[Dylan’s POV]
Something is wrong with Skyler tonight. She's in the kitchen, hands wrapped around a mug she hasn't drunk from, a storm behind her eyes she's containing with everything she's got.
Her smile arrives a half-second late—manufactured, the kind you build when the real one has been knocked clean out of you. I don't ask. Skyler Gray doesn't open on command, and pushing only adds another brick.
So I lean against the counter and keep my voice easy, keep every instinct to demand ‘who hurt you’ locked behind my teeth. "Come somewhere with me."
She looks up, and whatever she's containing flickers behind her pupils before she shuts it down. "Where?"
"The lake. Just us, no agenda." My hands stay in my pockets, posture deliberately open, and the effort costs me more than she'll know.
"No agenda…" she repeats it like testing it for cracks and sets the untouched mug on the counter. "Okay, sure."
The path is silver under a half-moon and I match her stride—shorter, unhurried, giving her silence without letting it feel like distance. The lake opens before us like black glass, the treeline reflected so cleanly the world looks doubled.
We sit where grass meets pebbled shore. The conversation starts safe—did the kids like school, how'd the eastern perimeter dispute play out—careful currency of two people circling something neither will name first.
Then she turns to face me, and the moonlight catches the silver in her hair. "Dylan, what are we doing?"
"Sitting by a lake? Gorgeous evening, really…" I try the grin, but it bounces off her like a pebble off armor.
"Not the lake." Quiet, steady—the voice she uses when she's done circling. "This. Us. I need to know what this is, because I can't afford to guess wrong." Her throat works once. "I've got two kids and no safety net, and if this is kindness, or guilt, or you being a good Beta—tell me now."
I'm quiet for a long time. Not because I don't know—I've known for weeks, maybe since a little girl held up a drawing of a peaceful cottage and I thought ‘I want to be in that picture.’
I'm quiet because this truth deserves the right shape.
"I think I'm in love with you." No preamble. No softening. "I love you, Skyler, and I love your kids. And if you'll let me, I want to be the one who's there. Every morning, every time Ashton needs someone beside him and every time River needs someone to take her art seriously."
"Why me, Dylan?" Barely audible. "With all the wreckage I come with?"
"Because you took the wreckage and built two incredible kids and a soon-to-be-medical-career and the sharpest humor I've encountered in twenty-eight years." Her mouth opens, closes. "Yes, don’t look so surprised. I’m Beta and his brother, all such decisions go through me too."
My hands are shaking and I let her see. I’m done hiding, I’m done being second. This time I’m choosing her first. And I'm keeping her for good, water it costs.
"If that's wreckage, Sky," I say, taking her beautiful face in my hands, "give me the whole damn disaster."
She kisses me with no warning or slow lean. Her hands on my face the second the words left my mouth and her lips on mine. The sound that she tears out of me is embarrassing and involuntary, but I don’t care. This woman can do whatever she wants with me and I’m hers to surrender, willingly so.
My hands slide into her soft hair and she tastes like the tea she didn't drink and something underneath that's just her, and I'm gone.
She pulls back just enough to breathe, forehead against mine. "Say it again."
Her voice is wrecked and the sound of it goes straight through me.
"I love you," I say against her mouth, letting it sit between our lips. "I love—"
She cuts me off with another kiss—deeper this time, fingers curling into my collar, and my hands trail down her spine. Skyler arches against me and the sound she lets herself out rewires my whole being.
The woman she is…
Her fingers find the hem of my hoodie and pull—arms over my head, fabric gone, the night air cool for one heartbeat before her palms press against my chest. Her nails drag down my ribs and every nerve I own relocates to wherever she's touching.
I reach for the buttons of her cardigan and my fingers are hopeless. Too eager, the first one slipping twice. She laughs against my mouth, low and vibrating, and the sound settles somewhere south of rational thought.
I give up on buttons and pull the whole thing off her shoulders.
Moonlight on her collarbone, the hollow of her throat, curves I've been pretending not to notice for weeks. I take my time. My mouth traces the line of her shoulder, teeth grazing where her neck meets her collarbone, and her fingers dig crescents into my back.
I lay her down on my hoodie on the grass, one hand cradling her head, and she pulls me with her. The shock of her skin against mine sends a tremor through my arms that I couldn't hide if I tried.
My mouth finds the dip between her breasts, the sensitive curve below her ear that makes her back bow off the ground. I trace the line of her ribs with my thumb and she shudders.
I memorize every sound she gives me—each one a map I intend to follow again.
Her hips press against mine and my ability to form sentences evaporates. I kiss down her sternum, the curve of her waist, the soft skin of her hip where she shivers under my lips.
Her fingers twist in my hair, pulling me back up, and the urgency in her grip tells me everything her mouth hasn't said.
My mouth finds hers as her legs wrap around me, heels pressing into the small of my back. The friction drags a sound from me I couldn't suppress if my life depended on it. Her fingers curl around my shoulders, nails biting down, and the sting is permission.
Her hips roll and the sound she makes—breathless, urgent, my name broken into syllables—dismantles every careful thought I've ever had. Her fingers trace the muscles of my stomach, lower, and my vision whites out at the edges.
I stop being careful. She asked me to—not with words but with her nails raking down my back. The way she breathes ‘please’ against my jaw, her body arching to erase every remaining inch between us.
I give her what she's asking for and the sound she makes splits the night open.
Her spine bows off the grass, fingers white-knuckled beside her head, and I press my forehead to hers and watch her come undone. Flushed, trembling, her mouth open on a sound she can't finish.
I follow her over the edge and the world narrows to her heartbeat against my chest and the grass beneath us and the way she whispers my name one more time, soft, like she's keeping it safe somewhere no one else can reach.
Tangled on the grass, her head on my chest, her fingers tracing a scar along my ribs with the focus of a woman who can't turn off the healer in her.
"Are you okay?" she murmurs into my skin, and the tenderness of it—this woman, asking me—nearly undoes me all over again.
"Better than I've ever been." I press my mouth to the top of her head. Her breathing evens out. Her hand stills on my ribs.
She falls asleep against me, and I hold her and stare at the sky—black, infinite, indifferent to the fact that my entire world just rearranged on a patch of lakeside grass.
The thought arrives uninvited, quiet as a knife between ribs.
I know who could heal my brother. She's asleep in my arms. And I'm not letting go.