Something warm.
Something that feels right.
I lie there, breathing, feeling that rightness, and waiting for the guilt to arrive.
It comes.
Quieter than expected.
Underneath thethis is Tracker’s brotherand thewhat would Ryan thinkand all the rest of it, something else is quieter still and more honest.
You haven’t felt like this since Ryan.
I close my eyes.
Open them.
Look up.
Tate is awake.
He is looking at the ceiling, or had been, because the moment I move, he looks down, and our eyes meet. For a long, suspended moment, neither of us says anything.
We just look at each other.
His arm is still around me, my hand is on his chest, everything unspoken between us right there in the space where words would have been.
Watching it move across his face, that careful, controlled face that keeps everything filed away, and for once, he doesn’t file it away. For once, he lets it be there.
I push myself up slightly and look at him properly at the dark curls, the green eyes, the jaw, and the way he looks in the early morning when the president, the patch, and the weight of everything he carries are all still sleeping, and it is just him.
He looks like Ryan.
He always looks like Ryan.
But he also looks entirely, completely, and unmistakably like himself.
And it is him I am looking at.
Not a ghost, a substitute, or grief reaching for the nearest familiar shape.
Him.
“Tate,” I say softly, and even the way his name comes out of my mouth feels different, like something I’d been holding back finally finding its way through.
“Sophia.” His voice is low and careful. His arm is still around me, fallen to my lower back. Neither of us has moved. “You just miss him. That’s all this is. You had a nightmare. and you’re—”
“No,” I say.
He goes still.
I hold his gaze.
“I know what missing Ryan feels like. I’ve been doing it for months. I know every version of it.” A pause. “This isn’t that.”
He looks at me.
Something shifts in his expression, the last wall he’d been building for a very long time finally cracking open.