Alyssa’s hand fists into my shirt collar before Marcus even finishes saying “let’s take a quick break,” and then I’m being hauled out of my folding chair like a piece of furniture someone’s decided doesn’t match the room anymore.
Nobody stops her. Nobody says anything. I catch Jinette’s eyes going wide over her Styrofoam cup as we pass, and then the basement door swings shut behind us and we’re climbing the stairs into daylight, Alyssa’s grip never loosening once.
She drags me around the side of the building until we’re tucked into the narrow gap between brick walls where nobody walking past on the sidewalk could see us even if they tried.
Then she shoves me. My back hits the brick hard enough that I feel it in my teeth, and there she is. The hijab’s still half-undone, black fabric bunched loose around her shoulders now instead of properly wrapped, and it’s hugging her body in a very non-Halal way. Her chest is heaving.
She looks unbelievable.
“I cannot fucking believe you.” Her voice comes out low, shaking. “How dare you bring up your fucking ex. In there. In front of everyone.”
I don’t say anything. I’m looking at her mouth instead, the way her bottom lip catches when she talks, and my heart’s doing something stupid and fast in my chest. This is becoming a pattern I should probably worry about. The angrier she gets, the more my body seems to think this is the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me.
“Do you know how that made me feel?” She’s still gripping my collar, knuckles white. “Sitting there, listening to you talk about her like she was the love of your life, like she still means something…”
“Well, you interrupted me before I got to you,” I say.
Her eyebrows shoot up. “What more was there, Caleb? You told an entire room full of strangers exactly why you wanted to kill yourself.”
“That’s not really the whole thing though.” I keep my voice even, watching her face instead of the wall behind her. “I never got to the aftermath. The court case. Losing all of my family and every single friend I had besides Josh. That’s where it all got worse. That’s where I started really meaning it.”
She rolls her eyes, but her grip on my collar doesn’t loosen.
My hands find her hips before I’ve consciously decided to move, pulling her in until there’s no space left between us.
“But I didn’t even get to the most recent part,” I say. “Where some crazy woman showed up at my doorstep and showed me the world still has color in it.”
She goes very still.
Her eyes search my face for a moment, and I watch the fury flicker, catch on something softer, and then immediately reroute back into annoyance.
“You are so fucking hard right now.” The words come out flat, diagnostic. Her gaze drops between us for half a second and then comes back up, and her nose wrinkles like she’s already decided she hates the answer to the question she’s about to ask. “Is this because of her?”
The disgust she wraps around those last word is almost impressive.
I smile wide enough that I feel it reach my eyes.
“No.” I pull her hips closer, just slightly, making sure she can’t misread the situation. “This is purely because of you.”
I let that land for exactly one second.
“And maybe partially the thought of railing you while you’re still wearing this.”
I glance down at the fabric bunched around her shoulders, the hijab draped against her body in a way that was clearly never its intended purpose, and then back up at her face.
The red floods her face so fast it looks like a switch got thrown somewhere behind her eyes.
“Alyssa.” I keep my voice even. “You didn’t tell me you were a practicing Muslim.”
She scoffs, the sound sharp and dismissive, but her face is still doing the thing. “I’m clearly not.”
“Right.” I tilt my head slightly, watching her. “So you’ve been what, exactly. Sitting in that basement for a few months in full hijab. Stalking me.”
The word lands and she laughs, this involuntary sound that she immediately tries to smother. She fails. The laugh wins.
“Caleb.” Her mouth comes to my ear, her voice dropping into something low and deliberate, the kind of tone that makes my brain go briefly offline. “I’ve been watching you at this meeting for years, baby.”
Something in my chest does a full somersault and then falls down a flight of stairs.
Years. Not months. Years of her sitting feet away from me, watching me count ceiling tiles instead of talking, watching me exist badly in a folding chair while I went through the motions of being alive.
I feel her fingers at my waist. Then at my zipper, her hands unhurried, like she’s got all the time in the world.
She pulls my cock out. I can feel her smile against my jaw. Not a performance. Something genuinely satisfied, like she’s unwrapping something she already knows she’s going to love.
She looks left. Then right. The narrow gap between buildings is empty in both directions, nothing but concrete and the distant ambient noise of a morning carrying on without us.
Her hands go flat against the brick wall. She shifts her weight, hiking the black fabric up around her hips, and then her fingers hook into the side of her underwear and push it aside.
She looks up at me. “Come on, baby.”
I don’t need to be asked twice.
I drive into her hard and she makes a sound that isn’t quite human, this short, broken gasp that she swallows before it can escape into the alley. My hands find her hips and grip with desperation.
“God.” Her forehead drops forward against the wall. Her palms flatten against the brick, and she pushes back against me with this slow, deliberate roll of her hips, like she’s settling into something she’s been waiting for. “You feel so at home inside of me, Caleb.”
“Yeah,” I say. Because she’s not wrong.
Her breath comes out uneven, catching on each movement. The fabric drapes loose around her waist, and I watch the way her shoulders tense and release against the wall, the way her hair has come fully undone now and spills down her back in a mess of blonde that I wrap one hand around without thinking about it.
She whimpers, quiet, almost surprised by herself.
I pull her back by the hips and she goes with it, completely, like there’s no resistance left in her anywhere. Her whole body is warm and soft and absolutely certain about this in a way I’ve never experienced with anyone, this total, unguarded surrender that coexists with the fact that she’d probably bite someone’s hand off if they tried to interrupt us right now.
That particular combination is doing something genuinely dangerous to my chest.
Her breathing starts to fracture, losing whatever rhythm she’d been holding onto.
“I love you so much, Caleb.”
The words come out wrecked, broken open in a way that bypasses every filter I have and goes straight through the center of me like a current.
I come completely apart.
My hips stutter forward, and I’m gone, my whole body seizing up around the sensation.
“I love you too, Alyssa.”
I finish with my face pressed into her hair, breathing in the smell of her shampoo and brick dust and morning air, my hands locked on her hips while the last of it moves through me in waves I can’t control.
Then the waves stop.
And I come back to myself.
The alley is quiet.
“Fuck.”
The word falls out of me while I’m still catching my breath. Pure embarrassment washes over me.
I came way too fast inside her… Has she turned me into a premature ejaculator?
She’s against the wall. Still. Not moving.
I straighten up slightly, pulling back, and she turns her head to look at me over her shoulder.
I brace for the potential disappointment in her face.
Instead of that her eyes are wet.
Not the sharp, furious wet of someone who’s about to scream. Just tears, quiet ones, tracking down her face through the smeared remnants of this morning’s makeup. And she’s smiling. This enormous, helpless, completely unguarded smile that she doesn’t seem to have any control over.
“You okay?” My voice comes out rougher than I intend.
She doesn’t answer right away. She straightens up slowly, the black fabric sliding back down around her as she turns to face me fully, and both her hands come up to cup her own face, fingers pressing against her cheeks like she’s trying to hold herself together from the outside.
“You finally said it back, Caleb.”
I blink at her.
“What?”
She’s still holding her own face, fingers pressed to her cheeks, tears running faster now. Her eyes drop from mine for just a second, traveling south with this warm, almost reverent expression, and then her hands leave her face entirely.
She tucks my cock back into my pants carefully. Both hands, unhurried, like she’s doing something important. She fixes my zipper, smooths the fabric flat with her palm, and the tenderness in the gesture is so mismatched with everything that just happened in this alley that I don’t know what to do with myself.
She hums while she does it. One low, satisfied note.
“You said you love me.” The words come out soft.
“Oh.” I say. “Right.”
She looks up at me. Her chin tips slightly, the enormous helpless smile still doing whatever it wants to her face. “Did you mean it, Caleb?”
I hold her gaze for a second.
“Yes.”
The sound she makes is immediate and involuntary, this small, high-pitched squeak that she would absolutely deny making if I brought it up later. Both hands fly back to her face.
“Then this means…”
“You two done?” Josh’s voice comes around the corner of the building half a second before the rest of him does, his hands shoved in his pockets, rocking on his heels with that particular energy of someone who has been standing just out of sight trying to figure out the right moment to interrupt.
Alyssa spins on him, fury on her face, which all melts away the second she recognizes Josh.
Josh isn’t angry. He seems very nervous, though.
“Sorry,” Alyssa says. Her voice comes out measured. I didn’t mean to interrupt his meeting.”
Josh rocks back on his heels a little harder when she says that, his eyes tracking from Alyssa to me.
“Hey, uhhh.” He clears his throat. “You promised to talk today.”
“He did talk,” Alyssa says immediately.
Josh blinks at her. Then at me. His head tilts slightly. “You two didn’t just spend the whole time...”
“No.” I pull in a breath. “I prematured inside her. That's why it probably seems like we've been here for a while. We only just got out here like ten minutes ago.”
Josh stares at me for a long moment.
“I told the whole story,” I say. “The day ten years ago. Start to finish.”
Something moves across his face. His jaw works once, tightening, and his eyes go bright in a way that he immediately tries to cover by looking down at the gravel.
“Did it help?”
The question sits in the air between the three of us. I look at him. Then I look at Alyssa.
These two people.
That’s the whole list. That’s every person in the world who matters to me.
I nod at Josh.
“Yeah,” I say. “It helped.”
Josh turns away from us, just slightly, angling his shoulder toward the street. His hand comes up and rubs the back of his neck.
“I’m glad,” he says.
He doesn’t turn back around.
Alyssa whispers to me. “Talking about Lauren helped you? You want to tell me more about that, Caleb?”
I look at her with everything I have.
The kind of look that says ‘please,’ without making a sound.
Her eyes read it. I watch them move across my face, cataloging.
Then she rolls her eyes so hard I’m surprised she doesn’t pull something.
“Whatever, lover boy.” The words come out fondly, in the particular tone of someone who has decided to grant a reprieve they didn’t have to grant. Her hand finds my chest, fingers curling lightly into the fabric. “You’re mine now.”
I breathe out.
“Yeah,” I say. “I am.”