CHAPTER 22 – ALMOST
1172 Words
LAYLA'S POV
Three weeks ago, I would have flinched. I would have backed up and apologised for existing in a space someone else decided I didn't belong in.
One thing they forget is that three weeks ago was a different woman.
The member – low-ranking, emboldened by Megan's protection and by the version of me that arrived here crying in a parking lot – corners me in the lot after dinner. He's been watching me all week with the specific hostility of someone who's been told I'm a problem and has decided to be the solution.
"You don't belong here." He steps closer. "Go back to your husband."
I don't flinch. I don't back up. I look at him with the flat patience I've been developing for weeks – the patience that comes from sitting across a dinner table from a man who poisoned your coffee and smiling at him while your tongue tastes like copper.
He doesn't like that.
He shoves my shoulder. Not hard enough to knock me down, but hard enough to slam me into the side of a truck. My lip splits against my teeth – barely bleeding, but the metallic taste this time isn't the lie-sensing. It's actual blood.
I'm still processing the impact when the temperature in the parking lot drops.
Rafe is between us before I finish blinking.
He doesn't touch the member. He doesn't need to. He stands there – six foot three of absolute stillness – and looks at the man with those grey eyes, and whatever that member sees in Rafe's face makes him take three steps backward without being told.
"Walk away," Rafe says with the kind of calm that is one decision away from devastation.
The member walks away. Fast.
Rafe turns to me. His eyes find the blood on my lip and his face goes very still.
He reaches out and wipes the blood off my lower lip with his thumb.
The touch is so gentle it makes my chest ache. These are the same hands that put Garrett on a driveway. The same hands that pinned my wrists above my head while he told me to look at him. The same hands that grip a coffee mug every morning with a marked wrist he thinks I can't see.
And right now, they're wiping blood off my mouth like I'm made of something he's afraid to break.
His other hand comes up and cups my jaw. His thumb stays on my lip – not wiping anymore, just resting there, his skin against mine, and I can feel the roughness of his calluses and the warmth of his palm and every single nerve in my body is focused on the two inches of space between his mouth and mine.
He's looking at my lips. I'm looking at his.
The world narrows to this – the parking lot, the truck behind me, the blood on his thumb, the way his grey eyes have gone dark in a way I've only seen once before, in a room with the door locked and his body above mine.
I can feel the heat of him. The leather. The warmth underneath. The buried crush isn't screaming anymore – it's quieter now, more specific, something that has my name on it and his and a future I can almost see if I close my eyes.
His thumb traces my lower lip. Slowly. From one corner to the other. And the sound that almost comes out of me is not appropriate for a parking lot.
"Rafe." My voice is barely a whisper.
His eyes come up to mine. Dark. Open. His hand is still on my jaw and his thumb is still on my mouth and we are so close I can feel his breath on my skin.
Two inches. Maybe less.
"Layla? What happened?"
Brandon rounds the corner, and Rafe immediately drops his hands like he's been burned. One step back. The distance between us goes from two inches to two feet in half a second and the cold air that rushes into the gap feels like punishment.
"I'm fine." I turn to my brother. My voice is steady even though my pulse is trying to exit through my throat. "Just a misunderstanding with a member. It's handled."
Brandon's eyes move from me to Rafe. To the space between us. To my split lip. Back to Rafe.
He starts to say something. Stops. His jaw works like he's chewing on a question he's decided not to ask yet.
"Come inside." He puts his arm around me and walks me toward the clubhouse. "I'll deal with the member."
I glance back. Rafe is standing exactly where we left him, watching me walk away with an expression that I would need an entire journal entry to unpack. He doesn't follow. Not because he's retreating – because he's the kind of man who understands that walking away from something you want is sometimes the most honest thing you can do.
I think about that for the rest of the night.
Harper cleans my lip in the bathroom and asks me what happened and I tell her about the member and she says she's going to find him and I say Rafe already handled it and she gives me a look that says she has follow-up questions about the way I said "Rafe already handled it" but she files them for later.
I lie in bed in the dark and the ghost of his thumb is still on my lip.
I can feel the exact spot – the specific pressure of it, the way he traced from one corner to the other, the gentleness that contradicts everything about his size and his hands and the violence he's capable of. The contrast is what's killing me. The same man who can put an alpha on a driveway with his fists wiped blood off my mouth like I was the most delicate thing he'd ever touched.
I press my finger to my lip where his thumb was. The sensation echoes through me – not a memory of pain but a memory of almost. Almost his mouth on mine. Almost his breath mixing with mine. Almost the specific devastation of Rafe Ashford kissing me slowly in a parking lot while my lip bled and neither of us cared.
Two inches. We were two inches from something that would have made everything more complicated and more honest at the same time.
I think about the mark on his wrist. What it costs him every time he gets close. And what it means that he keeps getting close anyway.
I open my voice memo app. I don't hit record. I just look at the screen in the dark – the list of entries accumulating since I arrived, the documentation building piece by piece. I think about Pearl at the council table, watching everything with eyes that gave nothing away. Quiet. Patient.
And I know I'm getting close to the part where I stop being patient.
- Writer
