Nine-forty p.m. Kids asleep and house quiet. Me on the couch with a veterinary file open on my lap, reading the same line about equine dental floats for the fourth time without absorbing a single word.
My brain wouldn't stop. It just kept cycling about Levi's silence, Mrs. Delgado's text, the pastor's wife pivoting her cart like I was contagious, Lily's drawing with the red X torn through the paper.
A carousel of worst moments on a loop while I stared at a paragraph about horse teeth and pretended I was functioning.
Kameron came in from the porch and sat down next to me. He didn't speak for a full minute, which was so out of character I almost checked him for a fever.
He watched me pretend to read the way you watch someone drown in three inches of water — patient, waiting, knowing they'll figure out they can stand up if you give them a second.
Then he reached over and took the file out of my hands. Set it on the coffee table.
"Stop working. Be here with me."
After these words I kissed him hard first. Not the slow, coffee-flavored mornings or the lazy porch sunsets. This was a collision with teeth and breath and my hands fisting his shirt like I could physically anchor myself to something that wasn't falling apart.
He was already hard when I ground into his lap. He groaned against my mouth and gripped my ass with both hands.
He lifted me off the couch like I weighed nothing. Carried me down the hall with my legs around his waist and my face buried in his neck, his heartbeat hammering against my chest as hard as mine. The bedroom door hit the wall when he kicked it shut. Neither of us flinched.
He laid me back with one hand bracing the curve of my belly — that single second of care before the care stopped mattering. My shirt went over my head. His eyes went dark at the sight of me — breasts swollen, nipples flushed.
I started to cover myself and he pinned my wrists above my head. "Don't you dare. You're fucking gorgeous, firecracker. Every inch."
His mouth found my breast and the sound I made wasn't human. Pregnancy had turned every nerve into a live wire.
He sucked, licked, grazed with his teeth until I was writhing, then kissed down over my belly — one moment of reverence — before settling between my thighs and destroying me.
His tongue swept through my folds and I fisted the sheets hard enough to hear fabric strain.
He ate me like a man who'd been starving — deep, relentless strokes, two thick fingers curling inside me, his lips sealed around my clit, sucking in rhythm.
"Three weeks of watching you hold everything together." His voice was rough against my skin. "This is the only time you've been still, and it's because I'm making you."
I came with my thighs clamped around his head and his name cracking in my throat.
He barely gave me time to breathe before I was pulling him up, shoving his jeans down, wrapping my hand around the thick, hard length of him.
He flipped onto his back and pulled me on top — the only position that worked with my belly, and the one that put me in control of the only thing I could still control.
I sank down onto him in one slow slide. The stretch was devastating — pregnancy had made everything swollen, sensitive, engorged — and we both went still, breathing hard.
"Ivory." Not a whisper, but a statement. Reminding both of us we were still here.
I rode him hard. This was three weeks of fear and adrenaline crashing into one body, and his hands gripped my hips hard enough to leave bruises while his thumb found my clit and his palm splayed warm across my belly, holding me and the baby both.
My nails went down his chest because closer still wasn't close enough.
"Let go, firecracker. I've got you."
I shattered with the kind of release that rips through you like a storm surge, taking everything with it — the tension, the control, the carefully maintained dam I'd built between functioning and falling apart.
My walls clenched around him in rhythmic pulses, and his control snapped a breath later — hands locked on my hips, burying himself deep, a groan dragged from somewhere he didn't let anyone see.
And then I cried.
Face pressed into his chest, tears soaking his skin while the aftershocks still moved through me.
Ugly crying with sounds and shaking and snot, the kind I hadn't let myself do once since Tom Wheeler's truck pulled away three weeks ago.
Kameron held me. Both arms around my back, tight against him, and didn't say a single stupid thing. Didn't tell me it would be okay or promise the town would come around or the kids would be fine.
He just lay there, heartbeat under my ear, hands warm on my spine, and let me fall apart on top of him like that was his sole purpose on this earth.
For the first time in three days I slept with deep, dreamless, the black-hole kind that swallows you whole and doesn't give you back until your body decides it's done rebuilding whatever you'd destroyed by refusing to rest.
Morning light woke me. Gold through the curtains. For three perfect seconds I didn't remember any of it before the carousel started again and reality climbed back into bed with me.
Kameron's side was empty. The indent of his head was still on the pillow, and I pressed my face into it like a woman who'd lost all dignity and was fine with that.
A soft knock on the door frame with two knuckles.
Colt stood in the doorway holding a mug of coffee in one hand and a glass of water in the other. Because of course — this was a man who believed in contingencies the way other people believed in God.
"Wasn't sure which you'd want first."
"Coffee. Always coffee. You should know this by now."
The ghost of a smile. He sat on the edge of the bed — not close enough to crowd, not far enough to feel distant. That precise Colt distance, calibrated to the millimeter, always leaving space for me to close the gap if I wanted.
I sat up, took the mug, and let the first sip burn down my throat. He watched me the way he'd been watching for weeks — not with Kameron's billboard-readable concern, but with that quiet, cataloging attention that missed nothing and said less.
"How are you doing?" he asked. "And I mean really. Not the version you've been giving everyone else."
I wrapped both hands around the mug. Colt deserved an honest answer, and honest answers required more energy than I usually had before seven a.m.
"Scared. Angry. Tired in a way that sleep doesn't fix. Tired of grocery shopping like it's a combat mission. Tired of watching Lily check my face every morning to see if today's a bad day. Tired of Levi not talking. Tired of being the one who holds it together while everything falls apart."
He was quiet. Processing. Then he took my free hand — not urgently, not desperately, just a steady grip that said I'm here and I'm not going anywhere and I don't need you to perform strength for me.
"Then lean on us. That's what we're here for. Not just the ranch work and the school runs. This. The part where you stop carrying it alone and let someone else hold the weight for five minutes."
I nodded slowly. Because leaning wasn't something I did — it was something I supervised other people doing while I stood upright and made sure nobody fell.
Six years of single motherhood had turned self-reliance into a religion, and handing even a fraction of the load to someone else felt like stepping off a cliff and trusting the ground to catch me.
But I nodded. Because Colt was sitting on my bed with coffee and water and steady hands and those clear, honest eyes, and if I couldn't lean on this man, I couldn't lean on anyone.
"I'm not good at it," I said.
"I know." He squeezed my hand. "Do it anyway."