Page 57 of Riff

She didn’t smell like the girly shit that Colter and Morgaine had gotten her.

No.

She smelled like my soap.

Like she’d been using it while I’d been gone, wanting my scent all over her to remember me by.

Fuck, my heart grew a few sizes bigger at that.

I released her down onto her feet, my grip loosening only as hers did.

But she didn’t let me go.

She slid her hands up my stomach, up my chest, then grabbed the sides of my face as she went up on her tippy toes.

Then sealed her lips to mine.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Vienna

It was almost adolescent how much I missed him.

You know how when you’re young and obsessed with someone to the point where it’s painful to be away from them? The kind of feelings you, you know, grow out of as you get older.

Except, of course, I hadn’t grown out of them, it seemed.

I felt like someone had hollowed out a part of me. The first few days, especially, were rough. I didn’t sleep much. I felt restless and unsure what to do with myself.

Luckily for me, though, I was surrounded by people who understood how I was feeling and worked to help distract me.

Coach led me through increasingly difficult yoga practices, and I even got to a point where I was okay with him touching me enough to help me into my first shoulder stand.

Morgaine asked me to take care of the chickens, a task I knew she was capable of since she did it every other day, but she wanted to give me something to do.

Nyx brought me into the studio to do one of her women’s self-defense classes. No men allowed. Aside from Rook who lived upstairs. And Slash who hung outside just to help me feel safe.

Detroit scored me a private lesson from an experienced yoga teacher at the gym, who pushed me harder than Coach did when she heard I might be interested in teaching myself someday.

Still, I always had to come back to the clubhouse.

I had to feel the ghost of Riff all around.

The longing I felt for him, as each day passed me by, felt less and less like that for a comfort person, and increasingly like, well, something else entirely.

The idea of that, though, sent me into a full-on panic attack that had both Coach and Morgaine sitting with me to calm me down. Then I had an immediate emergency meeting with my therapist who once again reminded me that this sort of thing was perfectly normal.

“Many women who have been through traumatic abuse have loving partners at home,” she’d argued as I fretted. “And it is a normal progression for them to crave more of that love and, eventually, intimacy with them.”

She reminded me that I was working on my own personal timeline, no one else’s. And that the progression of my feelings with Riff was entirely up to me. She told me that, if I felt safe and interested, that I was free to explore more with Riff. And that if it felt wrong, I was just as free to dial things back.

As if I’d been seeking reassurances that it wasn’t wrong for me to feel the way I was feeling, I slowly allowed myself to consider a reality where Riff was more than just a comfort person and friend to me.

By the time Coach told me that they were on the last leg home, I had all but wrapped my head around allowing myself to ease into… more with Riff.

As I watched the car make its way up the road and into the driveway, there was no stopping myself from throwing open the door, running down the front path, then literally throwing myself into Riff’s arms.

My heart felt full to bursting as he whipped me around in a circle, his arms holding onto me just as tightly as I was clinging to him.

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