I was crying for every moment he'd left me standing in the cold of his silence. For every almost-word, every almost-touch that never crossed the space between us. For the realization that maybe love wasn't enough if you had to beg for it to stay.

"I know you didn't do anything wrong."

The confession slipped out of me on a breath I barely controlled, thin and fragile, like spun glass that would shatter if I so much as touched it wrong. It wasn't loud. It wasn't bitter. It was worse than that—it was true.

The words curled bitter on my tongue even as I said them, because this was never about right or wrong. It wasn't about facts, about moments you could lay out cleanly in a courtroom and measure like fence posts. This was deeper.

This was about the way absence leaves bruises just as surely as betrayal.

I dug my nails into my palms until I felt the faint sting of skin breaking, anything to anchor myself when everything else was coming unstitched. My body was trembling under the effort of holding it together, every muscle tight and aching like I was carrying something too heavy for too long. I pressed my arms tighter around my ribs, as if I could keep myself from spilling out across the floor in pieces.

"But this..." I swallowed hard, forcing the rest of it up past the knot swelling in my throat. "This still feels wrong."

I didn't yell it. Didn't throw it like a weapon. I just said it the only way left to say it—bare, exhausted, the marrow of a truth neither of us had the courage to face before now.

Behind me, I could feel him.
His gaze bore into my back, searing through the brittle walls I had managed to build up over the course of this night. It was a gravity I knew too well. The way he pulled at me without ever lifting a hand. The way he could undo me without ever saying a word.

And God help me, I turned.

Because some part of me was still desperate enough to believe that if I looked back, maybe this time he'd be there. Really be there.

He was standing where I had left him, bruised and battered, his frame held taut with the kind of tension that didn't come from fists or broken ribs. His silence was a living thing, stretching between us, wrapping tight around my throat until breathing felt like a losing battle.

It wasn't his injuries that nearly brought me to my knees.
It was his eyes. Always his eyes.

The were broken now. The kind that didn't heal with bandages or time. The kind that carved itself into a man's bones and stayed there. And still, somehow, it wasn't enough.

Still, it wasn't what I needed.

My chest hitched, my ribs locking down like they couldn't hold in the ache anymore. Tears blurred the edges of him until he looked almost like a memory—something fading, something already half-lost.

I hated how naked I felt standing there. Hated how easily he could strip me down to the scared, hurting thing I'd spent years pretending I wasn't.

"It's not even about the girl," I said, and my voice didn't shake this time. It was steady. It was full. It carried every inch of the heartbreak lodged deep in my lungs. "It's the way you don't even care that it hurts."

The words thudded into the silence like stones dropped into a too-still lake, sending ripples through a night already pulled too tight around us.

Slowly, painfully, Colt moved.

He straightened, the motion stiff and deliberate, like every part of him was resisting it. His boots scraped against the worn wooden floor, each step slow enough that it felt like time itself was dragging. And when he finally stood in front of me, close enough that I could see the flecks of gold buried in the wreckage of his blue eyes, I almost wished I hadn't turned around at all.

His hand twitched at his side, like he wanted to reach for me. Like he didn't know how.

"I care."

The words came rough and low, no louder than the whisper of the fire guttering behind us, but they hit like a blow. His voice was hoarse, raw from the night and the fight and the things he had never known how to say until it was too late.

"You think I don't?" he rasped, and there was no anger in it. Just something broken. Something too real to look at straight on without flinching.

I pressed my lips together hard, tasting salt and blood where I'd bitten down too hard earlier. The ache in my chest was stretching, cracking wider with every second he stood there looking at me like that.

I almost laughed.

Almost.

But the sound caught somewhere in the back of my throat, tangled in the wreckage of too many almosts and not enough absolutes. I was too tired to throw it at him. Too tired to fight the way I wanted to.

Instead, I looked him dead in the eye—the man I had saved, or who had saved me—and I said, low and certain:

"You sure as hell don't show it."

The tears didn't stop. They fell slow and silent, carving warm paths down my cheeks like they were trying to trace the shape of everything I'd tried to bury. I didn't wipe them away. Let them fall. Let them say the things I couldn't.

"You act like none of this gets to you," I whispered, my throat raw, the words rising from somewhere low in my chest, where the pain had curled itself into something that didn't quite have a name. "Like I'm the only one drowning in it."

His jaw ticked, hard enough I saw the muscle jump beneath the bruises I hadn't yet had the strength to tend to. He didn't speak. He didn't look away. Every line of his body was taut with the ache of not knowing what to say, or maybe knowing and being too scared to say it.

And God, wasn't that the thing about Colt Langmore? The man could break his own bones and ride again the next day, force his hand to heal so he made it to Nationals, but words—real ones, the kind that required more than pride and grit—those gutted him. Those he met with silence like it was the only armor he had left.

"I'm standing right here, aren't I?" he finally said, his voice low and ragged, like it had clawed its way out of something dark. "You think I don't feel this too?"

But I couldn't give him credit just for showing up. Not anymore.

I shook my head, slow and tired, like the weight of it had become too much to carry. "You don't talk, Colt. You don't even try. You just shut down and shut me out. Every damn time." My voice cracked—not from anger this time, but from the exhaustion of trying to love a man who handed nothing back but silence. "You stand there like none of it matters. Like I don't matter."

The moment those words left my mouth, I saw the shift in his eyes. It was fast—sharp and flickering, like lightning behind the clouds. Not enough to light up the whole sky, but enough to know the storm was still alive.

He moved forward, just a step, but it was enough. Enough for the warmth of his presence to curl around me like a question he didn't know how to ask. His hands hovered at his sides, twitching with the need to reach for me—but he didn't. Not yet. Maybe he knew that if he touched me, I'd fall apart. Or maybe he knew he would.

"You really think you don't matter to me?" His voice was quiet now, but it held that gravelled edge he only got when something was cracking open inside him. When he was trying to hold something back and failing.

I didn't answer. Couldn't. There was too much trembling in my chest, too much fire licking at the back of my throat.

"Lemon," he said again, and this time he stepped closer—close enough I could smell the smoke still clinging to his jacket, the sweat and blood and storm soaked into the fabric of him. "I ain't good at this. You know that. But don't for one damn second think I don't feel it. Every bit of it. I feel it like a bruise under my ribs, like something that won't stop aching no matter how still I stand."

My breath stuttered, uneven and shallow, as his words settled into the silence like they belonged there—like they had always been waiting to be said.

Every bit of it.

They sank deep, not just into the quiet between us, but into the hollows inside me where the ache had lived too long, unspoken and fed by all the things we hadn't dared to name.

And God, there was something in the way he said it—like it hurt to say, like it cost him something to let it out. That rough, broken rasp that caught in his throat felt more honest than anything either of us had said all night. It clung to the air, to my ribs, to the part of me that still believed in him even when I didn't want to.

I stared at him, my eyes tracing the bruises on his face, the tension in his jaw, the wreckage of the man I had once seen as unshakable. Colt Langmore—the man I'd memorized like a prayer—he was standing right there. And for the first time, I wasn't sure if I knew how to meet him where he was.

His walls weren't just high. They were weathered and reinforced, built from silence and steel and that godforsaken Langmore pride. I'd scaled them too many times, only to fall back down, bruised and breathless. And now, looking at him—his defenses faltering, his edges softer than they'd ever been—I felt something in me hesitate. Not because I didn't want him. But because I didn't know how to hold the version of him that bled instead of bristled.

The scent of him—pine and dirt and rain-soaked leather—filled the narrow space between us. It was familiar. Familiar in the way old homes are, even after they've burned to the ground. You still remember the rooms, still remember where the light used to fall. But that didn't mean you could go back.

"I..." The word scraped up from somewhere raw and aching, somewhere I'd been afraid to touch. I swallowed hard, tasted salt. I didn't know what I was trying to say. Only that the words were clawing to get out and I was too tired to keep them caged. "I don't know what you want from me, Colt."

The moment the question left my mouth, I regretted it—not because it wasn't true, but because I could see how much it landed. That look—half plea, half reckoning—slipped across his face, and he stepped closer, slow and sure, like he didn't trust the floor to hold him. Like maybe he didn't trust himself either.

He didn't speak right away. Just let the quiet stretch, let it wrap around us. And then, just when I thought maybe he wouldn't answer at all, he did.

"I just want you." The words were low, nearly lost beneath the storm still rustling outside, but I heard them. Felt them. His hand twitched at his side again, the same unsure gesture he always made when he was on the verge of reaching for something he didn't know if he had the right to touch.

"I've always wanted you, Lemon."

His words hit like rainfall after drought—slow, steady, and impossible to ignore. But they didn't soothe the ache the way I'd imagined. They only deepened it, filled the cracks with something heavier than hope.

Once, those words would've undone me.

I would've clung to them like a girl who still believed wanting was the same as choosing, the same as staying. But tonight, they felt like something else. Like regret in a different shape. Like a story we'd both told ourselves too many times just to sleep through the night.

I stood still beneath the weight of them, trying to decide if it was okay to believe him—if my chest could take that leap again without splitting wide open.

Because the truth was, I'd built whole nights out of those words in my head. I'd folded them into the silence he always left me with. I'd imagined him saying them when the barn was quiet and the moonlight reached through the rafters just right. But here, now, with his voice still rough from holding too much in, they didn't feel like the ending I'd waited for. They felt like a beginning I wasn't sure I could survive.

He stepped closer, slow and deliberate, like he thought I might vanish if he moved too fast. I didn't. I stayed rooted, breath caught somewhere between my ribs and the place his voice had landed.

His hand came up, hovering just beside my cheek, fingers twitching as if unsure whether the moment called for softness or surrender. I didn't move. I didn't lean in.

I wanted to. God, I wanted to.

But my body remembered too well the times I'd reached for him and come back empty-handed.

"I'm sorry," Colt said, and it didn't sound rehearsed or half-meant. It sounded broken. It sounded like a man trying to speak from a place that had never known how to be seen. "For everything."

His eyes—storm-heavy and unguarded for once—met mine with an honesty that made my stomach twist. I watched him struggle against himself, jaw tight, breath shallow, like he was trying to tear down a wall with nothing but his bare hands.

"I know I haven't made it easy. I know I've been—" His voice faltered, caught on the edge of something sharp. "Hell, Lemon, I don't even know the right word for what I've been. But it wasn't what you deserved."

He reached for me then—not all at once, not in some sweeping, cinematic moment—but with a quiet kind of bravery. The way a man touches something precious. Careful. Reverent. Like he knew it might be the only time he was allowed.

His palm cupped the side of my face, warm and rough and shaking just slightly, and the feel of it undid something in me. Unraveled the tight coil of fear and fury that had been living beneath my ribs since the moment I saw her fingers on his skin.

And then—without asking, without hesitating—he kissed me.