Page 116 of Flat Out
She shook her head once, eyes filling with despair and disbelief. "You don’t?—"
"I do." I exhaled, pressing my forehead against hers, voice dropping to a whisper. "I do, love. And I always will. Racing 101, right?"
Her entire body caved, fucking collapsing. A sob tore from her throat, and then she was throwing her arms around my neck. She was falling, but I caught her.
I always fucking would.
“Commit to your line,” she muttered, but now there was a playfulness to it, that shot an arrow straight through my heart to hear again.
“And mine’s you.”
Callum pulledme back into the bed, and the sound that ripped out of me was equal parts sob and laugh, like grief and relief were colliding in my chest. The tension I’d been carrying in my shoulders, in my spine, in the very marrow of me, finally broke. I folded against him as though my body had been waiting for this permission—to rest, to collapse, tobelong.
My ribs still ached from yesterday, from crying until my lungs burned, from holding on so tight I thought I might splinter. Every bruise and scrape felt like proof of how easily the world could break me. But in his arms, the same aches turned into something else entirely. Not a wound, not a punishment, but a reminder that I was still alive, still here. That maybe pain could mean survival, and survival meant there was still something worth wanting. Not just existing to succeed, but tolive.
“Mon amour,” I whispered, the words barely making it past the tears leaking hot down my temples. My eyes closed, surrendering to the feel of him. We were both alive, here in each other’s arms, in the quiet of this room where only the sound of the rain anduscould penetrate our haze. “You don’t know what that means to me.”
“Yes, I do,” he murmured. His lips brushed my lashes, then my temple, then the tender, ugly bruise darkening my cheekbone. Each kiss softened the sharp edges of my pain until they blurred into something gentler, something almost holy. He always had a way of making me surrender to him. “Because yesterday, I thought I lost you. And now you’re here, and you’re mine, and I’ll never let you believe you’re anything less than whole.”
Whole.
The word landed in my chest like a revelation. Yesterday, my body had felt like a cage—broken, traitorous, proof of everything I’d been told I couldn’t be. Incapable of controlling the car any longer, giving out on me as the strength bled from me the way life had before. But now? Pressed to him, breathing with him, the pain inside felt less like emptiness and more like space. Space we might fill together, however we chose.
I sagged into him, trembling, but lighter than I’d been in years. Lighter because the weight of carrying it alone wasn’t mine anymore. It wasours.
And then he asked the question. The one that had gutted me for so long I thought it might kill me to hear it aloud.
“Do you want kids, Aurélie?”
My body went still. My heart stumbled. Every nerve screamed at me to run, to shut down, to hide the truth in silence where it couldn’t wound me again. For years I had done just that—buried the want so deep it became a fossil, something Icouldn’t admit even to myself. Safer to pretend I never wanted it. Safer to live without hope than to risk it being crushed again.
But then his pale blue eyes held mine. Steady. Gentle. Carving out a space safe enough for honesty. Telling me whatever answer I gave him wasokay. That the choice wasmine.
And for the first time, I let myself imagine it. Not the picture-perfect story the world shoved in my face, not the dream they said I’d never deserve. Just… me and him. However it looked. Whatever it meant. A future of our deciding.
My lips wobbled, my throat closed, and the tears came harder. But I nodded.
His reaction nearly undid me, eyes closing briefly in relief. He touched my face as though he’d been drowning and I was the shore, thumb catching the tears spilling faster than I could stop them.
“Okay,” he breathed. “That’s all I need to know. If you want them, then we’ll figure it out. Other options, other paths. Whatever it takes. But I need to understand everything, so I can be here for you. So I can be what you need. Because I’m not going anywhere, Aurélie.”
My lungs collapsed around a sob, but this one wasn’t despair. This one was pure release. The years of shame, the nights I’d convinced myself I was unworthy, the terror that love would always leave me once it saw the truth—all of it washed away in his vow.
Clean. I was clean now, rid of the dirty lies I’d believed all this time.
I pressed a kiss right over his heart, the steady thrum under my lips proof that he meant it. That he was staying. “What about you?” I asked, my voice barely more than a sigh. Because if he didn’t want this—any version of it—I had to know before I let myself believe too much. But part of me already knew hisanswer, well before he even took the breath to utter the words aloud.
“I want them too,” he said. His fingers slid through my tangled hair with such tenderness it nearly hurt. “But the craziest thing? I never thought about it before you. Not once in my life. And now the future is all I think about. Only ever with you.”
The sound that left me was fragile and fractured—a laugh breaking open through a sob. For so long the future had been a locked room in my mind, barred and shadowed. And now he’d flung the door wide open, lit it with something bright and impossible.
“And by the way,” he whispered, kissing me softly. I arched into his touch, caving to him, and his hand splayed over my womb, the span of it reaching from hip to hip, “your body isn’t broken. It’s perfect. Exactly how it was always meant to be. Made for me. To carry me when I couldn’t, to fit against me like two halves of the same heartbeat, to remind me every day that home isn’t a place or a podium. It’s you.”
The words poured into me like water into desert soil. What had been dry, cracked, barren inside me bloomed with something terrifying and new:hope.
He pressed his forehead to mine, his breath fanning across my lips. “And if you’re okay with it, when you’re ready… I’d like to hear all the information. Everything you know. Or we can go get answers, so we can plan. Together.”
Plan. Together.
