Page 31 of Scr*wed By the Minotaur in Hallow's Cove
I blinked, still half-lost in the afterglow, then realized he was already hopping off the tailgate, reaching back to gather up mugs and wrappers and the little lantern. There was a noteof finality in the way he moved, not cold, but—gentle. Like he wanted to wrap the night up without shattering whatever spell we’d put ourselves under.
I followed him into the cab, the warmth inside a shock after the chill outside. He started the engine, then paused, resting his hands lightly on the wheel. “That was… fuck, Lea. I don’t have words for it.”
My cheeks flared, and I buried my nose in my shoulder, not wanting to make it a big thing, even though it was. “Yeah,” I said, and it sounded thin, so I tried again. “Me too. I don’t think I ever—I mean, I never—did it like this,” I finished, feeling a little embarrassed by the nakedness of the thought. “With anyone.”
Rick reached over, squeezing my hand tight, his thumb tracing little nervous lines along the bones.
He didn’t say anything else until we pulled up to my apartment. The street was empty, and the only sound was the click of the cooling engine. He cut the lights and turned to me, his face half-shadow in the cab.
“I had a plan for tonight,” he said, voice soft but steady. “Thought I’d take you home after, like, a proper date. Walk you to your door and leave you wanting more, like a gentleman.”
I grinned, a little sleepy, a little delirious from the rush of the night. “You mean you weren’t going to try and seduce me in the truck bed?”
He snorted, but there was a flicker of seriousness in his eyes. “No, I wasn’t. I mean, I wanted to, but that wasn’t the point.” He let out a slow breath, collecting his words. “I wanted to show you that you’re worth more than just a quick fuck and a night on a mattress. I wanted to do it right. I wanted to… I don’t know. Prove I could be the kind of guy you’d want to keep around.”
He let the words hang, not looking at me, but the way his hand clenched the steering wheel gave away everything he was trying not to say.
I wanted to tell him that I’d never met anyone like him. That he was already the standard by which I would judge every other man for the rest of my life, and all of them would fall short. But I didn’t know how to put that into words that weren’t embarrassing or too much or, worst of all, so honest that saying them might make him disappear.
So I settled for the simplest thing: “You already did.”
I leaned over the battered center console, slipped my fingers around the back of his neck, and kissed him, slow and deep and with all the certainty I didn’t know I had until it was unlocked by his stubborn, messy, beautiful devotion. When I pulled away, he was grinning, a little dazed, like he’d just discovered a new law of physics.
He squeezed my thigh, just above the knee, and let the silence fill up between us until it felt as peaceful as the cold night beyond the windshield. I wanted to stay there, soaking up the warmth and the hush and the way he looked at me like we were the only two creatures on Earth. But there was a point, with every good night, where you had to open your door and trust the world would still be waiting in the morning.
I slid out of the truck, shivering as my feet hit the cold earth. He followed, not giving me a chance to protest, to the door, hand warm at the small of my back the whole way. At the threshold, neither of us moved.
He reached up, tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, and said, “Text me when you wake up?” Like it wasn’t a given, like it was the most fragile hope in the world.
I found his hand and squeezed it. “I will.” After everything, it seemed stupid and impossible to want more, to trust that wanting more wouldn’t ruin all the good built up in the last few hours. But the words didn’t scare me this time. I wanted to text him. I wanted to tell him everything.
He kissed my forehead, a quick, almost embarrassed brush, then stepped back and walked to the truck. He waited at the curb until he saw my lights come on inside.
I leaned my head against the door after it closed, listening to the slow beat of my own heart, the way the walls echoed back the contentment I’d managed to borrow from the stars. Hours later, wrapped in my own blankets, I lay awake and replayed every second of the night again and again, like a favorite song. There was a new ache inside me, but it wasn’t loneliness—not exactly. It was the kind of ache you get when something you never thought you’d have was suddenly, miraculously, yours.
Chapter sixteen
Rick
WithLeabackinHallow’s Cove, her city life wrapped up and squared away, we fell into a rhythm. We traded off nights at each other’s apartments. I worked at my shop during the day, but snuck away at odd hours to help her with hers.
At first, there was nothing much to do but wait. Every morning I’d walk over and find her cross-legged on the floor, staring at paint swatches or hunched over a laptop, drafting up to-do lists that bordered on the metaphysical: Fix the floor. Replace the windows. Make Mom proud. Start over. Some days I’d find her with her hands deep in potting soil, sleeves rolled to her elbows, a streak of dirt on her forehead like a war stripe. She’d be talking to her seedlings as if they were old friends. I kept my jokes to a minimum, because it seemed less like she was talking to herself than holding court with a thousand tiny, green confidants.
Given the progress that had already been made, Randy’s crew finished the big stuff in two days. After the demo, the shop looked like one of those time-lapse videos where a building crumbles to the studs and then, impossibly, emerges shinier andmore itself than before. The new floor gleamed, the windows sparkled, and the back room was dry as a bone. I handled the grit work—patching drywall, running new conduit, swapping out some ancient fuse box for the kind that wouldn’t burn the whole block down after a power surge. Evenings, we’d go over the day’s progress, splitting takeout or leftovers, always ending up on the floor or the work table, limbs tangled and mouths hungry. Sometimes, Lea would fall asleep mid-sentence—head on my chest, hand curled in my shirt—and I just let her, because it felt like a privilege to be the last thing she trusted before she let go.
It was the third week after coming back from the city when she started getting squirrelly. The opening was creeping closer, and her lists multiplied. She’d read one, then scribble three more things to do. She double-checked everything I touched, though I didn’t mind. If it calmed her, I’d let her measure each paint stripe and count every petal on the fake sample bouquets. She was, technically, my boss for all work performed within her domain, and I liked the way she’d start to order me around, then forget what she was ordering and just stare at me until I kissed her out of her spiral.
She never said it out loud, but I could feel her nerves ratchet up a notch every day. I wanted to fix it, be the guy who made the world easier for her, but I also knew that nothing would calm her down except the thing itself: the launch, the proof that she could survive a night with all eyes on her and not collapse into a heap.
So I decided to make the opening a little easier. I fired off a text to Maisie—Urgent, need your help, bookstore?—and left Bryce with the hardware. By the time I crossed the street, the rain had started, drumming a steady beat on the awnings as I ducked through the door of the bookstore.
Barnaby was at the counter, nose deep in some leather-bound volume that looked older than the town itself. With the stormylight outside illuminating his pale, angular profile, he looked like he belonged in an oil painting.
“She’s in the back,” he said, not looking up, but his mouth curling into a hint of a smile. “Try not to break anything.”
I snorted and wove my way through the shelves. I still got lost in here sometimes—Barnaby’s arrangement of books was vast and varied. I found Maisie hunkered over her computer in the back room.
She didn’t look up as I walked in, just kept typing with the kind of terrifying efficiency that always made me think she was secretly running the government. I hovered in the doorway until she finally glanced up, eyebrows arched, face already halfway to a smirk.
