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“Please,” the girl who looks so much like her, yet nothing like her at all, begs. “Please don’t give up on her.”

He’s caught between heartbreak and rage that she thinks he would do that.

He’s caught between heartbreak and rage that he wouldn’t be the first.

There wasn’t a man in my bed when I fell asleep, but there is when I wake up.

“Sorry,” a sleepy voice murmurs, the husky vibrations tickling the sensitive skin of my neck. A hand smoothes along the outside of my thigh—the same thigh, I realize slowly, that’s hooked over a torso. The same torso that twitches beneath my fingertips. “Couldn’t sleep.”

Finn , I groggily recognize. Finn in my bed. Finn holding me in my bed.

“Five more minutes,” he promises as if I’m putting up any kind of a fight. As if I’m not slumped half on top of him like dead, boneless weight. Like I don’t have one hand pressed flat over his thumping heart, the other fisting the waistband of his sweats like I’m afraid he might roll away.

He apologizes again, and this time, I get why. He thinks I’m stiff in his arms because I’m uncomfortable. That I woke up and went rigid because, by my own admission, I don’t like being touched.

Not because I’m so completely confused by his presence.

Even though he already told me, I ask, “What’re you doing here?”

“Worried,” comes out as a drowsy sigh. The bicep beneath my cheek tenses as the fingers curled around my hip coast upwards to tangle in my hair. “Wanted to make sure you’re okay.”

I stiffen even more. “I’m not hungover, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Finn sighs again—tired in a different sense of the word. “It’s not.”

“I wasn’t out drinking all day yesterday.”

“I know that.”

I roll out of his arms. Sit up. Shiver again as I throw off the duvet and cold morning air replaces a much warmer embrace. “You don’t have to babysit me or whatever this is.”

A sleepy frown creasing his forehead, Finn watches me scuttle to the other side of the room through squinted eyes. Covering a yawn with the back of one hand, he props himself up on the other. “What?”

My back against the window, I cross my arms over my chest, palming the ball of discomfort hovering over my thumping heart. “I told you. I knew you would regret it, I knew I’d disappoint you, but you wouldn’t listen, and now I’m the one—”

A goddamn scoff cuts me off. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“I’m fine. I don’t need your pity or whatever this is. You changed your mind and that’s—”

Again, he doesn’t let me finish. It’s the soft snap of fabric being flung through the air that cuts me off this time. Hurried, determined footsteps. Hands on my cheeks—lips close behind.

They touch my forehead.

The furrow between my brows.

The freckled slope of my nose.

And I just stand there. Unmoving. Silent. Stunned. Stomach hurting at the butter-soft, crumpled expression an inch from my face.

Two calloused thumbs stroke my cheekbones. “Oh, honey.”

Oh, honey, he says.

Oh, your poor, pathetic thing , I hear. “Stop looking at me like that.”

He doesn’t stop—if anything, it gets worse. More intense. Dizzying. “Like what?”

“Like you feel bad for me.”

“I feel a lot of things for you, Lottie. None of them are bad .”

That can’t be true. He… “I’m really confused.”

“Why, baby?”

Baby . My eyes close. Itch. Ache like my chest does. “You kicked me out. You weren’t there when I woke up. You… You said I was cruel.”

“I was upset.” The freckles on my jawline earn his attention. “A little mad.” His lips find the corner of my mouth. “ Jealous .”

I suck in a breath, and it tastes like him. “Oh.”

Lips touch my scrunched eyelids, featherlight. “You’re not cruel, baby. I’m sorry I said that.”

I shake my head because he has nothing to apologize for, he didn’t do anything, it was all me yet he insists, “I’m sorry. I should’ve talked to you, but I didn’t want to say something I didn’t mean. I didn’t want you to say something you didn’t mean.”

“Oh,” I repeat because I don’t know what else to say. I don't know what to do, and I don’t suddenly figure it out when the hands on my cheeks drop to my hips and peel me away from the window, dragging my lower body flush against Finn.

“I did not,” he starts, and I can’t see him, but I see him, I perfectly picture the honest, open look on his face, hear it on his tongue, “for a single second, change my mind .”

So pathetically, I whisper, “You still like me?

He kisses my cheek again, so tender and gentle. “That’s one word for it.”

Relief—that’s one word for what floods me.

And when I reopen my eyes, he’s looking at me like that again. The way I feared only moments ago. The way I clearly misconstrued because he says, he teases , “This is how I look at someone I like, princess.”

I squint at the little smirk curling his mouth, grumbling, “How would I know that?”

“‘Cause it’s how I always look at you.”

“Oh,” is once again all I can muster.

“I should’ve been here when you got back last night.” Long fingers smooth my hair away from my face. “I thought you might’ve wanted some space.”

I did.

I didn’t.

I have no idea what I want anymore.

“I left you something.”

I think of the wooden horse stashed beneath my pillow. A handmade sobriety chip. “Are you mad?” I ask quietly, gaze fixed on the patch of chest exposed by the gaping neckline of a loose, rumpled pajama shirt, too chicken-shit to look him in the eyes. “That I didn’t tell you?”

“No,” Finn grants me relief with a single syllable. “I wish you would’ve. Wish you felt like you could’ve. But I’m not mad.”

“And it…” Wetting my lips, I chew the bottom one. “It doesn’t change anything?”

Two fingers crook beneath my chin, lifting my gaze upwards. “What kind of asshole do you think I am, baby?”

“A smart one. With good instincts.”

“Oh, I’ve got great instincts. Wanna know what they’re telling me to do?”

“Is it dirty?”

His mouth quirks—an entirely misleading gesture because there’s nothing dirty about the way he slips his arms around my waist and pulls me into a hug. “Five seconds,” he repeats his earlier promise, and again, I don’t know why when I’m sinking into his embrace like it’s the single place I belong.

Five seconds pass and I don’t move away. I only shift to prop my chin on his chest, forcing myself to look him in the eyes.

“I’m sorry.” Have I even said that to him yet? Apologized? I can’t remember. I don’t know. I do know that I’ve never meant the words as much as I do now. “Ricky—”

He does not want to talk about Ricky.

He makes that abundantly clear with a sharp grunt and an even sharper kiss.

I don’t put up a fight. I don’t even consider it. I just tighten my grip and yank him as close as I can get him. He kisses and licks and bites, and then he changes his mind and pulls away with a certifiable growl, pressing his forehead hard against mine. “You didn’t kiss him back?”

I’d be offended he needs the clarification if it weren’t demanded in such a desperate pant. Palming either side of his neck, I lean into him even more. “I told him if he touched me again, my pussy-ass cowboy would put him in the ground.”

Finn laughs. Groans. Kisses me again. “Pussy-ass cowboy?”

“His words, not mine.”

“You don’t wanna put him in the ground yourself?”

I grin. God, he really does know me.

Got someone else fighting your battles for you now, Lottie? Ricky had snarked, and I’d snapped my fingers before flashing the middle one and correcting. Touch me again and my pussy-ass cowboy will keep watch while I put you in the ground.

“Jesus.” Finn groans again when I relay the encounter. “Fuck, baby. How could I ever change my mind about you? In what fucking universe would I not like you ?”

I decide not to answer that.

Finn doesn’t tell me we’re not going to work so much as he just doesn’t let me. I try, and he just drags me back to bed, keeps me there with kisses and sweet murmurs and wandering hands that never wander as far as I want them too.

More than once, I wonder if it’s a manipulation tactic. If being needy makes me mouthy in more ways than one—if that’s what makes me spill my guts without so much as a nudge.

Because spill, I do. I tell him everything.

Every last dirty detail. How I grew up and how I ended up in Serenity and why I left, things I think he might already know, but he lets me rehash it all anyway.

I tell him things he definitely doesn’t know, the thing that only one other person knows, and as my eyes water, he holds me close until that last, secret memory of my mom doesn’t hurt quite so acutely.

I roll onto my stomach when I tell him about Ricky, not quite able to meet his eyes as I regale how we met in rehab, how we relapsed together, how I thought that he was the kind of guy I deserved.

That that life we had, that listless, nothing life, was what I deserved too.

And while I manifest the mattress swallowing me whole, he connects the freckles on my upper back with his mouth, waiting until I’m done before murmuring that he’s really, really going to enjoy teaching me exactly what I do deserve.

It’s why I’m back that I struggle to articulate the most. Not because of the accident or the unexpected reunion, but the deal I struck. Not the shallow, monetary part of it all, but the time limit that I half-forgot about until I bring it up—the six months that I’m halfway through now.

The fingers lazily tracing the tattoo on my lower back stutter, but Finn doesn’t comment on the revelation. If he has any kind of thoughts about it, he doesn’t share them. If he has a question, he doesn’t ask.

I have questions. I have desperation. I am downright feral to know how he feels about the prospect of me leaving in a matter of months, but I keep quiet too. I stew in my curiosity—I still stew in it now, hours later, as I sit on the kitchen counter and watch Finn cook.

“Open.”