Page 22 of Brash for It (Hellions Ride On #11)

He thinks for a long beat. “I don’t say anything I don’t mean.

I can promise exactly one thing,” he answers at last. “I won’t take from you what I can’t keep.

And I won’t keep you locked down. If all I’ve got is a shoebox of space for you, I’ll say so.

You’ll decide if you want to stand beside me there awhile to see if space comes or goes or not.

But you’ll always have a way out and you’ll know what you got standing in front of you. I don’t play games ever.”

It’s not a fairytale. It’s not a ring. It’s not even a label. But it is something. Dark, honest, and somehow what I needed to hear.

I breathe. It shakes on the way out. “Okay.”

“Okay,” he echoes, and something unclenches in his jaw. “Now, do me a favor and stop letting other people’s stories about me pick fights in your head. You want to know something, you ask me. Not Lana. Not a rumor. Me.”

I nod, a little dizzy with relief, a little embarrassed at my own spiral. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry.” He squeezes my shoulder, then releases. “Be clear. All I ever ask.”

The room exhales with us. The fridge hum clicks into a new cycle like it was waiting to see where we’d land. Outside, a car door slams somewhere, the echo a punctuation mark.

“You hungry?” he asks, like we just tightened bolts on something and now it’s time to put the tools away.

I laugh, still pushing back my tears. “We just had that conversation and you ask if I’m hungry?”

“Emotions burn calories,” he states with infuriating logic. “I’m putting burgers in a pan. You want a fried cheese skirt or are you still pretending that’s not the best part?”

“Cheese,” I reply, and wipe my face on the hem of my sleeve. “Please.”

He moves to the stove and the whole universe shifts a half-inch back into place. I set out plates and slice tomatoes like a person who has things to do. It feels good. It feels like proof.

When he slides a plate in front of me, he pauses, thumb brushing my wrist. “And Kristen?”

“Yeah?”

“You’re wanted.” He states it simple, like he’s telling me the weather.

“By me. Don’t get it twisted because someone else wanted a version of you that was easier to carry.

I want all of you. I want to taste your good days and swallow out your bad as I kiss you until all you can think of is my name on your lips. ”

The words land and sink, heavy and warm. I hold his eyes until I know I’ll remember it tomorrow. “Okay,” I whisper unable to come up with a remark.

We eat. The world doesn’t end. The moths keep up their bad habits banging into the light. The map on the wall keeps being a directional paper with a future awaiting another plan. And inside me, something fragile sets back in place like pieces coming back together.

The night settles into a softer quiet after dinner.

Dishes clack and steam, then stack in a rack like soldiers at ease.

He wipes the counter the way he always does—efficient, thorough, like mess can’t outrun him if he sees it.

I dry and hang the towel and turn to find him watching me, not with heat, not with the kind of pressure that used to live in rooms with men who wanted the night to go a certain way.

Just watching. Like he’s memorizing a picture he doesn’t want to forget later.

“What,” I ask, self-conscious and yet, warmed by it.

“Nothing.” He shrugs, a small tilt of his shoulders. “You look like you live here.”

“I guess I do.”

He nods, accepting this as a fact we don’t need to wrap in ceremony. “Walk?”

It’s cooler now. The day let go, finally. We cut down the block, past porches where people lean back in plastic chairs and let screens do their talking for them. Fireflies stitch green commas over the ditch water. Somewhere, a grill pops and hisses. The night smells like cut grass and memory.

I slide my hand into his and he doesn’t flinch like some men do at public touch. He squeezes once, matter-of-fact, as if to say this is how it should be. We walk in a rhythm that our bodies learned in the last month without asking for permission.

“Tell me something true,” I request, because I want to know more.

He thinks. “When I was fifteen,” he shares after a beat, “I rebuilt an engine for a 1970 Chevelle with my dad in our driveway and thought I’d invented calm.

I didn’t. But it felt like it because every project he did with any of my brothers resulted in lots of yelling and cussing.

When it was my turn, I was determined to stay calm.

We did it and fuck, it was fun. I’ve been chasing that version of quiet since. ”

“I like that.” I kick a rock; it skitters, sparks briefly against asphalt. “My mom used to read to me out loud even when I was too old for it. Thick books. She’d give everyone different voices, even the boring rich men who only talked about property law. That was my calm.”

“You got her voice in your head still?”

“When I need it.” I smile into the dark. “Sometimes it sounds like Trina now when she tells me to breathe. Which would make my mom laugh.”

We loop the block and head back. The house looks like itself—plain, square, exactly the size of the life we’re making, concise. Inside, he kicks off his boots and I do the same. He clicks off the porch light so the moths can regroup and make worse decisions somewhere else.

In the bedroom, I sit on the edge of the bed while he brushes his teeth. I stare at the notebook on the nightstand. A LIFE THAT CAN’T GET TOWED stares back in my own handwriting, and I am both the girl who wrote it and the woman who is going to live it.

He comes out, shirt off, jaw clean, eyes tired in a way that doesn’t scare me.

I stand, intercept him, and press a kiss to his chest, right over the place that keeps me steady at night.

He lays his palm between my shoulder blades for a second, there and gone, and something like gratitude arcs between us without needing a name.

We trade places and I scrub mint into my mouth and spit it out and think about all the words I wanted to say today and didn’t, all the words I said and wish I’d said better.

When I come back he’s turned the bed down and left the lamp low.

The room is easy the way it only gets when a day was hard and you didn’t lose it.

We slide in. He doesn’t reach for me, and I love him for it. I don’t make him wait long, though. I turn, tuck my face into the curve where his shoulder meets his chest, and let his arm come around me like it’s been doing since the first night.

“Thank you,” I say into his skin.

“For what.”

“For not making me smaller so I’d fit. For not wanting me to be a puppet. For helping me figure out the next thing and encouraging me to keep going.”

“Wouldn’t know how to make you anything but you,” he remarks. “Wouldn’t want to.”

He clicks the lamp off settling back into place.

The room breathes dark. His hand finds my hair and starts that slow, absent rhythm my nervous system recognizes now.

The restless part of him that rolled in the door tonight is quiet.

The frantic part of me that thought I was unlovable is, for this minute, convinced otherwise.

“You’re wanted,” he whispers. “By me. Don’t forget that, Kristen.”

I hold it like a warm coin in a cold palm. It buys me sleep.

I don’t dream of Brian. I don’t dream of doors that won’t open or codes that change. I dream of a road that runs along water and the feeling of my body leaning into a curve with a partner who guides me but doesn’t demand from me.

Morning edges in the blinds at some point.

The AC sighs. A bird tries a song and gives up.

I wake before Kellum which is unusual and stay still because it feels like stealing something good to be awake and quiet while he sleeps.

He looks different when he’s not holding the world up with his shoulders.

Younger and older at once. Softer without being soft.

He cracks an eye and catches me staring. “What,” he rasps.

“Nothing,” I whisper, and decide on being up front. “Something true.”

He grunts a laugh. “Go.”

“I’m still jealous,” I admit, embarrassed and brave at once. “I don’t want to be. I don’t want to make you carry that. But I am. I’m working on it.”

He considers. “I can take it,” he states. “Just don’t feed it other people’s stories. I’ll always give you the truth even when it’s hard.”

I nod against him. “Okay.”

He tightens his arm and the day begins the way it ought to: with honesty and coffee and a plan, not certainty.

We don’t have certainty. We have the next thing.

The list says DMV in ugly letters because I’m still putting it off.

The lines are simply out of control and I hate waiting when I could be working or spending time with Kellum.

At the shop door, he kisses my forehead and then my mouth, quick, and it still turns the whole day three shades brighter because I was not expecting that at all. “You’re wanted,” he reminds me on a whisper, “By me.” Then he leaves me to work.

At the spa, Trina raises an eyebrow. I mouth later and she nods, because women in rooms like this understand that later sometimes arrives exactly when it’s supposed to.

Lana doesn’t come in today. If she does next week, I’ll look her in the eye and do my job.

Her story with Kellum is hers and mine is something altogether my own.

The phone rings. “Good morning,” I say into the receiver, voice steady. “Ocean Blue Spa. This is Kristen. How can I help you today?”

A woman asks for a facial. I schedule it. The AC cuts on. The day unfolds, a series of small tasks that add up to a life, and when it’s time, the low hum of a motorcycle threads the spa music and my bones know it. I am learning to lean into everything life gives me.

Most especially the ride.