Later, in the safe room, adrenaline still loud in our veins, Dominic and I fell into the only language that had been true between us for months: heat.
He wanted to mark the night, to make the triumph feel as flesh. I wanted to be claimed, to be told with breath and touch that when the world tried to burn us, we would make a hearth. We moved like people who had leaned on danger so long it had become a ritual.
He laid me across the low couch; the light was spare, the world outside a rumor. Our clothes came off in a flurry of impatient hands; it was not a tender lesson but it was a reclaiming. Fingers traced bruises and scars like cartography. His mouth learned the curve behind my ear the way a sailor learns a coastline — careful, hungry, reverent.
The s*x was loud in the soft way; not gra
