Tonight, though. Tonight she's on my mind.
I pour myself two fingers of bourbon and sit in the living room without turning on the lamp. The darkness feels appropriate. A place to think without being seen.
Sarah would have known what to do with Gemma. She had a way of drawing people out, of making them feel safe enough to tell her their secrets. I watched her do it a hundred times at the Forge, with submissives who came to us broken and left a little more whole. She'd just sit with them, patient and present, and eventually they'd start talking.
Gemma knew Sarah. Not well—she was barely twenty-five at the funeral, still trying to figure out her own life—but she'd seen us together. At Brotherhood cookouts. Club events. The occasional holiday dinner when Cole brought her around. She'dwatched Sarah and me from the outside, seen whatever version of us we showed the world.
I wonder what she thought of us back then. Whether she saw the reality or just the surface.
I drain the bourbon and set the glass aside.
This is dangerous territory. Gemma is Cole's sister. She's damaged in ways I'm only beginning to understand. She's not ready for anything, and I'm not the man who should be waiting when she is.
But I can still feel her eyes on me, still hear her voice sayingI see what you're doing. The way you don't push.
I'm not pushing. I'm barely breathing around her. But I'm in trouble anyway, and I know it, and knowing doesn't change a thing.
Sleep doesn't come easy. I lie in the dark and stare at the ceiling and think about Sarah's lights and Gemma's smile and how a man can want something he knows he shouldn't.
Somewhere around three in the morning, I give up and go stand on the back porch. The rain has softened to mist, and the air smells like wet pine and the ocean.
Gemma is Cole's sister. She's broken in ways I recognize. She needs protection, not whatever this is.
I know all of that. I know it the way I know my own name.
Knowing doesn't seem to matter anymore. Hasn't mattered since she walked through that door three weeks ago and looked at me like I was something she'd forgotten could exist.
I stay on the porch until the sky starts to lighten, watching the mist drift through the trees.
I don't figure out what to do about Gemma. But somewhere between midnight and dawn, I stop pretending I don't need to.
4
GEMMA
He didn't touch me. That's what I can't stop thinking about. He was close enough to feel my breath, and he kept his hands at his sides and asked permission before he even stepped closer.
I've been replaying it all morning. The stockroom. The panic clawing up my throat. Will's voice cutting through the static in my head, low and steady, giving me something to hold onto when everything else was spinning out of control.
Five things you can see. Four things you can hear. Three things you can feel.
He knew exactly what to do. He didn't panic, didn't crowd me, didn't try to fix it with platitudes or tell me to calm down. He just sat there, three feet away, and talked me back into my own body.
Craig would have handled it differently.
The thought arrives uninvited, and I let myself follow it for once instead of shoving it away.
Craig would have told me I was being dramatic. He would have sighed that particular sigh, the one that meant I was exhausting him with my emotions. Then later, when I was wrung out and vulnerable, he would have used it. Would have pushedme somewhere I didn't want to go, told me it would help me relax, told me I needed to get out of my head and let him take over.
And I would have let him. Because that's what I did. That's who I was with him.
I set down my coffee cup harder than I mean to, and the sound echoes through Cole's empty kitchen. He left for the shop an hour ago, and I've been sitting here ever since, staring at the same spot on the wall and running the same mental loops.
Will is not Craig. I've known Will half my life, watched him with Cole, with the Brotherhood, with Sarah. He's never been anything but steady. The kind of man who takes charge without weaponizing that power against people who can't push back.
But I've been wrong before. I looked at Craig and saw safety and was catastrophically, devastatingly wrong.
I'm not doing this again. I can't.
