🔥 Sixty-Two 🔥

Thank You for Reading! 💜

You made it to the bonus content — which means you’ve lived through Jordan and Blair’s journey from Room 214 to the championship court to Draft Day. Thank you for giving their story a chance. This exclusive chapter is our gift to dedicated readers like you — their first night in the Hartford apartment, after the boxes but before the sheets, with no protocols and no hiding.

⚠️ Content Warning: This scene contains explicit FF content, oral sex, kitchen counter sex, multiple orgasms, biting, emotional vulnerability, domestic intimacy, and two women christening their first apartment with the enthusiasm of people who spent seven months hiding and are done being quiet. Rated 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ for a reason.

Sixty-Two

Set after the Epilogue • First night in the Hartford apartment • Dual POV

JORDAN

The apartment smelled like paint and possibility.

Hartford, Connecticut. Second floor of a brownstone on Prospect Avenue — a street name that felt like a promise, given that my entire life had just become one. The apartment had hardwood floors, tall windows that faced east, a kitchen with actual counter space, and a bedroom where the morning light would hit the bed at approximately the angle that turned Blair’s skin to warm gold.

I knew this because I’d tested it. I’d come to Hartford three weeks before Blair, signed the lease alone, and spent an entire morning lying on the bare mattress tracking the way the light moved across the bed. When Blair asked why I’d chosen the east-facing unit over the larger west-facing one on the third floor, I’d said “better natural light” and she’d accepted this because she was a scientist who respected empirical reasoning and had no idea that the empirical reasoning was this is the angle that will make you look like a renaissance painting when you wake up next to me every morning for the rest of our lives.

The U-Haul was unloaded. The movers — two guys from a local company who’d been professionally indifferent to the fact that both names on the lease belonged to women — had wrestled the furniture up the stairs and departed with a tip that Blair had calculated based on some formula involving distance, weight, and stair count that she’d researched on the drive up. The boxes were stacked in every room. Blair’s labeling system was color-coded by room and prioritized by necessity, because Blair Ashworth approached moving the way she approached everything: with a methodology.

Tessa had helped for the first four hours, then left with a hug for Blair, a handshake for me that turned into a hug halfway through, and the parting words: “If I hear details about tonight, I will enter witness protection.”

We were alone.

In our apartment. With our names on the lease. Both names. On the same lease. No burner phones. No 5 AM departures. No counter-surveillance in the parking garage. No Chloe with photographs. No protocols.

Just us.

Blair was in the kitchen, unpacking a box labeled KITCHEN: PRIORITY (MUGS) with the focused intensity of a woman who could not rest until the coffee infrastructure was operational. She was wearing my old Michigan t-shirt — the one with the faded maize and blue that she’d stolen during the conference tournament and never returned — and leggings and bare feet. Her hair was in a messy bun. There was packing tape stuck to her left elbow.

“Blair.”

“I’m organizing the mugs by frequency of use. The everyday mugs go on the first shelf — accessible without overextension — and the guest mugs go on the second shelf, which requires—”

“Blair.”

“—a minor postural adjustment that I’ve calculated is ergonomically acceptable for—”

“Blair.“

She looked up. Glasses slightly fogged from the heat of unpacking. A smudge of dust on her cheekbone. The most beautiful woman in Connecticut, standing in our kitchen, holding a mug in each hand.

“The mugs can wait,” I said.

“The mugs cannot wait. Without a functional mug system, our morning routine will be—”

I crossed the kitchen. Took the mugs from her hands — one in each of mine, set on the counter. Took her glasses off her face. Set them next to the mugs. She blinked at me — myopic, vulnerable, the Blair who existed behind the lenses.

“We live together,” I said.

“I’m aware. I co-signed the lease. The documentation is—”

“We live together and nobody is hiding. Nobody is sneaking through the laundry room. Nobody is setting alarms for 4:47 AM. Nobody is buying tickets with the wrong credit card.”

“That was one time—”

“We live together.” I cupped her face. Thumbs on her cheekbones. The gesture that was mine — that I’d claimed the first time I’d touched her face in Room 214 and that had become the physical vocabulary of I see you, I’m here, you’re mine. “And I have been in a U-Haul for five hours and I have been unpacking boxes for three hours and I am standing in our kitchen and I would very much like to stop organizing mugs and start christening this apartment.”

Blair’s breath caught. The micro-hitch. The one I’d been cataloguing since October — the involuntary suspension between inhale and exhale that meant her autonomic nervous system had just overridden her prefrontal cortex.

“The sheets aren’t on the bed,” she said.

“I don’t care about the sheets.”

“The shower curtain isn’t—”

“Blair Ashworth.” I leaned in. Close enough that my mouth was a centimeter from hers. Close enough that she could feel my breath on her lips and I could feel hers on mine and the distance between us was just barely enough to constitute not-kissing. “For seven months, we had sex in offices and dorm rooms and hotel stairwells and the back seat of my car. We set timers. We used burner phones. I once made you come in a bathroom stall at an away game while Mia stood guard outside playing Beyoncé loud enough to cover the noise.”

“That was — a logistically impressive achievement—”

“We don’t need sheets. We don’t need a shower curtain. We need a flat surface and the freedom to be as loud as we want.” I closed the centimeter. Kissed her — soft, barely there, a question rather than an answer. “Can you be loud for me, Dr. Ashworth?”

Her eyes went dark. The pupil dilation was visible even without her glasses — the limbic system responding faster than the neocortex, the body saying yes before the brain could compose a counter-argument about mug organization.

“I haven’t defended my dissertation,” she whispered.

“You defend in three weeks. I’m getting ahead of the timeline.”

“That’s presumptuous.”

“It’s confident. There’s a difference.”

“The difference being?”

“Presumptuous assumes an outcome. Confident knows you’re going to pass because you’re the most brilliant person I’ve ever met and your dissertation committee is going to fall over themselves to award you the degree.” I kissed her jaw. The hinge, where the bone met the soft tissue. “Dr. Blair Ashworth. In our apartment. In our kitchen. On our counter.”

“We are not having sex on the kitchen counter.”

“Why not?”

“It’s an unsanitary food preparation surface.”

“We haven’t prepared any food on it yet. It’s the cleanest surface in the apartment.”

She opened her mouth to argue. I kissed her before the argument could form — deep, consuming, the kind of kiss that bypassed the cognitive processing centers and spoke directly to the part of Blair’s nervous system that I’d been mapping for seven months. My hands went to her waist. Her hands went to my shoulders. The kitchen was warm and the light was golden and I could feel her pulse through the thin fabric of my stolen t-shirt, accelerating, baseline abandoned.

“Bedroom,” she said against my mouth. “First. Bedroom first.”

“Counter later?”

“Counter later.”

“Every room?”

“Don’t push your luck.”

I lifted her. She wrapped her legs around my waist — the same way she had the first time, the same automatic response, the vestibular activation that she’d once explained to me using clinical terminology and that I’d once explained to her by carrying her to the bedroom and making her forget every word she’d just said.

I carried her through the hallway. Past the boxes. Past the bathroom without a shower curtain. Into the bedroom where the mattress was bare — just a mattress pad on a frame, no sheets, no pillows, the bed that Tessa had assembled three hours ago with the pragmatic efficiency of a woman who understood that the bed was the most important piece of furniture in any apartment occupied by two people who’d been hiding for seven months.

I set Blair on the mattress. She looked up at me — hair falling from the bun, dust on her cheekbone, bare feet, my t-shirt. Vulnerable and brave and mine.

“No alarms,” I said.

“No alarms.”

“No burner phones.”

“No burner phones.”

“No leaving before dawn.”

“No leaving.” She reached for me. Hooked her fingers in the waistband of my joggers. Pulled me forward until my knees hit the mattress edge. “No leaving ever again.”

I pulled the t-shirt over her head. My t-shirt. Off her body. Underneath — nothing. No bra. Blair had driven five hours braless in my t-shirt and I was going to need a moment to process the implications of that choice.

“You weren’t wearing—”

“I was in a moving truck for five hours. Comfort was prioritized over structural support.”

“You drove five hours with nothing under my shirt.”

“It seemed — strategically efficient. For later.”

“You planned this.”

“I optimized for probable outcomes.” The ghost of a smile. “Come here.”

I stripped off my tank top. Then the sports bra. Blair watched — that systematic gaze, the one that catalogued every line, every muscle, every change in my body since the season ended. I was leaner now — off-season conditioning, different from game shape — and she noticed. She always noticed.

“New definition in your obliques,” she said. Reaching out. Fingertips tracing the muscle that ran diagonal from my ribs to my hip. The clinical observation delivered with a touch that was anything but clinical.

“Off-season program.”

“I approve.”

“Of my training regimen?”

“Of the results.” Her fingers traced lower. Along the waistband of my joggers. Hooking. Pulling. “Take these off.”

I took them off. Everything. Stood naked in the bedroom of our apartment in Hartford while the late afternoon sun poured through the east-facing windows and turned my skin amber and Blair looked at me from the bare mattress with an expression that I would describe, if I had her vocabulary, as covetous.

“Your turn,” I said.

She lifted her hips. I pulled the leggings down her legs — slowly, deliberately, the reveal that never got old, the specific thrill of watching Blair Ashworth’s body emerge from clothing like a theorem being proven. Underwear — simple, cotton, the practical choice of a woman who’d been lifting boxes. I pulled those off too.

Naked. Both of us. On a bare mattress in an empty bedroom in Connecticut.

No locked office. No hotel stairwell. No back seat. No timer.

Just us, with the rest of our lives stretched out in front of us like the court before tip-off.

“I want to take my time,” I said.

“We have time.”

“No. I mean — I want to take my time. Every other time we’ve done this, there’s been a clock. A curfew. A 4:47 alarm. Twelve minutes in a stairwell before Mia starts texting Beyoncé lyrics.” I crawled onto the mattress. Over her. My hands on either side of her head, my body above hers, not touching — hovering. The almost-contact. The charged space between skin and skin. “Tonight there’s no clock. And I want to use every minute.”

“That’s — potentially a very long time.”

“Yes.”

“My threshold for sustained arousal without resolution is approximately—”

“Blair.”

“Yes?”

“Stop calculating and let me worship you.”

Her breath caught. The word — worship — landing like a three-pointer at the buzzer. I watched it hit. Watched her eyes go liquid. Watched the last remnant of analytical distance dissolve.

“Okay,” she whispered.

I started at her forehead. Kissed the crease between her brows — the one that appeared when she was thinking, when she was grading, when she was building a framework. I kissed her temple. Her cheekbone — the one with the dust smudge. The tip of her nose. The corner of her mouth.

I kissed her jaw. The hinge. The spot below her ear where her pulse lived close to the surface. I pressed my lips there and felt the sixty-two become seventy, eighty, the numbers climbing as her body responded to the map I was drawing.

“I’m going to kiss every part of you,” I said against her neck. “Every part I never had time for. Every part I rushed past because we had twelve minutes or twenty minutes or a forty-five-minute window between practice and film session.” I bit her neck — gently, the precise pressure that lived between sensation and mark. “Tonight I’m not rushing.”

“Jordan—”

I kissed her collarbone. The hollow of her throat. The space between her breasts where her sternum rose and fell with breaths that were already ragged. I kissed the freckle on her left ribcage — the one I’d discovered in October, the one she hadn’t known existed until I’d mapped it — and she arched off the mattress with a sound that filled the empty room.

No neighbors to worry about. No roommates. No Mia with headphones. The sound bounced off bare walls and hardwood floors and came back to us like an echo in a cathedral.

“Louder,” I said.

“The neighbors—”

“Are about to learn that apartment 2A is occupied by a woman who makes the most incredible sounds when she stops overthinking.” I kissed her left breast. Slow. Deliberate. The attention that I’d learned she needed — the patience that converted sensation into surrender. My tongue circled and her spine curved and the sound she made was exactly what I’d been waiting seven months to hear at full volume.

“Louder,” I said.

I spent twenty minutes on her upper body alone. Twenty minutes of mouth and tongue and the specific attention that Blair’s body had been starved of during every rushed, time-boxed, protocol-constrained encounter we’d had. I learned things I’d never had time to learn — the way she responded differently when I used my teeth on her right side versus her left, the way she gripped the mattress pad when I kissed the soft skin of her inner arm, the way her breathing went completely silent for two seconds before a moan that came from somewhere deeper than her lungs.

By the time I reached her stomach, she was shaking.

“Jordan — please—”

“Please what?”

“Please — I need—”

“Tell me.” I kissed her hip bone. “Use your words, Dr. Ashworth.”

“I haven’t — that’s not — I haven’t defended—”

“Three weeks. We’re rounding up. Tell me what you need.”

“Your mouth.” The word tore out of her — wrecked, desperate, the clinical vocabulary completely abandoned. “I need your mouth, Jordan, please, I have been in a moving truck for five hours thinking about your mouth and I cannot — I cannot — sustain this level of—”

I put my mouth on her.

The sound she made echoed through the entire apartment. Through the bedroom and down the hallway and into the kitchen where the mugs sat unorganized on the counter and the boxes stood unstacked against the walls. The sound of Blair Ashworth at full volume. The sound she’d been containing for seven months — muffled into pillows, bitten back behind clenched teeth, swallowed in hotel rooms and offices and every space where being heard meant being caught.

Not anymore.

I took my time. No clock. No countdown. No Beyoncé playing cover fire through a hotel wall. Just the taste of her and the sounds she made and the specific, devastating pleasure of doing something thoroughly that I’d always had to do quickly.

She came the first time in under three minutes — the five hours of anticipation compressing the timeline, her body so primed that the contact alone was almost enough. I felt it — the tensing, the silence, the held breath — and then the release, the wave, the sound of my name pulled from her throat like a confession.

I didn’t stop.

I’d never had the luxury of not stopping. Every other time — every stairwell, every office, every stolen hour — there’d been a next thing. An alarm. A departure. A return to the performance of not-being-in-love. Tonight there was no next thing. There was only this: Blair, on the mattress, in the light, with my mouth between her legs and the freedom to keep going.

The second time took longer. I changed the approach — slower, different angle, building from a different foundation. Blair’s hands found my hair. Not guiding — anchoring. Holding on while I took her apart piece by piece, sensation by sensation, the methodical dismantlement of every defense she’d ever built.

“Jordan — I can’t — again — it’s too—”

“You can.”

“The refractory period for clitoral stimulation is—”

“Variable. And I’m very patient.”

She came again. Harder. The sound was a sob — not pain, not sadness, the specific overwhelmed sound of a woman receiving more than she’d ever allowed herself to ask for. Her back arched off the mattress and her fingers twisted in my hair and she said my name three times, each one louder than the last, and the echo filled the room like a church bell.

BLAIR

I needed approximately ninety seconds to remember how speech worked.

Jordan was lying beside me on the bare mattress, looking enormously, infuriatingly pleased with herself. The golden-girl grin. The dimple. The post-coital satisfaction of a woman who had just made her girlfriend come twice in a new apartment and was clearly considering whether to attempt a third.

“Don’t,” I said.

“Don’t what?”

“Whatever you’re planning. My nervous system needs a recovery period.”

“I wasn’t planning anything.”

“Your left eyebrow is elevated by approximately two millimeters. That’s your scheming face.”

“I don’t have a scheming face.”

“You have a scheming face. I’ve catalogued it. It appears before every fourth-quarter comeback and every attempt to initiate a third round.”

She laughed. The real one — full, warm, the laugh that echoed differently in this room than it had in any other room we’d shared. The acoustics of home.

“My turn,” I said. And rolled onto her.

The reversal was always my prerogative. Jordan gave and gave — it was her nature, the same generosity that made her the best passer in women’s basketball — but she needed to receive, too. Needed someone to look at her and say lie down, let go, the next however-long is mine.

I straddled her hips. Settled my weight against her. She looked up at me — golden skin in the afternoon light, braids fanning across the bare mattress, her eyes dark and steady and trusting.

“What’s my heart rate?” she asked. Our ritual. The question that had started as clinical curiosity and become love language.

I placed my hand flat on her sternum. Counted. The pulse was rapid under my palm — elevated, post-exertion, the cardiovascular signature of a woman who’d just spent thirty minutes engaged in vigorous physical activity.

“Ninety-four,” I said. “Well above your resting baseline.”

“That’s your fault.”

“I accept responsibility.” I leaned down. Kissed the mark on her collarbone — the one from this morning, the one I’d made in the hotel before Draft Day, the location that had become our coordinates. Our permanent address on each other’s bodies. “I’m going to make it go higher.”

“Promises.”

“Data.”

I worked down her body with the thoroughness that seven months of rushed encounters had denied me. I kissed the muscles of her shoulders — the deltoids that had held my weight, the biceps that had carried me to the bedroom, the body that was both instrument and offering. I kissed her sternum. Her ribs. The obliques she’d developed in off-season conditioning — new topography, new terrain to map.

I bit her hip. Not gently. The pressure that I knew she wanted — that she’d never asked for until I’d discovered it accidentally in month three, my teeth grazing her hip bone and her entire body convulsing and the sound she’d made burning into my memory like a brand.

“Blair—”

“Don’t move.”

“I’m not moving.”

“Your hips are moving.”

“That’s involuntary.”

“Then control your involuntary responses.”

“You’re a psychologist. You know that’s physiologically impossible.”

“I’m a psychologist who knows exactly which stimuli produce which involuntary responses in your body.” I kissed her inner thigh. “And I intend to produce all of them.”

I settled between her legs. Looked up at her. She was propped on her elbows, watching me with an expression I’d spent seven months earning — open, unguarded, the complete absence of the armor she wore for the rest of the world. No glasses. No clinical vocabulary. No wire rims between her and the terrifying experience of being seen.

“I love you,” I said. From between her thighs. In our apartment. In the light.

“I love you too. Now please—”

“Say it again.”

“Blair—”

“Say it again. Without the please. Without the rush. Say it like we have the rest of our lives.”

Her expression shifted. The impatience softened into something deeper — the recognition that what I was asking for wasn’t foreplay but foundation. Not a performance but a promise.

“I love you,” she said. Slowly. Each word carrying weight. “I love you, Blair Ashworth. In this apartment. In this city. In every city we’ll live in after this. I love you without a countdown and without a protocol and without a clock.”

“Good,” I said. “Now lie back.”

She lay back. And I gave her everything I had.

I knew Jordan’s body the way I knew research methodology — through repetition, observation, and the relentless pursuit of understanding. I knew the rhythm that built her slowly. I knew the variation that pushed her to the edge. I knew the exact moment when her thighs tensed and her breathing stopped and her fingers gripped whatever surface was available — tonight, the bare mattress pad — and she tipped over into the sound that was half my name and half something that preceded language.

She was loud. Gloriously, unapologetically loud. The sound of a woman in her own apartment making love to the person she loved without modulating, without calculating, without the fear that had shadowed every private moment for seven months.

She came with a shout that the neighbors absolutely heard. I didn’t care. I stayed with her through every aftershock, every tremor, every involuntary contraction, because this was ours now. Not borrowed. Not stolen. Not counted in minutes.

Ours.

JORDAN

The kitchen counter happened at 9:47 PM.

We’d attempted to unpack. We’d managed approximately one and a half boxes before Blair opened the one labeled KITCHEN: PRIORITY (MUGS) and held up two mugs — one blue, one yellow — and said, “First shelf. Side by side. Non-negotiable,” and the domesticity of it, the permanence of it, two mugs on a shelf in a kitchen that was ours, hit me like a cross-court pass I didn’t see coming.

“What?” Blair said, watching my face.

“You bought a yellow mug.”

“You needed a mug. The blue one is mine. Has always been mine. You needed your own.”

“You bought me a mug for our apartment.”

“It cost four dollars. It’s not a grand gesture.”

“It’s the grandest gesture anyone has ever made me.”

“Jordan, you were drafted number one overall. You’ve received—”

I kissed her against the counter. Hard. The mugs — still in her hands — clinked together between us. She set them down blindly, hands finding the counter by feel, and then her hands were on me — in my hair, on my shoulders, pulling me closer with the urgent efficiency of a woman who had just discovered that mug-related emotion was, apparently, an aphrodisiac.

“Counter,” I said against her mouth.

“We discussed this. It’s unsanitary—”

“It’s been cleaned. I Clorox-wiped it while you were in the bathroom. Anticipatory hygiene.”

“You planned this.”

“I optimized for probable outcomes.”

She laughed — the real laugh, the low one — and I lifted her onto the counter. The granite was cold and she gasped and I stepped between her legs and the height difference evaporated and we were face to face, eye to eye, for the first time without her having to look up.

“I like this angle,” she said.

“Get used to it. I’m putting you on every counter in Connecticut.”

What followed was — according to Blair’s later assessment — “a highly effective demonstration of sexual technique adapted to non-standard surfaces.”

According to me, it was the hottest thing that had ever happened in a kitchen.

Blair on the counter. Legs wrapped around me. My hand between us while she gripped the edge of the granite and the upper cabinet and made sounds that definitely carried through the walls and possibly through the floor to apartment 1A below us. I watched her face — the face I’d been watching since October, the face that hid behind glasses and clinical language and that revealed itself, only to me, in the extremity of pleasure.

Her eyes were open. Looking at me while I touched her. That was the difference — that was the thing that made tonight different from every other night. She looked at me. Not through the haze of urgency or the fog of stolen time or the half-darkness of offices and stairwells. In the kitchen light, on the counter, with the mugs beside us and the lease on the fridge and the life beginning.

“Stay with me,” I said. “Eyes open. Stay right here.”

“I’m here.”

“You’re mine.”

“I’m yours.”

“Come for me. In our kitchen. In our apartment. On our counter.”

She did. Eyes open. Looking at me. The orgasm moved through her body like a wave and I watched every second of it — the pupils blowing wide, the mouth falling open, the neck arching back and then snapping forward because she’d promised to stay with me and Blair Ashworth kept her promises. She came looking directly into my eyes and I caught every sound and every expression and every tremor and I thought: this. For the rest of my life. This.

BLAIR

We ended up on the bedroom floor at 11:23 PM, having migrated from the kitchen counter to the couch (still wrapped in plastic — we improvised) to the hallway (brief, intense, against the wall) and finally to the bedroom where we’d started.

The mattress was three feet away. We hadn’t made it.

Jordan was lying on the hardwood, breathing hard, her skin glistening in the light from the streetlamp outside. I was lying perpendicular to her, my head on her stomach, listening to the internal machinery of the woman I loved — heartbeat, breath, the soft rumble of a digestive system that was reminding us we hadn’t eaten since a gas station sandwich at 2 PM.

“We need to eat,” I said.

“We need sheets.”

“We need food, then sheets.”

“Counter-proposal: we order food, put on sheets while we wait, and eat in bed.”

“Eating in bed introduces crumb-related hygiene concerns on the first night of sheet installation.”

“We just had sex on a kitchen counter, a plastic-wrapped couch, and a hallway floor. Your hygiene standards have been comprehensively violated.”

“Fair point.”

We ordered Thai food. Because Thai food was our crisis food and our celebration food and our Tuesday-night food and now, apparently, our christening-the-apartment food. Pad see ew for me, drunken noodles for her, spring rolls we’d split unevenly because Jordan always stole mine and I always let her.

While we waited, we put sheets on the bed. Together — the collaborative act, the domestic duet. Jordan took the fitted sheet; I took the corners. We negotiated pillow placement (mine left, hers right, established seven months ago in a twin bed that could barely hold both of us and now replicated in a queen that felt luxurious by comparison).

I placed the blue mug and the yellow mug on the shelf above the coffee maker. Side by side. First shelf, left side, where I could reach them without overextension.

Jordan watched me from the kitchen doorway. Leaning against the frame. Arms crossed. The golden-girl grin, but real.

“What?” I said.

“Nothing. I just like watching you put mugs on a shelf.”

“That’s a very low bar for entertainment.”

“It’s the highest bar I’ve ever set.” She crossed the kitchen. Stood behind me. Wrapped her arms around my waist — chin on my shoulder, her body warm against my back. “Those are our mugs. In our kitchen. In our apartment.”

“You’ve said that approximately seven times tonight.”

“I’m going to say it seven more times. Minimum.”

“Jordan.”

“Blair.”

“What’s your heart rate?”

She pressed my hand against her chest. Over the sternum. Over the heart that I’d measured in the dark in a dorm room and a hotel room and an office and that I would now measure every night in a bedroom with east-facing windows and a blue and yellow mug on the shelf.

I counted.

“Sixty-two,” I said.

Sixty-two. Resting. Home. The exceptional cardiovascular conditioning of a woman who was exactly where she was supposed to be.

“Exceptional,” I said.

“I know.” She kissed my temple. “You’re the one who makes it steady.”

The Thai food arrived. We ate in bed — crumbs be damned — with our backs against the headboard and the sheets fresh and the windows open to the Connecticut night. The apartment smelled like paint and pad see ew and the compound chemistry of two bodies that had spent the evening learning what it felt like to love each other without a timer.

At midnight, Jordan fell asleep with her head on my chest and my fingers in her hair. Her heart rate: sixty-two. Steady. Home.

I stayed awake for a while. Listening to the apartment — the settle of new floors, the hum of the refrigerator, the distant sound of the city that was ours now. I looked at the woman sleeping on my chest and thought about burner phones and protocols and a fifty-seven-day countdown that had ended not with catastrophe but with a lease and two mugs and a life.

Tomorrow we’d finish unpacking. Tomorrow we’d find a coffee shop and a grocery store and the route from our apartment to the Sun’s practice facility. Tomorrow we’d begin the mundane, miraculous work of building a life from boxes and routines and the daily accumulation of shared mornings.

But tonight — tonight was the first night. The night the clock stopped. The night we slept in our bed in our apartment without an alarm set for 4:47 AM, without a departure planned, without the knowledge that morning meant separation.

Morning meant coffee. Morning meant the blue mug and the yellow mug, side by side. Morning meant Jordan in the kitchen, barefoot, grinning, asking me to measure her heart rate because the asking had become the ritual and the ritual had become the love.

I closed my eyes. Sixty-two beats per minute under my palm. The steady, exceptional, permanent rhythm of home.

THE END

Thank You for Reading!

If you loved Jordan and Blair’s story, please consider leaving a review on Amazon. Reviews are the #1 way to help other readers discover books they’ll love — and they mean the world to indie authors.

Never Miss a Release