We made it to the truck like a dream stitched at the edges. The compound lit behind us with spotlights and men who hated being outplayed. We drove like the devil was after us, tires eating gravel, nerves taut as piano wire.
At the safehouse I’d found for him — a small, merciful place that smelled like pine cleaner and the promise of secrecy — we closed the door and collapsed into each other like two people who had been starved for oxygen. The room was small; the bed was soft in a way that felt sacrilegious after concrete and gravel.
He kissed me again and this time it was different. It wasn’t the grab of a man who’d been denied; it was the slow, worshipful thing of someone who had spent his time thinking of nothing but how to get back into the right room of someone else’s heart.
“I thou
