Page 72 of Lady and the Butcher
The question gnawed at me, even as my body leaned toward his heat, even as my pulse steadied when his hand stayed heavy on my knee.
I thought of Stephen’s warning.
I thought of my mother, who would spot the cleaver tattoo at his neck in a second during daylight and call it what it was: scary.
And I thought of myself, pressed to the glass, begging for what only his hands had taught me to want.
Was I reckless? Yes. Was I terrified? Absolutely. Was I alive in a way I hadn’t been in years? God, help me, yes.
The tug-of-war inside me burned my palms raw.
23
Aweek passed, though it didn’t feel like time had moved in a straight line. It felt bent, warped, like the light you see when you look at water through glass.
During the days, I was still Simone Rogers, doula and shop owner. My phone buzzed with questions about Braxton Hicks and breast pumps. I showed first-time mothers how to swaddle and reminded second-time mothers that they really did know what they were doing. I stocked lanolin, arranged diapers in neat towers, and pretended my hands were as steady as they had always been.
But at night—at night I was something else. Atticus’s loft became my second orbit. The hum of the river, the glow of the skyline, his mouth on mine until every nerve in my body rewrote its alphabet.
I tried to keep the worlds separate. Tried to believe I could live under two suns without getting burned.
It didn’t work.
Because no matter how carefully I stacked bottles on shelves, the memory of Atticus’s hand around a man’s throat followed me. It bled into my bones, into the way my skin prickledwhenever the door chimed at the shop, like I half expected another warehouse man to come staggering in, coughing and red-faced.
And yet, when I crawled into Atticus’s bed, when he pulled me under him with that exact balance of control and care, my body didn’t protest. It begged.
I was a contradiction, and I knew it.
Stephen stopped by on Wednesday. He leaned against the counter like he had after every soccer game of my childhood, sweaty and casual, except this time his color was wrong. His cheeks looked hollow, his skin pale in a way that had nothing to do with work fatigue.
“You’re still not sleeping,” I said.
He shrugged, smiling with effort. “Who sleeps? You never did.”
I wanted to press, but he veered the conversation toward me instead, asking if business was good, if the new staff were working out, if I’d eaten breakfast. Brother questions that sounded caring but felt like cover. His laugh was thinner than it should have been.
When Atticus walked in ten minutes later, carrying a brown bag that smelled like fresh biscuits and eggs, Stephen’s eyes sharpened.
“You two are …” He didn’t finish the sentence. Didn’t need to. His gaze bounced between us, measuring, cataloging.
Atticus didn’t flinch. He set the bag on the counter like it was already his place to put it. “Eat,” he told me, then tipped his chin at Stephen. “You, too. You look like hell.”
Stephen bristled, the way brothers do when someone else notices what you’ve been trying to hide. But he took a biscuit, anyway.
I tried not to shake at how easily Atticus claimed space. My brother’s space. My space.
That night, at the loft, Atticus stripped me slow, every button deliberate, every piece of fabric tossed aside like it had no right to keep him from my skin.
“You’ve been walking around all day with this look,” he said, lips brushing my collarbone.
“What look?”
“Like you’re trying to convince yourself I’m not under your skin.” His teeth grazed. “But I am.”
I wanted to deny it, to hold some part of myself back. But then his fingers slid inside me, steady and patient, his eyes locked on mine while my body gave up every lie.
He ruined me again, pressed to the tall steel window of his river loft, the dark water below throwing our bodies back at us. Barges hummed, a horn cut the night, and he held me with his mouth at my throat, voice rough, telling me to give it all. I did. I gave him everything, again and again, until I couldn’t remember what it had felt like not to.
