leader— then you’re done in my book. You and the rest of them, I don’t care”

More static mumbling. Like the sick guy he was, Cameron Cade only smiled at your words. Was this vindication?

“Yeah, whatever, goodbye”

Cameron quickly fixed his nosy posture and focused on the tv screen once he heard you emerging from the bedroom.

You walked straight into the kitchen and into the fridge. “Cam, is there any more ginger ale?”

Cameron coughed out a response, praying he didn’t expose himself for eavesdropping. “Y-yeah, I put a few cans in the freezer for you”

He watched you search the freezer and find what you were looking for.

“Everything okay?” He asked, you looked over at him. “I just heard you yelling.. wanted to give you your space without intervening”

You waved him off, “Don’t worry about that, it’s fine. Just had to cut off my best friend of ten years plus so..” you cracked open the can and took a sip. “But no seriously, don’t worry. I’m done with liars and fake people”

You didn’t say another word before grabbing a snack and retreating back to the bedroom with the close of the door.

Cameron Cade’s smile was something like the chesire cat. He wasn’t going to say he told you so at all, it wasn’t what you wanted to hear.

But to him.. it was a win in his book.

.

Cameron Cade finally felt like things were going well again.

Maybe he had to let you have your space for you to start coming around. And that you did. It wasn’t like a flipped switched but a gradual shift.

He was back sleeping in the bed with you and you were fine with cuddling. One arm above your head, the other wrapped around your stomach, your back to his chest.

You weren’t fully kissing him on the lips whenever he departed from work but Cameron accepted a kiss on the cheek. At least you hugged him too.

You came around to talking to him a bit more. Your tone still hesitant but completely void of the ice and annoyance like before.

You hated that Cameron was back to making you laugh. He was a naturally funny guy and upon your walls slowly coming down, he made up for it with jokes and the humor you missed.

If that wasn’t better, you were steadily getting back to cooking dinner for you two. Your cravings started getting frequent, you had certain tastes for things and it was better if you made it.

Something like a baked ziti pasta with salad on the side, Cameron could never cook pasta properly.

You stood at the stove, having just pulled out the pasta dish that was baking in the oven.

Ready to announce that the food was done, Cameron Cade appeared at your side. He slithered an arm around your waist and kissed your hair.

“All done?” He muttered, you nodded and leaned into him.

“You want salad too?” You asked, your boyfriend nodded.

“Yes please”

You turned to grab two plates but Cameron Cade stopped you. He cupped your face and peered into your eyes, a soft smile pulling at his lips.

He felt his heart lurch at his ribcage with the more he looked at you. You, the love of his life. He leaned down and connected your lips, the first kiss in what felt like years.

He could feel your hesitation to kiss him back but you melted regardless.

“I love you. Thank you” Cameron said against your lips once he pulled away.

Your smile was shy. “You’re welcome”

You brought two plates to the dining room table where Cameron sat. A full meal and Pepsi for him, a salad and ginger ale for yourself. He didn’t take long to start digging in, you watched him as you forked your salad.

“You really do make pasta better than me, Danielle. This is so good”

You winked, cracking open your ginger ale and taking a sip.

“Well thank you. I’ll end up fixing me a plate later, this salad and ginger ale is keeping my nausea at bay”

Cameron Cade nodded sympathetically, “how’s baby doing lately?”

It was your turn to sigh. “I’ll be glad when out of the first trimester. I’m nauseous, exhausted, sleeping all day, can barely eat. I’m drained to say the least”

Cameron reached over and interlocked your hand on the table. Sympathy swished through his eyes in a way that still had your stomach plummeting.

Were you coming around to him? Yes. But the cold reality that your pregnancy wasn’t planned how you dreamed was something you still thought about.

“It’s not even just this though. I know I told you not to worry but having to cut off my best friend since high school still hurts. I cried that night. I’d never thought our journey ended the way it did”

His thumb brushed over the front of your hand, caressing the skin supportively.

“She and the girls always looked at me like they’d never seen someone in love. Always giving me opinions and advice that I never asked for”

Cameron Cade felt the itch crawl up his spine, the itch to validate his own vindication that your friends weren’t shit at all. He really didn’t want to say he told you so.

“Yeah.. it’s a really unfortunate situation, baby, I’m sorry that you’re going through this. The timing is awful. It’s even sadder because she’s seen the ins and outs of your life. To suddenly end that over a relationship she wasn’t apart of is really fucking stupid”

You nodded in agreement, taking a sip of your ginger ale. “As shitty as a friend she’s been acting, she did give me a piece of advice that actually made sense”

You squeezed Cameron’s hand, looking at him. His eyebrows raised in curiosity.

“She told me “You are still Danielle Young with or without Cameron Cade. I know that you know that but does he know that?””

Cameron gulped, still watching you. “At first I couldn’t really see what she meant by that because my love for you exceeded everything and everybody. I’ll do anything for you, Cameron”

You leaned over and kissed the front of his hand.

“At least I thought I did. Bed ridden and wallowing in my depression, I realized that my life wasn’t over just because someone’s never told you no. I’ve always told you that I’m nothing like the bitches in your past that let you scream, cry, yell, and holler to get your way.. I don’t think you really took me seriously”

You glanced up, watching the mask of your boyfriend start to slip and crack. He wore the softest grimace on his gorgeous face but still tried to smirk.

“I might not be the loudest bitch you’ve ever dealt with but I promise you I’m the smartest”

You leaned back in your seat and took another drink from your can.

“You can think you’re quick but I’m quicker” you made sure to look Cameron square in the eye as you revealed papers from underneath you. Placing them on the table, you pushed them towards him.

Cameron Cade skillfully kept his burning anger contained. Snatching the papers from in front of him, he read. His eyebrows jumped in surprise, a dark chuckle leaving him.

“‘Got some balls on you, huh? My baby’s gone? My daughter? My son? Gone, huh?”

You nodded surely, “you don’t know really know me as well as you say you do, baby”

Cameron Cade took a beat to respond, he merely stared at you. All he could muster was a sarcastic chuckle. He silently stood with his plate, walked over to the oven and helped himself to more pasta.

Your eyes followed him the entire time. He plopped back into place and began tucking in.

“Y’know, I gotta give it to you, Danielle” he said after swallowing and wiping his mouth with a table cloth, “I respect your ambition and this petty need to prove me wrong but I know it’ll be short lived”

You let him continue to talk, your own sense of anger building and burning.

“I know you. I know your body, I know your mind. It didn’t take shit for me to keep you from leaving that one night and that says a lot about you. I love you to death but you’re weak. Weak, gullible, easy to manipulate. I can just fuck you and knock you up again”

You bit the inside of your cheek, you had to keep yourself calm.

“Believe me when I say, there isn’t anything you can do to me that won’t ruin my life or yours”

You let out a breath and gave Cameron Cade a solemn like smile.

“Would you believe me if I said I already have? And I’m not talking about the abortion”

Almost as if on cue, Cameron Cade felt all internal rushing and signals suddenly halt. Halt, freeze, stop. He sat rigid in the kitchen chair, a frown settling deep on his eyebrows and staring at you from across the table.

“It’s not poison I put in the pasta but a pretty strong paralytic that’s going to keep you like this for hours.. days even”

Cameron Cade somehow still attempted to move, his loss of function and frustration because of it had him choking out a growl of anger. His pretty face now red and ready to go.

“And when it finally wears off, you’ll be so disoriented and slow that your body won’t have a choice but to shut down. How’s that for weak?”

All he could do was watch you move but even then, his sight was going a soft daze view.

You stood and rounded the table, not saying another word. You simply reached into the coat closet and put on a jacket, grabbing your hefty purse of prepacked essentials. Your shoes were last.

With one look over your shoulders, Cameron Cade was so rigid that his lower limbs had given up, taking him to the grounds of the hardwood floor.

It was beyond rigidity, he couldn’t feel a fucking thing. It also burned like a bitch.

With one final approach to Cameron, you bent down to meet his face. “I didn’t need to go through the pain by you to know that I’ve been a fighter. You can’t control me anymore, Cameron Cade”

And with that, you were hauling ass out of the apartment. The fresh air kissed your face when you pushed open the main door. You didn’t make it three feet outside without the sound of a blaring car horn alerting you.

Waving from her Nissan Altima stopped in the middle of the street, Mikayla Wallace honked at you from the driver’s side.

“Dani!” Mikayla called out, “come on, let’s go, let’s go!”

Seeing your best friend and hero had you tearing up with every step you ran towards her car. You hurriedly helped yourself inside.

“Oh shit, wait!” You reached into your jacket pocket and grabbed your phone. Out of your window, you harshly threw the device to the ground— destroying it. “Okay, let’s go!”

And to Mikayla Wallace, that was all she needed to hear.

.

“You know as much as I love being a here at Aunt Lisa’s house, I can’t stay here forever. Not even for another day”

You sat on the guest bed of Mikayla’s aunt’s condo. Four bed and two bath, Aunt Lisa lived large and took charge.

Mikayla sat next to you, she nodded both in solemn and sympathy. “The least I can offer you is somewhere to eat, sleep, and clean up while you’re planning”

You smiled and rested your head on her shoulder. “You also got me a new phone so you’re kinda pushing it with meeting my basic needs”

You both shared a laugh. A brand new iPhone with a registered number sat in your purse, it was a gesture by your best friend that she thought of on her own.. given the situation.

The elephant in the room was huge but it wasn’t one you had to touch on. You and Mikayla knew, what was understood didn’t have to be explained.

Truth be told, Mikayla Wallace knew your entire plan. With her help, she was your sanctuary and safe haven. You just had to make it convincing to Cameron that you were finally Mikayla free, all to win his trust.

“Any idea where you’re heading?” She mumbled for you to hear, her head now resting on yours. You nodded.

“Somewhere far the fuck away from here”

And by the next day, that’s just what was happening.

A morning as early as 4 AM had you at the airport, a barely packed luggage of clothes Mikayla let you take and your purse occupying your hands. You’d made it through TSA and to your terminal.

Mikayla, draped in leggings and a hoodie, stood before you.

“That phone has mine, all of the girls’ numbers, and Aunt Lisa’s too, I had that queued up before giving you the phone. Promise we’ll talk everyday?”

You both interlocked pinkies, you brought her in for a hug you both needed.. and was going to desperately miss.

“Fuck everyday, every damn hour” you both laughed. “but I promise to keep you in the loop about everything. I feel like I’ve been saying it so much lately but thank you. We’ve always been lifelines for each other.. couldn’t ask for a better one”

Mikayla squeezed you before pulling back and kissing your cheek. “Anything you want or need, do not hesitate to call me or Aunt Lisa. Get yourself situated and we’ll come see you”

You didn’t get the chance to say anything other than another hug and goodbye, your flight was now boarding.

Blowing Mikayla one last kiss, you got yourself in line and getting your ticket checked. Down the runway you went until you were on the aircraft, looking for your seat.

When you found it, you finally let out a breath of relief.

It was go time. Finally the plane started into turbulence before setting off.

You watched the takeoff and with your headphones on, you closed your eyes.

.

ELEVEN MONTHS LATER — NOW

“Baby, I’m home! You in here?”

You smiled as you continued washing your clean up dishes, having just finished preparing for dinner to cook.

“I’m in here! C’mere so I can kiss you”

Hearing his chuckle was enough to make you blush as you wiped your hands with a paper towel.

Finally rounding the corner and entering the space, the light in your boyfriend’s eyes was loving.

“‘Said you wanted to kiss me, huh?” He grinned, “I might need more than that since you look so fucking good. C’mere, girl”

Falling into the arms of him was your favorite parts of the day. Like magnets, your lips found one another. Something soft, sensual, and light. Enough to say: ‘welcome home’.

“Mister Rafe Cameron, you clean up great for the office. Had I known you left looking this good, I would’ve made you stay home”

Rafe Cameron chuckled, his adorable dimples in both of his cheeks. His hands playfully patted your denim blue jean covered ass before walking over to the stove.

“What’s on the menu tonight?”

“Red wine short rib beef tips with some mashed potatoes and broccoli. How’s that sound?”

“Like I need to marry you tomorrow”

You only giggled, blushing wildly. “Well, the crockpot is still going so we’ve gotta wait on that. Shouldn’t be any longer, it’s been going for a while now”

Rafe smiled and approached you, his hands on your waist. You wrapped your arms around his neck.

“So you’re saying we’ve got time?”

You grinned, “a lot of time”

That’s how you and Rafe found yourselves on the living room couch, wine glasses in your hands. You were standing in his lap, his free arm around your waist to keep you in place.

Conversation flowed easily between you and Rafe. No phones just soft music in the background as you and Rafe talked about your day.

You met Rafe Cameron two months into moving away. You were the front desk receptionist to the law firm he was working at.

The interest was mutual once you saw him walk into the building. You remembered him doing a soft double take before introducing himself to you, asking if you were new. It was history ever since then.

He made it a point to learn more about you and softly flirt with you every chance he got. He couldn’t bring himself to not court you. Flowers on the pick up, on the way in was a must fate two weeks of talking and getting to know one another.

He was your confidant and your best friend. To Rafe, you were the light of his life. He seriously had plans of marrying you.

The flowed conversation was cut off by the sound of your crockpot and the doorbell. You and Rafe perked up.

“I’ll get the food, you get the door?” You promoted. Rafe nodded.

“Of course, i got it”

You shuffled off of Rafe and back into the kitchen. You could make out the sounds from the front as you checked on your beef tips— tender and saturated.

“Oh shit, good to see you! You came at the perfect time, dinner’s almost ready”

Your brows softly furrowed. You weren’t expecting company, not your friends from work nor did Rafe tell you anything.

“Hey Dani! Come on by, baby, I want you to meet someone”

Removing your apron, you trotted out of the kitchen, just after alerting Rafe that you were on the way.

Approaching the front door, Rafe stood with another man just as tall as him if not taller. If you were carrying a glass, you would’ve dropped and shattered it. You were surprised your knees didn’t give out.

“Danielle, I want you to meet my new friend from work. This is Cameron Cade, he’s a new analyst exec” Rafe smiled, “Cameron, this is my girlfriend, Danielle”

You stood frozen in place, time reducing down to something impossibly slow. Was this real? That was until he smiled and held out his hand.

“Hi Danielle, I’m Cameron. Nice to meet you, I’ve heard so much about you”

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

You giggled and nodded in agreement. “If it makes you feel better, I got on his ass that next morning like.. cussed him out so bad that he was scared to talk to me for the rest of the day”

Mikayla’s smile never left her face despite her sigh. “How are y’all doing anyway? I was surprised the party still continued after that. I saw you as you were dragging his tall ass out, you were mad—“

“Mad as hell! He made me so upset but we’ve talked since then, we’re better. He’s just.. sometimes he gets into these fits where he swears something bad is going to happen in our relationship and I’m always reassuring him. I have no problem doing that but sometimes his paranoia has him tripping for no reason”

Mikayla nodded understandingly, letting you continue.

“You know he basically spent his early life without his family. He sees his Mom very seldom and.. y’know his Dad died so, I’m always there to be his girlfriend and his best friend ‘cause he really doesn’t have anybody”

Mikayla nodded again. “And I can understand that, I’m not knocking that at all, please hear me clearly when I say that, Dani. I think with the girls and I— our whole thing is he just doesn’t let you live sometimes. Or he swears we don’t respect your relationship and we do!”

You nodded as well, taking the hands of your best friend.

“But there isn’t anything wrong with having your own crowd outside of your relationship. You’re still Danielle Young with or without Cameron Cade— and I know you know that, but does he know that?”

Mikayla’s question was rhetorical but it kept you deep thought even throughout the day.

The brunch date of two easily turned into a girls day when the rest of your girlfriends pulled up. The booth filled up but accommodated all six of you.

For the first time in a while, you felt like you could breathe differently.

Life felt good— your relationship was going well, your job was stable, your bills were paid, and you still had your girlfriends.

You laughed hard, smiled a lot, and enjoyed yourself. So much that time was hardly a thing you thought about..

Brunch turned into shopping at the mall and leaving with bags on top of your to-go package bags. The mall then ended with bowling.

After entering in your names in the respective orders into the monitor, the girls were deciding on food and drinks.

“What are you thinking, Dani?” Mikayla asked, the laminated menu in her hand as she sat next to you.

“Do you wanna split some wings and fries with me? Looks like they’re batching a lot for just one person”

“Hot or mild?”

“Let’s do half and half. One half hot and the other.. honey barbecue? Ranch for that and the fries?”

Mikayla nodded in satisfaction, happy to pay for the food while you paid for the drinks.

Twenty minutes into the game, your food arrived, being sat on the expansive table along with your drinks. Sitting next to Kayla, you were ready to tuck into your food.

You grabbed a regular doused hot wing and as soon as the strong scent filled your nostrils, you immediately put the wing back down.

It felt more than just the hot scent that burned your nose, the smell went straight to your stomach and you wanted to vomit.

“You okay, Dani?” Kayla asked glancing at you, she’d already began eating at one of the wings on the platter. Concern etched on her face.

“I.. I don’t know. Somebody in that kitchen probably used the whole damn bottle of hot sauce on our wings, the smell is just too strong”

Kayla agreed. “You’re probably still full from brunch”

That made sense. You instead focused on the fries and sipped your Sprite carefully. You hated having to throw up, especially when you weren’t in the comfort of your own home. You just had to keep it together.

After hugging and kissing your girlfriends goodbye, you hopped into your car and headed home.

The clock rang 7:00 PM from your car phone, you were tired. The high of today would soon be worn off once you stepped into your apartment.

You smiled at your boyfriend who sat on the couch, he faced the front door, almost like he was expecting you.

“Hi baby” you placed your bags on the kitchen counter and approached him to greet him. “How are you?”

You placed your hands on his shoulder and leaned in to kiss but he pulled back, avoiding it.

“Don’t come in here doin’ that. You didn’t see me callin’ and texting you?”

You frowned and searched for your phone in your purse. Upon expanding the notifications as your phone was in Do Not Disturb, your mouth dropped in surprise.

‘Heart and Soul ❤️’ — missed calls (10)

‘Heart and Soul ❤️’ — messages (20)

“You said you’d be home at 5, why are you walking in this house two hours after what you told me?”

You closed your eyes in building guilt, you fucked up.

You walked back over to your boyfriend, sitting down next to him. The remorse and guilt on your pretty face almost had Cameron Cade crumbling but he knew had to stand firm.

“I’m sorry, baby—“

“C’mon, Danielle” Cameron rolled his eyes. “Were you just not looking at your phone at all?”

“I was with the girls. At first it turned into just Kayla and I, and then Denise, Jackie, and Kiara pulled up and.. I just lost track of time”

All Cameron Cade could do was sigh and shake his head. He felt his anger already bubbling into something worse and he tried his best to chill out.

“I didn’t mean to keep you here worried and stressed out, I swear. You know how it is when I get with the girls, I just be having so much fun that I barely check my phone—“

“And that’s exactly why I don’t like you being with them, Danielle. You don’t see how bad of an influence they can be on you? You’re so invested in them that you can’t check in with me? At least let me know that you’re safe and planning to stay out later?”

You stayed silent, trying not to give Cameron that attitude back because in a way, his anger was justified. You’d be on him the same way if the roles were reversed.

He was right but damn, it was hard to accept.

“I’m sorry” you muttered, “it won’t happen again, I promise”

Cameron Cade took another look at your sad, pouty face. You truly felt bad and he felt he’d grilled you enough.

He sighed and smoothly brought your body into his lap, his arms around your waist. “Look at me” he mumbled, his hand slithering up to gently grab your chin, forcing you to meet his eye.

“I love you, girl and I swear I don’t mean to worry or make you worry whenever you’re out. I want you to have fun, bae, but can you understand why I’m upset?”

You nodded your head vigorously. “Absolutely, that’s why I feel bad. I definitely let time get the best of me but I still should’ve communicated that with you. There’s no excuse, I’m sorry”

Finally, Cameron Cade’s eyes softened and smiled gently. Pulling you by your chin, his lips lovingly captured yours, you felt yourself relax and melt into your boyfriend.

“I forgive you” Cameron mumbled against your lips, still keeping himself close. “Just please talk to me, that’s all I ask”

Nodding, you held your pinky out for him. Your gentle giant chuckled and wrapped his pinky around yours.

“I love you, Cam”

“I love you, Danielle”

.

“Isn’t this outfit so cute? Doesn’t it look good on me?” You called out to Cameron from the bathroom.

Cameron Cade’s approached the opened bathroom, watching you finish touching up your hair. He felt his suspicions begin to raise.

“You look sexy as fuck” he leaned in and kissed the side of your brown lip lined lips, careful not to mess up your makeup. His hand slapping with your ass. “Where you going tonight? I thought we were gonna chill out.. watch some movies and shit”

Still focusing on your hair, you responded. “It’s Kayla’s birthday. We’re all going to dinner together and probably chill at the lounge downtown. I told Kayla my cut off is 10 PM so I’ll be strict, I promise”

Cameron frowned softly. You met his eye through the mirror. “I told you about this a few days ago, you said it was okay as long as I made it back on time.. that’s how we came up with 10 PM”

Cameron Cade remembered and he did okay you going out. But Cameron Cade couldn’t bring himself to give a fuck about that.

He wanted you all to himself.

“Baby, when’s the last time we had a date? Or some actual time to spend together?”

You closed your eyes, “Cameron, please don’t do this—“

“I’m just asking! It feels like the only times we see each other is after we’re working or when we’re fucking. We haven’t spent real time together like you spend with your friends”

“That’s bullshit and you know it. You do this every time I want to go out and that’s really fucked up. I never do this to you when you go out with your coworkers or your friends from college, do I?”

Cameron rolled his eyes, walking out of the bathroom. You only followed him, officially irritated.

“No, answer me! Do I trip on you when you want to go out the way you trip on me?” Cameron Cade didn’t answer, plopping down on the couch.

“No? Exactly. And in my opinion, your friends are even more questionable than mine but do you see me making a big deal? No, you don’t”

You watched your boyfriend ignore your gaze, he was shutting down, you could see it in his body language.

“Can I have this last night and I promise you, it’ll be about you and me for however long”

Cameron didn’t respond, instead you made out his watering eyes and soft red face. Cameron Cade rarely cried, even when he’d have moments of grief over his father’s death, he never cried.. or tried his best not to.

“Cam—“

He waved you off, “nah it’s okay, don’t even worry about it. You’re right, I did agree to you going out so go have fun. Just come back home, please”

He tried to walk past you but you grabbed his arm, stopped him completely. With a cupped hand on his face, you watched a few tears stream down his pretty face.

“Baby, stop it” you swiped a tear with your thumb, “why’re you crying?”

Cameron’s pink tinted eyes met yours, you felt your heart lurch. “I just miss you, Dani. I miss us. I miss us going on dates, I miss us hanging out, I miss everything. Maybe I’m being selfish but you’re my best friend. I have the most fun with you and it’s hard sharing you”

One hand on his face turned into both, your fingers continuing to wipe away his tears. Sympathy coated your insides, you hated that Cameron felt neglected.

“But I don’t want you to think I’m controlling you so please, go have fun. Just text me and come home in one piece. I love you”

Maybe you were being selfish with how much time you weren’t home. Maybe that scale was tipped too far away from your relationship. Maybe Cameron was right.

Standing on your tippy toes, you leaned in and kissed Cameron softly on the lips. His arms stretched around your waist, bringing you close to him. You pulled back to peer into his greenish hazels.

“Okay” you whispered, “I’ll stay. It’s all about me and you tonight, ‘yeah?”

Cameron only kissed you again in response to your words. Like he was saying thank you.

Cameron watched you unravel yourself from him and go back to grab your phone, he heard you sigh quietly. You were already breaking the news to your best friend of your change of plans.

You brushed past him and into your shared bedroom, undressing yourself from your occasion outfit.

In Cameron Cade’s eyes, this was a win. Even if it meant guilt tripping.. even if it meant victimizing a reality of your relationship that wasn’t really a reality… even if it meant forcing out some tears.

He won, that’s all that matters.

.

The more you thought about that night you missed Mikayla’s birthday, the more angrier you grew.

You spent the night with Cameron. You talked, laughed, ate, and finished the night with Cameron burying you deep in your bed.

But that following morning after he kissed you goodbye for work, you stayed in your head.

You actually hadn’t hung out with your friends as much as Cameron tried to accuse you of. You were just as introverted as him and preferred staying in to hang out with him.

Not to mention, you never threw tantrums whenever Cameron wanted to leave the house for some time. No matter how full of shit his own friends were.

The more you thought, the more you realized that Cameron Cade was trying to isolate you. His possessiveness was hidden by an insane amount of toxicity and insecurity.

The night where you left Jacy Kane’s party, where Cameron got into it with your former classmate. He alluded to you cheating on him when really, you were raving about Cameron to the guy.

Your loyalty exceeded more than even Cameron Cade knew. You bent a lot of your boundaries to please him and what was he doing? Accusing you of cheating and icing you out from your friends.

You became standoffish, a bit more short and annoyed with your boyfriend. Not to mention you’d come down with a sickness that had you bed ridden and missing work.

You’d thankfully started feeling better but you had your own plan. You just had to play up being sick a little longer to make it real.

“Can I get you anything, baby?” Cameron leaned down at the edge of the bed to meet your sulking face. His hand pushed your hair back, care in his eyes.

“I’m fine, Cam, thank you” you mumbled just briefly meeting those same eyes. He nodded and kissed your forehead.

“Okay, well text me if you need anything and I’ll drop by. Any updates on your tests results? Is it the flu or something?”

You shook your head. “Nothing yet but I can smell and taste so I don’t think it’s Covid. I just don’t feel good right now, Cam”

He nodded and kissed your head again. “I know, bae. Call me if you need anything at all”

You sent him the fakest smile you could muster up, he still was in hot water with you. You waited a ten minutes after the front door closed and locked before hauling yourself up.

Your patience was thin and you had enough. You texted Mikayla and told her you were coming over, you just had to pack some bags.

And packed you did. Clothes, body products, hair products, you had to make sure you had enough to suffice.

You sat your bags on the couch and sat there waiting. Before you could depart to Kayla’s, you wanted to give Cameron Cade a piece of your mind.

.

It felt like forever when Cameron came in the door. You sat on the couch next to your bags, dressed in basic lounge clothes, and ready to go.

“Hey baby” Cameron mumbled, his sights taking in the scene in front of him. “What’s this?”

You sighed. “I’m going to Kayla’s for a little bit and you’re not stopping me. I need space, Cameron. Lately it feels like you’ve been trying to control my life and dictate what I get to do with and without you, and I can’t do that anymore”

Cameron Cade stood silently, letting you rant. But his calm demeanor threw you off a little bit, only because you didn’t know what to expect.

“I’m not saying we need to break up but I need you in the doghouse until I’m ready to let you out. I’ve been nothing but loyal and supportive of your needs and you can’t meet mine without an issue. I’m done”

You watched Cameron nod, still not saying anything.

“You don’t have anything to say?” You prompted now standing in the middle of the living room.

Cameron opened his mouth and closed it. He instead walked over to one of the drawers in the kitchen, revealing a set of papers.

“Would you believe me if I said I saw this coming?” He flipped through the papers until he came upon a specific page.

“And not because of my actions in the way you think but because.. I planned all of this..”

Cameron stalked towards you, the paper in his hand. “All I had to do was cause a ‘lil tension.. argue a bit more.. maybe shed a few tears and become way more insufferable enough for you to want to break up with me. I drove you to this feeling on purpose”

Your heart only sunk deeper into your chest as Cameron spoke more. None of what he was saying was making any sense.

“And why? Because as much as you think you’re leaving me.. you’re not leaving me, Danielle. Not with this”

You watched your boyfriend hold the paper out for you to take, and when you did, you wanted to faint.

It was more than the test results to your swabs of Covid or flu strains but.. a positive HCG test result. You were—

“I know how you feel about abortion, you wouldn’t kill my baby” the sickest smirk pulled on Cameron’s face. He caught sight of your teary eyes, still staring at the positive test result.

“I already loved the feeling of cumming inside of you but when I saw that you started putting your hoe ass friends before me, I knew I had to speed up our future a bit faster. A future without them in it”

The tears finally came down your cheeks. “You trapped me?”

His hands came down on your shoulders, his lips near your ear. “I secured you.. to me and me only. We made this baby out of nothing but love and you do know how much I love you, Danielle”

Finally looking from the paper, you met the eyes of the man you thought you knew. His greenish hazels went a shade dark, his presence no longer comforted you but instead scared you.

Because he was right.. you were insanely pro choice but you know if you had the choice, you wouldn’t resort to abortion. You’d grow and raise your child no matter the circumstances.

To know Cameron got you pregnant on purpose simply to keep you bound to him was enough to make you want to die.

You felt his hand reach under your sweater and caress the smallest pudge in your stomach, it sent shivers down your spine.

“I know you still love me somewhere.. deep down. I know somewhere within you is actually excited about this, you’ve always talked about being a mother. You’re just a little mad at daddy and that’s okay, you’ll get over it”

He cupped your face in his huge hands and took your lips into his. The kiss was a sensual rhythm like Cameron Cade was putting a spell on you. You felt more tears burn your eyes and slide down your cheeks.

“..You’ll get over it and eventually you’ll understand my thinking. But for now? Right now? You’re gonna take your purse off..”

Cameron moved his hands up from your stomach and cupped your breasts, his fingers brushing over your sensitive nipples, drawing out a hiss from you.

“.. take your hair down..” he kissed your lips, “..get out of those clothes until the only thing I’m seeing is that necklace.. and lay right on that bed..” another kiss.

“..I think I wanna show you why I know you’re not leavin’ me..”

.

.

.

.

.

pt 3 otw 🤭

You giggled and nodded in agreement. “If it makes you feel better, I got on his ass that next morning like.. cussed him out so bad that he was scared to talk to me for the rest of the day”

Mikayla’s smile never left her face despite her sigh. “How are y’all doing anyway? I was surprised the party still continued after that. I saw you as you were dragging his tall ass out, you were mad—“

“Mad as hell! He made me so upset but we’ve talked since then, we’re better. He’s just.. sometimes he gets into these fits where he swears something bad is going to happen in our relationship and I’m always reassuring him. I have no problem doing that but sometimes his paranoia has him tripping for no reason”

Mikayla nodded understandingly, letting you continue.

“You know he basically spent his early life without his family. He sees his Mom very seldom and.. y’know his Dad died so, I’m always there to be his girlfriend and his best friend ‘cause he really doesn’t have anybody”

Mikayla nodded again. “And I can understand that, I’m not knocking that at all, please hear me clearly when I say that, Dani. I think with the girls and I— our whole thing is he just doesn’t let you live sometimes. Or he swears we don’t respect your relationship and we do!”

You nodded as well, taking the hands of your best friend.

“But there isn’t anything wrong with having your own crowd outside of your relationship. You’re still Danielle Young with or without Cameron Cade— and I know you know that, but does he know that?”

Mikayla’s question was rhetorical but it kept you deep thought even throughout the day.

The brunch date of two easily turned into a girls day when the rest of your girlfriends pulled up. The booth filled up but accommodated all six of you.

For the first time in a while, you felt like you could breathe differently.

Life felt good— your relationship was going well, your job was stable, your bills were paid, and you still had your girlfriends.

You laughed hard, smiled a lot, and enjoyed yourself. So much that time was hardly a thing you thought about..

Brunch turned into shopping at the mall and leaving with bags on top of your to-go package bags. The mall then ended with bowling.

After entering in your names in the respective orders into the monitor, the girls were deciding on food and drinks.

“What are you thinking, Dani?” Mikayla asked, the laminated menu in her hand as she sat next to you.

“Do you wanna split some wings and fries with me? Looks like they’re batching a lot for just one person”

“Hot or mild?”

“Let’s do half and half. One half hot and the other.. honey barbecue? Ranch for that and the fries?”

Mikayla nodded in satisfaction, happy to pay for the food while you paid for the drinks.

Twenty minutes into the game, your food arrived, being sat on the expansive table along with your drinks. Sitting next to Kayla, you were ready to tuck into your food.

You grabbed a regular doused hot wing and as soon as the strong scent filled your nostrils, you immediately put the wing back down.

It felt more than just the hot scent that burned your nose, the smell went straight to your stomach and you wanted to vomit.

“You okay, Dani?” Kayla asked glancing at you, she’d already began eating at one of the wings on the platter. Concern etched on her face.

“I.. I don’t know. Somebody in that kitchen probably used the whole damn bottle of hot sauce on our wings, the smell is just too strong”

Kayla agreed. “You’re probably still full from brunch”

That made sense. You instead focused on the fries and sipped your Sprite carefully. You hated having to throw up, especially when you weren’t in the comfort of your own home. You just had to keep it together.

After hugging and kissing your girlfriends goodbye, you hopped into your car and headed home.

The clock rang 7:00 PM from your car phone, you were tired. The high of today would soon be worn off once you stepped into your apartment.

You smiled at your boyfriend who sat on the couch, he faced the front door, almost like he was expecting you.

“Hi baby” you placed your bags on the kitchen counter and approached him to greet him. “How are you?”

You placed your hands on his shoulder and leaned in to kiss but he pulled back, avoiding it.

“Don’t come in here doin’ that. You didn’t see me callin’ and texting you?”

You frowned and searched for your phone in your purse. Upon expanding the notifications as your phone was in Do Not Disturb, your mouth dropped in surprise.

‘Heart and Soul ❤️’ — missed calls (10)

‘Heart and Soul ❤️’ — messages (20)

“You said you’d be home at 5, why are you walking in this house two hours after what you told me?”

You closed your eyes in building guilt, you fucked up.

You walked back over to your boyfriend, sitting down next to him. The remorse and guilt on your pretty face almost had Cameron Cade crumbling but he knew had to stand firm.

“I’m sorry, baby—“

“C’mon, Danielle” Cameron rolled his eyes. “Were you just not looking at your phone at all?”

“I was with the girls. At first it turned into just Kayla and I, and then Denise, Jackie, and Kiara pulled up and.. I just lost track of time”

All Cameron Cade could do was sigh and shake his head. He felt his anger already bubbling into something worse and he tried his best to chill out.

“I didn’t mean to keep you here worried and stressed out, I swear. You know how it is when I get with the girls, I just be having so much fun that I barely check my phone—“

“And that’s exactly why I don’t like you being with them, Danielle. You don’t see how bad of an influence they can be on you? You’re so invested in them that you can’t check in with me? At least let me know that you’re safe and planning to stay out later?”

You stayed silent, trying not to give Cameron that attitude back because in a way, his anger was justified. You’d be on him the same way if the roles were reversed.

He was right but damn, it was hard to accept.

“I’m sorry” you muttered, “it won’t happen again, I promise”

Cameron Cade took another look at your sad, pouty face. You truly felt bad and he felt he’d grilled you enough.

He sighed and smoothly brought your body into his lap, his arms around your waist. “Look at me” he mumbled, his hand slithering up to gently grab your chin, forcing you to meet his eye.

“I love you, girl and I swear I don’t mean to worry or make you worry whenever you’re out. I want you to have fun, bae, but can you understand why I’m upset?”

You nodded your head vigorously. “Absolutely, that’s why I feel bad. I definitely let time get the best of me but I still should’ve communicated that with you. There’s no excuse, I’m sorry”

Finally, Cameron Cade’s eyes softened and smiled gently. Pulling you by your chin, his lips lovingly captured yours, you felt yourself relax and melt into your boyfriend.

“I forgive you” Cameron mumbled against your lips, still keeping himself close. “Just please talk to me, that’s all I ask”

Nodding, you held your pinky out for him. Your gentle giant chuckled and wrapped his pinky around yours.

“I love you, Cam”

“I love you, Danielle”

.

“Isn’t this outfit so cute? Doesn’t it look good on me?” You called out to Cameron from the bathroom.

Cameron Cade’s approached the opened bathroom, watching you finish touching up your hair. He felt his suspicions begin to raise.

“You look sexy as fuck” he leaned in and kissed the side of your brown lip lined lips, careful not to mess up your makeup. His hand slapping with your ass. “Where you going tonight? I thought we were gonna chill out.. watch some movies and shit”

Still focusing on your hair, you responded. “It’s Kayla’s birthday. We’re all going to dinner together and probably chill at the lounge downtown. I told Kayla my cut off is 10 PM so I’ll be strict, I promise”

Cameron frowned softly. You met his eye through the mirror. “I told you about this a few days ago, you said it was okay as long as I made it back on time.. that’s how we came up with 10 PM”

Cameron Cade remembered and he did okay you going out. But Cameron Cade couldn’t bring himself to give a fuck about that.

He wanted you all to himself.

“Baby, when’s the last time we had a date? Or some actual time to spend together?”

You closed your eyes, “Cameron, please don’t do this—“

“I’m just asking! It feels like the only times we see each other is after we’re working or when we’re fucking. We haven’t spent real time together like you spend with your friends”

“That’s bullshit and you know it. You do this every time I want to go out and that’s really fucked up. I never do this to you when you go out with your coworkers or your friends from college, do I?”

Cameron rolled his eyes, walking out of the bathroom. You only followed him, officially irritated.

“No, answer me! Do I trip on you when you want to go out the way you trip on me?” Cameron Cade didn’t answer, plopping down on the couch.

“No? Exactly. And in my opinion, your friends are even more questionable than mine but do you see me making a big deal? No, you don’t”

You watched your boyfriend ignore your gaze, he was shutting down, you could see it in his body language.

“Can I have this last night and I promise you, it’ll be about you and me for however long”

Cameron didn’t respond, instead you made out his watering eyes and soft red face. Cameron Cade rarely cried, even when he’d have moments of grief over his father’s death, he never cried.. or tried his best not to.

“Cam—“

He waved you off, “nah it’s okay, don’t even worry about it. You’re right, I did agree to you going out so go have fun. Just come back home, please”

He tried to walk past you but you grabbed his arm, stopped him completely. With a cupped hand on his face, you watched a few tears stream down his pretty face.

“Baby, stop it” you swiped a tear with your thumb, “why’re you crying?”

Cameron’s pink tinted eyes met yours, you felt your heart lurch. “I just miss you, Dani. I miss us. I miss us going on dates, I miss us hanging out, I miss everything. Maybe I’m being selfish but you’re my best friend. I have the most fun with you and it’s hard sharing you”

One hand on his face turned into both, your fingers continuing to wipe away his tears. Sympathy coated your insides, you hated that Cameron felt neglected.

“But I don’t want you to think I’m controlling you so please, go have fun. Just text me and come home in one piece. I love you”

Maybe you were being selfish with how much time you weren’t home. Maybe that scale was tipped too far away from your relationship. Maybe Cameron was right.

Standing on your tippy toes, you leaned in and kissed Cameron softly on the lips. His arms stretched around your waist, bringing you close to him. You pulled back to peer into his greenish hazels.

“Okay” you whispered, “I’ll stay. It’s all about me and you tonight, ‘yeah?”

Cameron only kissed you again in response to your words. Like he was saying thank you.

Cameron watched you unravel yourself from him and go back to grab your phone, he heard you sigh quietly. You were already breaking the news to your best friend of your change of plans.

You brushed past him and into your shared bedroom, undressing yourself from your occasion outfit.

In Cameron Cade’s eyes, this was a win. Even if it meant guilt tripping.. even if it meant victimizing a reality of your relationship that wasn’t really a reality… even if it meant forcing out some tears.

He won, that’s all that matters.

.

The more you thought about that night you missed Mikayla’s birthday, the more angrier you grew.

You spent the night with Cameron. You talked, laughed, ate, and finished the night with Cameron burying you deep in your bed.

But that following morning after he kissed you goodbye for work, you stayed in your head.

You actually hadn’t hung out with your friends as much as Cameron tried to accuse you of. You were just as introverted as him and preferred staying in to hang out with him.

Not to mention, you never threw tantrums whenever Cameron wanted to leave the house for some time. No matter how full of shit his own friends were.

The more you thought, the more you realized that Cameron Cade was trying to isolate you. His possessiveness was hidden by an insane amount of toxicity and insecurity.

The night where you left Jacy Kane’s party, where Cameron got into it with your former classmate. He alluded to you cheating on him when really, you were raving about Cameron to the guy.

Your loyalty exceeded more than even Cameron Cade knew. You bent a lot of your boundaries to please him and what was he doing? Accusing you of cheating and icing you out from your friends.

You became standoffish, a bit more short and annoyed with your boyfriend. Not to mention you’d come down with a sickness that had you bed ridden and missing work.

You’d thankfully started feeling better but you had your own plan. You just had to play up being sick a little longer to make it real.

“Can I get you anything, baby?” Cameron leaned down at the edge of the bed to meet your sulking face. His hand pushed your hair back, care in his eyes.

“I’m fine, Cam, thank you” you mumbled just briefly meeting those same eyes. He nodded and kissed your forehead.

“Okay, well text me if you need anything and I’ll drop by. Any updates on your tests results? Is it the flu or something?”

You shook your head. “Nothing yet but I can smell and taste so I don’t think it’s Covid. I just don’t feel good right now, Cam”

He nodded and kissed your head again. “I know, bae. Call me if you need anything at all”

You sent him the fakest smile you could muster up, he still was in hot water with you. You waited a ten minutes after the front door closed and locked before hauling yourself up.

Your patience was thin and you had enough. You texted Mikayla and told her you were coming over, you just had to pack some bags.

And packed you did. Clothes, body products, hair products, you had to make sure you had enough to suffice.

You sat your bags on the couch and sat there waiting. Before you could depart to Kayla’s, you wanted to give Cameron Cade a piece of your mind.

.

It felt like forever when Cameron came in the door. You sat on the couch next to your bags, dressed in basic lounge clothes, and ready to go.

“Hey baby” Cameron mumbled, his sights taking in the scene in front of him. “What’s this?”

You sighed. “I’m going to Kayla’s for a little bit and you’re not stopping me. I need space, Cameron. Lately it feels like you’ve been trying to control my life and dictate what I get to do with and without you, and I can’t do that anymore”

Cameron Cade stood silently, letting you rant. But his calm demeanor threw you off a little bit, only because you didn’t know what to expect.

“I’m not saying we need to break up but I need you in the doghouse until I’m ready to let you out. I’ve been nothing but loyal and supportive of your needs and you can’t meet mine without an issue. I’m done”

You watched Cameron nod, still not saying anything.

“You don’t have anything to say?” You prompted now standing in the middle of the living room.

Cameron opened his mouth and closed it. He instead walked over to one of the drawers in the kitchen, revealing a set of papers.

“Would you believe me if I said I saw this coming?” He flipped through the papers until he came upon a specific page.

“And not because of my actions in the way you think but because.. I planned all of this..”

Cameron stalked towards you, the paper in his hand. “All I had to do was cause a ‘lil tension.. argue a bit more.. maybe shed a few tears and become way more insufferable enough for you to want to break up with me. I drove you to this feeling on purpose”

Your heart only sunk deeper into your chest as Cameron spoke more. None of what he was saying was making any sense.

“And why? Because as much as you think you’re leaving me.. you’re not leaving me, Danielle. Not with this”

You watched your boyfriend hold the paper out for you to take, and when you did, you wanted to faint.

It was more than the test results to your swabs of Covid or flu strains but.. a positive HCG test result. You were—

“I know how you feel about abortion, you wouldn’t kill my baby” the sickest smirk pulled on Cameron’s face. He caught sight of your teary eyes, still staring at the positive test result.

“I already loved the feeling of cumming inside of you but when I saw that you started putting your hoe ass friends before me, I knew I had to speed up our future a bit faster. A future without them in it”

The tears finally came down your cheeks. “You trapped me?”

His hands came down on your shoulders, his lips near your ear. “I secured you.. to me and me only. We made this baby out of nothing but love and you do know how much I love you, Danielle”

Finally looking from the paper, you met the eyes of the man you thought you knew. His greenish hazels went a shade dark, his presence no longer comforted you but instead scared you.

Because he was right.. you were insanely pro choice but you know if you had the choice, you wouldn’t resort to abortion. You’d grow and raise your child no matter the circumstances.

To know Cameron got you pregnant on purpose simply to keep you bound to him was enough to make you want to die.

You felt his hand reach under your sweater and caress the smallest pudge in your stomach, it sent shivers down your spine.

“I know you still love me somewhere.. deep down. I know somewhere within you is actually excited about this, you’ve always talked about being a mother. You’re just a little mad at daddy and that’s okay, you’ll get over it”

He cupped your face in his huge hands and took your lips into his. The kiss was a sensual rhythm like Cameron Cade was putting a spell on you. You felt more tears burn your eyes and slide down your cheeks.

“..You’ll get over it and eventually you’ll understand my thinking. But for now? Right now? You’re gonna take your purse off..”

Cameron moved his hands up from your stomach and cupped your breasts, his fingers brushing over your sensitive nipples, drawing out a hiss from you.

“.. take your hair down..” he kissed your lips, “..get out of those clothes until the only thing I’m seeing is that necklace.. and lay right on that bed..” another kiss.

“..I think I wanna show you why I know you’re not leavin’ me..”

.

.

.

.

.

pt 3 otw 🤭

Mikayla’s smile dropped, a groan slipping out as she tossed her head back. You only shook your head and smiled. Kayla didn’t have to ask for more information.

“Why—“

“Aht aht, you’re not new to this so don’t even start complaining. You know that’s just how Cameron rolls and with the parties we go to, I’m going to bring my six foot five inch body guard every time”

“But every time you bring him, I never leave with something fine to take home. Your nigga be scaring the other niggas and that shit is not cool, Dani”

Your smile stayed plastered on your face and your head shook, despite the growing irritation from your friend on the phone.

Any speak of Cameron Cade with your small group of girlfriends was always a trigger. A trigger you could acknowledge but you never really saw why.

“He can’t help that he’s a tall ass dude.. taller than everybody in the room. He’s just not with the bullshit because again.. Jacy’s parties attract the wrong kinds of niggas”

Mikayla groaned. “But those be the ones I try to court, Danielle”

Before you could retort, the front door of your apartment suddenly rang with the sound of keys jingling in the lock. Your insides began to flutter, you knew what that meant and who that was.

Soon, Cameron Cade was entering your shared apartment. He kicked off his shoes and calmly walked into your bedroom, a soft smile on his lips.

“Speaking of” your smile a bit bashful but beaming, “hi baby”.

Still sitting, you met Cameron halfway as he bent down to meet you. You wrapped your arms around his neck, bringing him into the frame for Mikayla to see.

“Mikayla’s on the phone” you muttered to your boyfriend, who gave Mikayla a simple wave. No words, just a wave.

Mikayla only waved back, no words either.

Cameron Cade really wanted to roll his eyes. Even more, he wanted to hang up the phone entirely.

Cameron Cade didn’t like your friends but Mikayla might be the one he disliked the most.

Now smirking, Cameron turned to face you and pressed his lips to yours fully. Your mouths moved perfectly in sync, enough to put a spell on you.

You pulled back before things could intensify. “How was your day?”

Cameron pressed a kiss to the side of your head. “My day was cool. I’ll tell you later though.. I’ll let you get back to your call”

“Actually, I gotta go anyway, Dani. My apartment is dirty and I’m not sleeping like this so I need to clean. Keep me posted about tomorrow night”

You nodded, “I should be good to go, Kay but I’ll let you know. I’ll talk to you tomorrow”

Mikayla Wallace blew you a kiss and bid you a goodnight before ending the FaceTime call. You stood from your desk, closed your laptop, and met your boyfriend in the living room.

“I’m all yours, my love” you perched yourself on his lap, arm circling his neck and caressing his face. “How was your day? How was coaching?”

Cameron Cade finally felt like he was able to relax. Able to unclench his jaw and drop his shoulders, that’s just what you did to him. You felt the ease finally dawn on him, his arms circling your waist.

“My day was good but it’s always better getting to come home to you”. That earned him a sweet kiss to his neck. “Not to eavesdrop on you and her but what’s happening tomorrow night?”

You ignored the way Cameron emphasized ‘her’. You wished you understood why both parties hated each other so much.

“Jacy Kane is throwing a party and Mikayla invited me”

Cameron eyed you. “And you’re going?”

You nodded, meeting his gaze. “I’ll be able to come home and get ready, I have to be at the office tomorrow”

His hands caressed the skin of your waist just past the waistband of both your sweats and panties. Cameron nodded but you could sense his hesitation.

“Okay.. and she knows protocol, right? She should since she’s always the one bitchin’ and complainin’ about it”

You nodded. “She’s familiar, baby, I promise. She knows everywhere she sees me, you’re not far behind”

That earned you a soft pat to your clothed ass. “Good girl. I know you’re probably tired of me saying it but it’s true. I trust you, I don’t trust these niggas and I don’t trust these hoes. I can never expect for ‘muhfuckas to be on their best behavior if I’m not around. You know that—“

You cupped his face and pecked his lips. “I know, I know, I know. Trust me, I get it. I really wouldn’t want it any other way—“

Cameron Cade gripped your ass tight and met your eyes through your prescription glasses.

“And you’re not having it any other way, y’know that. If I can’t come with, you’re not going, that’s it”

You swallowed but nodded nonetheless. It wasn’t like Cam controlled you, his possessiveness always had him acting larger than you.

He never dictated what you wore, how you styled your hair, if you were to wear makeup on some days. He let you be free.. except when it came to your social life with your friends.

He was fine with your solo dates and if your friends did lowkey things together. He’d just call and text you nonstop despite having your location… and forcing you to put his purchased AirTag in your car..

Your friends weren’t the kind of girls to get you in trouble. All of you had shit to lose and being in those situations wouldn’t end well for the whole group. They were sweet, nice, and the most coolest set of girlfriends you’d ever had.

And yet, Cameron Cade couldn’t bring himself to feel the same way.

.

“Are you sure that you even wanna go out tonight?” Cameron sat on your bed facing you.

You stood completely dressed and ready, now dousing yourself in perfume. Cameron’s favorite— Donna Karen’s Cashmere Mist.

“I can’t convince you with weed, good dick, and whatever food you want on DoorDash?”

You only giggled and approached him, standing in between his legs with your hands on his shoulders. Like magnets, Cameron’s hands found your hips.

“Can you promise me that afterwards?” Finally, your boyfriend cracked just a little smile. You leaned in and softly pecked his lips. “Give me an hour and thirty to get a feel for the party and we can dip out. Can we shake on that?”

You weren’t a party girl at all but you loved a pop out every once in a while. You weren’t even the type to stay until the owners were kicking people out, you always left a party or a club early.

You held out your hand and watched your boyfriend playfully sigh before slipping his huge hand into yours and shaking. He soon gripped your hand and pulled you back into him, his lips now hungry and kissing you breathless.

You pulled back and found Cameron Cade’s ear. “Just give me that time and when we get home, you can have me all over this house.. ‘be real loud just like you like it..”

When Cameron hissed and cautiously smacked your ass, all you could do was grin.

“Yeah let’s go before I take you down and we skip this fuckin’ party”

.

With Cameron’s hand in yours and keeping you close, you approached the jumping house party. People were outside with red solo cups in their hands— some were talking, some were smoking.

You knew you were in the right spot.

Walking in with Cameron trailing behind you, your eyes immediately sought out your friends in the midst of the many bodies. A soft fog filled the space, strobe lights everywhere.

“Oh, they’re right over there! Can you see them, bae?” You asked your boyfriend who towered over everybody damn near.

He bent down in your ear, “I see ‘em, just keep walking and I’ll get you there. Stay close to me, a’ight?”

You nodded and gripped his hand a bit tighter. The more you walked, the more people filtered in and out, Jacy’s house parties were always jumping.

Hip Hop and R&B music flowed from her speakers and throughout the house. You bobbed your head as you walked.

After what felt like hours, you finally found your friends. Mikayla, Jade, Kiara, Denise, and Jackie stood in their own corner. They all smiled and waved when they saw you.

Cameron understood when you dropped his hand to run over to them. He stood at a decent distance and watched. They all hugged you, complimented your outfit and hair.

It was like Cameron wasn’t even there and honestly? The man preferred it that way. Every last one of them knew what it was with him being there, almost all of them weren’t fond of Cameron either so they didn’t speak.

You’d caught the vibe a while ago and just stopped introducing him. They knew him and he knew them, that was all you needed.

“.. okay, sure, let me ask.. baby?” Your voice put Cameron back in reality, his brows raised and awaiting your response. “Do you want anything to eat or drink? Jacy’s got food and shit”

Your boyfriend shook his head, his eyes soft and full of love the more they were set on you. It was everything about you that he couldn’t quit, Cameron Cade was in love. Even in moments like this, you were so sweet.

“Nah, I’m good, bae, thank you though. You gettin’ food?” He asked and when you nodded, he held his hand out. You only smiled and blushed, happily slipping your hand into his.

“I’ll be right back, y’all!” You called out to your friends.

You and Cameron made it to the kitchen— Jacy had pizza and small little snacks on the table. Her counter filled with both alcoholic and nonalcoholic beverages.

“I’m probably not gonna drink tonight, I’m not in the mood. I’ll just cradle some Sprite or Pepsi in my cup” You said out loud, navigating the empty kitchen area.

Cameron Cade only nodded, staying silent. He loved a party as much as the next person but he was fine with leaving that life aside when he found you.

He just wanted you and you only. No party could give him that feeling that you did. But whenever he went nonverbal, you knew he was shutting down.

“You sure you don’t want any food, bae?” You stood in front of your boyfriend with two pizza slices and a red solo cup full of cherry Pepsi. “We can share mine if you want?”

Cameron Cade smiled and shook his head. He leaned down and pressed a kiss to your lips, trying to reassure you that he was okay.

“I promise I’m good. Y’know I’m waiting until we get home to eat on other things..”

You blushed and turned away from him, a smile on your face. “You are disgusting. Come on and let’s have a little fun, yeah? I can tell you’re getting a little uptight. Cmon and dance with me”

.

And dancing you did.

After eating your food, you bounced back from dancing with your friends to dancing with Cameron who stood like your personal security guard.

With your back to his chest, your hands threaded together, you swayed to the beat of ‘I’m Sprung’ by T-Pain.

Despite the feeling of you being so close and watching you have fun, Cameron Cade was growing more annoyed by the second. Annoyed at the fact that more people kept pouring into the house, annoyed that some people could say ‘excuse me’, and more annoyed that you weren’t trying to call it a night yet.

And if he wasn’t irritated before, he was irritated watching you pull from him and mix into the crowd. It seemed like he looked away for a second and you were gone.

You didn’t say what you were going to the kitchen for more food but simply untangled yourself from him and left.

And in replace of you was Mikayla Wallace. She looked at him and he fought the urge to roll his eyes. He smacked his lips, eyes still looking over the sea of people to find you.

“When are you ever gonna lighten up, nigga? You know Dani is good with us when she wants to go out, you don’t have to come with her every time”

Cameron huffed. “I’on trust y’all, simple”

Mikayla blanched, “And I don’t trust you. Her social life isn’t healthy because of you. Danielle is grown and already has a Dad. All I’m asking is for you to let her breathe because clearly you need to do that for her”

Cameron shrugged, “I’ll breathe when she drops y’all. That’s all I gotta say”

“Boy, fuck you” Mikayla said and turned on her heels, walking away. If that didn’t irritate Cameron Cade, it was the fact that you still hadn’t returned.

He already didn’t want to be here and here you were bullshitting. Moving through the crowd, Cameron made a beeline for the kitchen and the sight had his heart dropping.

You stood against the counter with another pizza in your hand and talking to someone he didn’t recognize. Not even a stranger but another guy.

You were smiling and laughing.. and so was the dude. When your eyes met, you lit up. “And speaking of him, there he is!”

You slithered over to his side and tried to hug him but Cameron shook his head, stepping back from you.

“Nah, yo, what’re you doing?” Cameron scolded, “why’d you just dip on me like that without telling me where you were goin’?”

You looked taken aback, a soft frown in your eyebrows. “Cameron, what—“

“You know better, Danielle. I’on know these people in here and it’s too many of them to keep up. At least let me know what you’re tryna do, girl”

You felt a bud of guilty creep in your chest and immediately, you tried to make it right. Putting your food down, you tried to take your boyfriend’s hand. But he wasn’t having it.

“Baby, don’t be like that, please. I’m sorry—“

“Y’know I didn’t even wanna come here— you know I didn’t even want you here. All I ask is for you let me know what you’re tryna do, I could’ve lost you!”

And again, if Cameron wasn’t pissed off initially, it could’ve been the sound of the guy still standing there that had the nerve to interject himself in the conversation.

“C’mon bruh, she already apologized”

Cameron Cade blanched, looking at the dude who stood about 5 inches from him. “And who the fuck are you? This is between me and my lady. You should’ve walked away as soon as I walked in”

The dude turned square to your boyfriend. “But you’re talking to her crazy and that’s not even necessary, I can’t just stand here and listen to that, especially because it’s not a big deal”

You again reached for Cameron’s hand. “Yeah, bae, he’s just a former classmate from college, that’s it. We were just chopping it up, I was about to come back, I just wanted more food, that’s it”

Cameron Cade looked at you. Sincerity danced in your eyes and he almost crumbled. But he was still to angry.

“Yeah bruh, that’s all it was. You ain’t have to come pressin’ her like that—“

Cameron huffed out a sarcastic laugh and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I can do whatever the fuck I want with my woman because she’s mine. Real shit, I don’t give a fuck where you know her from, don’t come tryna give me advice about what we do. Just shut the fuck up, that’s what you can do”

When the guy took a step towards Cameron threateningly, you immediately slid in between the two with your arms out.

“Stop, we’re not doing that, not at this house” you turned towards Cameron, “what is wrong with you? Why are you acting like this? Are you ready to go home now like you been wanting? Because I am, you’re pissing me off”

You forcefully took Cameron’s hand and began walking, pulling him to walk with you.

“Yeah, Danielle, gon’ ahead and get him outta here—“

Before you could react, Cameron Cade was fast. His fist was faster. It was swift with the way it collided across the guy’s face, sitting him right on his ass.

“Ay, I told you to shut the fuck up, didn’t I?!” Cameron yelled. It suddenly got the attention of surrounding people at the party, including your friends. “Didn’t I? And look what happened. Pick ‘yo ass up—“

“Cameron, let’s go! Now!” You yelled, tugging on his arm. Finally, your boyfriend relented and followed you out.

Once outside, you walked to the car. “Are you fucking serious, Cameron? What is wrong with you?!”

“What’s wrong with me? Me?! I’m in that fuckin’ house worried about you and I find you talkin’ to another nigga? And you’re defending that nigga?!”

You had enough but there was a time and a place for everything. “Give me the fucking keys so we can go home, since you wanted that so badly. I can’t even have fun without you causing some bullshit”

Cameron clenched his jaw, anger still steaming off of him. He simply tossed you the keys like you asked.

The drive back home was quiet and charged. You tried to calm yourself down but the more you thought about the situation, the more it pissed you off.

.

You stormed into your apartment and already began taking off your shoes. Cameron right behind you.

“You don’t get to have an attitude with me, Danielle” Cameron began, “you left me without saying shit and got the nerve to be stickin’ up for some nigga i’on even know”

Cameron followed you to your bedroom as you began stripping out of your outfit and into something more comfortable.

“That’s not even the point. I can admit I was wrong for just leaving you like that and I apologized to you but it’s the way you acted then and even before this”

“And what is that supposed to mean?”

Finally dressed, you stood before your boyfriend looking at him like he grew three heads. “Why is it always an issue with you when I want to have fun with my friends? You can never chill out or have fun with us—“

“Because I don’t like them!” Cameron’s voice raised, “I don’t like them, I don’t trust them, and I don’t trust them around you!”

“How come?! They don’t do anything to you or to me! Have you forgotten that I’ve known almost all of them since my first year of college? Kayla since high school? I can determine if they’re good fits for me, Cameron, not you”

You pushed past him and into the kitchen, Cameron following.

“Still though. I feel like they always got something to say about our relationship and giving their two cents when it’s not fucking needed. Especially Mikayla. Always got her nose turned up whenever I’m around and I don’t like that shit. I feel like she’s actively trying to turn you against me and tryna find a reason to break us up”

You gave Cameron that same look from earlier. “Cameron, are you serious?”

“Dead fucking serious”

You pressed your fingers to your temple, briefly closing your eyes. This couldn’t be a real conversation you were having.

“And you think I’d let her do that? Come between you and me? Like I’m letting her guide my life?”

Cameron shrugged. “She’s still your friend so—“

“Cameron Cade, don’t play with me. Now you’re just saying shit because you’re mad. You got some weed or do you need me to order some? You hungry? I’ll cook right now. Because you need to chill out”

Cameron Cade only stood and watched you stare at him, awaiting his decision.

He wasn’t making any sense. This weird paranoia he had was becoming too much, he clearly wasn’t thinking straight.

“Nah.. because now I feel like you’re not even trying to understand or hear me. Clearly your friends mean more to you than your boyfriend”

You only rolled your eyes.

“I’ll leave” he shrugged. “I’ll leave, we can break up, and I’ll give you the space Mikayla wants you to have so bad”

You crossed your arms and watched the tall man shrug again, his hands in his pockets. He clearly wanted you to beg.. and you weren’t that kind of woman.

“Okay” you simply said. “You know that’s not true and that’s not what I want but if you believe that, okay”

Cameron looked slightly taken aback. “That’s all you gotta say?”

You nodded and turned towards the fridge, you reached in and grabbed a water bottle. “I’m not playing with you. You’re still angry and being irrational and I’m not dealing with that. Be mad by yourself, you know how to make it back here”

You tried to walk past him to go back to your bedroom but Cameron Cade was faster.

Snatching the water bottle out of your hands and throwing it, he scooped you up and planted you on the kitchen island.

His lips were on yours heatedly, his hands everywhere on your body. Of course you melted, of course you didn’t fight him.

Your legs locked around his waist, arms around his neck, and your kisses matching his energy. His tongue swiped at your bottom lip, you happily welcomed his tongue.

You moaned as Cameron pulled back, his lips now finding your neck. You moaned again, manicured hands caressing the back of his buzzed head.

“Mhm, you ‘gon make it up to me?” You smiled, biting your lip. Your back arched when he found your spot, your body buzzing in pure pleasure.

Before you knew it, Cameron was pulling away, his hand replacing his lips and gripping your neck. He stared down at you, watching your smile only grow wider.

“You better shut that smart ass mouth up ‘fore I do somethin’ crazy”

One of your hands closed over his hand on your throat. You had that look in your eye that made his pants tight.

“Do it.. I might just like it..”

He stared some more at you before breaking out into a smile just as sinister as yours. Pulling you by the throat, his lips found yours again.

.

It must’ve been the anger from both of you that had time compressing into nothing. From kissing in the kitchen to aggressively stripping yourselves naked.

From stripping yourselves naked to kissing some more to Cameron watching you drop to your knees and begin blowing him. Your mouth was full, hands working his base what you couldn’t fit in your mouth.

His hand on the back of your head keeping you steady on his cock. Up and down, up and down. Your boyfriend grunted and groaned, still shit talking.

“You hear that? That silence? I love that shit. I’on gotta hear that smart ass mouth because I got my dick full of it”

Soon after you were splayed on your back, legs dangling off of Cameron’s shoulders as he buried his face in your pussy.

His skilled mouth and fingers successfully pulled an orgasm from you. Maybe you were so pissed off and worked up, the heated energy sending you deep into that abyss.

When Cameron emerged and hovered over you, you reached out and wiped at his bottom lip.

“Your mouth is good for something when you’re not bitching at me”

Cameron Cade growled out a laugh and handled your body onto your stomach, he slapped your ass hard, watching the recoil.

With one hand on your head and keeping the side of your face in the bed, he spread your legs open and shoved himself deep within you.

His pace wasn’t nice either. It was hard and rough, so much that your bed began moving. Your headboard smacking consistently against the wall.

“You ‘gon stop talkin’ to me like you lost your goddamn mind. Fuck got into you, huh?” Cameron growled. His thrusts were unforgiving and you were sickly enjoying it.

Cameron made out a giggle in the midst of your loud moans. He slapped your ass again.

“Mhm.. you want me to apologize, daddy? Want me to say sorry cause I hurt your feelings?”

That earned you another slap to your ass, harder this time. You know it would leave a mark.

Cameron Cade fucked you harder and deeper, so much that your brain felt like it was turning into mush. There weren’t a lot of moments where you two were going at it like this, typically Cameron Cade liked making love to you.

“Y’know what? I think I do. ‘Getcho ass up”

Cameron took you up by your hair and hauled you both to the attached bathroom. Cameron kicked your legs open and pushed himself back inside of you, your hands grabbed at the granite counter.

“I wanna hear you say you’re sorry” Cameron rasped in your ear as he began pumping, this time his thrusts were agonizingly slow.

You hated how pathetic your whine was. “In my eyes, seein’ you with that other nigga felt like you were cheating on me. This my pussy, right?”

Cameron had you bent over, your elbows supporting your body on the granite. He mounted over you and grabbed your jaw harshly.

“You better listen to me or guess what? You’re not cumming at all tonight. You better answer me, girl” he slapped your ass again, “look at me, is this my pussy?”

You nodded, eyes meeting your boyfriend’s in the mirror. “Yes, baby”

“I can do whatever I want with you and to you because this pussy is mine?”

Your eyes squeezed shut at the feeling of Cameron finally speeding up. Your body jolted in his hold.

“Yes, Cam!”

You watched your boyfriend smirk. “Yeah? You’re sorry for disrespecting me tonight? For getting me out of character like that?”

You nodded. “I’m s-sorry, baby” you said pathetically, eyes blown in lust and staring at your boyfriend who you stupidly loved so much.

“Mhm, so fuckin’ pretty, baby.. you love me?”

“Yes!”

Cameron eyed you, you could see the wheels turning in his head and before you could think, he was hauling you back up and back into your bed.

“I’m all you need?”

“Yes, Cameron”

Legs over his shoulders, body hovering over you. Cameron grabbed your phone.

“Yeah? I’on think I believe you but it’s okay, imma make an example outta you”

You watched Cameron unlock your phone and within seconds, you were hearing the call ring loudly. Your eyes went wide once Cameron turned the phone to you.

It was Mikayla’s contact screen being called.

You tried to reach up and grab the device but Cameron stopped you with a hand to your throat, keeping you pinned on the bed. To your horror, Mikayla actually answered.

“Dani?” She called out. Cameron chuckled. “You there, babe?”

“Oh she’s here.. talk to her, baby”

In that same moment, Cameron pushed back inside of you, snatching a deep moan from you against your will. He began fucking you.

“She’s here, Kayla, don’t worry” Cameron grunted, his hips snapping to touch every crevice inside of you. “She a lil busy right now though”

And despite the growing embarrassment, you couldn’t bring yourself to shut up. You were so loud just how Cameron loved it.

“‘mma let you know, Kayla” Cameron huffed out a groan, his brows creasing in pleasure. Your soaking.. tight walls were clamping around him something serious. “Danielle is good, good here with me, okay? I’m all she needs and I take real good care of her. Don’t I, baby?”

All you could do was cry out, his hand on your throat squeezed harder. You nodded for him.

“That’s a good girl..” he leaned down and quickly kissed you. “You hear me, Kayla? You hear her? She won’t be coming like that no more”

Cameron hung up and tossed your phone to the other side of your king sized bed, fully giving you his attention.

You felt him close in on you, his chest to your chest, lips brushing against yours. His lower half still powering and pushing you closer and closer to your release.

“I meant that..” he kissed your lips, “I just want you all to myself, baby. Nobody else, nothing else..”

Your legs tightened around his waist out of instinct, you were so close. Cameron could tell. He felt your orgasm was deserved.

“I love you, Danielle”

“I love you too, Cam” you replied back almost immediately.

Your orgasm was mind blowing and enough to make you see stars. You clung to Cameron desperately and tightly, your throat dry from your cries.

Cameron was right behind you. “Fuck, I’m cumming, baby”

He pushed himself even deeper before howling out. His thrusts stuttered and slowed, his stream coming out in constant spurts before becoming sporadic.

You were so out of it, you were on the brink of falling into a deep sleep. You felt Cameron peck your lips affectionately, words on his lips.

“Swear one of these days, ‘m gonna knock you up..”

You made out a laugh at the end of that statement but you couldn’t focus on anything else.

Sleep found you with ease.

.

.

.

.

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