Page 70 of Hollowed

But his voice broke through the hush like breath returning to a body.

“Still here?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

His arm tightened around me.

“I didn’t want to wake up without you.”

And just like that, I wasn’t afraid of the stillness anymore.

Because it wasn’t the absence of movement.

It was the presence of us.

He asked me once what I wanted to be called.

Not the name they gave me. Not the one he whispered into my throat when I came on his cock. Not even the one written into the pages of the ledger that waited in silence for every girl to leave.

He asked with his eyes.

Lying on his side, shirtless, still sweat-slick from the vow we’d just made with breath and movement and the silence that followed. His hand cupped my hip like a relic. His gaze never dropped to my body.

Only my face.

“I don’t know,” I whispered. “What am I now?”

His jaw clenched. His thumb traced the hollow beneath my ribs. He looked at me like I had asked him to carve scripture with his teeth.

“You’re the place I remember I’m still alive,” he said.

And then he didn’t speak for hours.

We sat together by the edge of the basin. The water hadn’t been changed. He didn’t ask me to kneel. I didn’t offer. There was nothing to prove.

Not anymore.

He watched me as I bathed myself.

Washed his come from my thighs. My neck. The places where his hands had marked me. He didn’t look away.

And I didn’t cover myself.

Because what was there to hide, now?

He’d fucked me until I couldn’t remember my own voice.

Then kissed me like it was the only thing he knew how to hear.

I dipped a cloth into the water and turned to him.

“Your turn.”

He said nothing.

But he let me come to him.

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