FALLING FOR THE LYCAN BIKER: MY BESTFRIEND BROTHER

Chapter 69: DON’T GO ANYWHERE. JUST STAY HERE. PLEASE.

Chapter 70

Lumi

I stood in that hallway far longer than I should have.

Long enough for the sound of the deadbolt to stop echoing. Long enough for the particular humiliation of having a door shut in your face to settle into something quieter and more honest.

Long enough to admit to myself, standing alone in a corridor, that I had absolutely no right to feel hurt by any of it.

I had called him a monster.

I had told him to leave and not come back, and he had done exactly that, and now I was standing on the wrong side of his door feeling the specific, deserved sting of someone who had asked for silence and received it and now discovered too late that it was not what they wanted at all.

I turned around and walked back to my car.

I sat in the driver’s seat for a moment without starting the engine, my hands in my lap, staring at the building through the windscreen.

I pressed the heel of my hand against my chest, took a deep breath, then picked up my phone and called Neve.

She answered on the first ring.

"Is he okay?" she said immediately, her voice still tight with worry. "Lumi, please tell me he’s okay."

"He’s okay," I said. "He answered the door. He said the phone died and he forgot to charge it." I paused. "He looks rough, Neve. But he’s standing up and talking."

Neve let out a long, shaking breath. "Oh thank God. Thank God." A pause. "How did he seem? Was he..."

"He was fine," I said, which was technically true. He had been fine. Cold and entirely indifferent but perfectly fine. "He just wanted me to go."

There was a brief silence on Neve’s end that said she had heard something in my voice she wasn’t going to push on.

That was one of the things I had always appreciated about her. She knew when to leave a thing alone.

"Thank you for going," she said quietly. "I mean it, Lumi."

We said goodbye and I put the phone down, started the engine and pulled out onto the quiet street.

I told myself I was not going to think about the look on his face when he opened the door.

I told myself it was what I deserved and that I was going to drive back to my office, sit down, finish the quarterly reports and pick Theo up at three, cook dinner and go to bed and be fine.

I made it approximately four blocks, then turned the car around.

It wasn’t planned, my hands simply did it. I parked outside the building again, sat in the driver’s seat with my heart doing something entirely disordered.

I got out of the car after a while and walked back down the corridor.

I stood outside his door and knocked again, and this time I did not rehearse anything because every speech I had ever prepared for this man had dissolved the moment he looked at me, so there was no point.

Nothing happened for a long moment. Then the bolt slid back, slower this time, and the door opened.

He looked at me with the same flat expression. If anything, it was flatter than before, which I hadn’t thought was possible.

"Lumi," he said.

"I know," I said. "I know you want me to go. I know I have absolutely no right to be standing here after what I said. I know you don’t owe me anything, not your time, not your patience, not even this conversation." I stopped and took a breath.

"But I came back because I needed to say something that isn’t a report for Neve and isn’t an excuse, and I’m going to say it and then I’ll leave and I won’t come back if that’s what you want."

Then I just let everything I had been carrying for four weeks come to the surface, all of it, without managing it, measuring it or making it safer than it actually was.

"I’m not here because Neve called me," I continued.

"I need you to know that. Neve called me and it got me to my car but it is not why I’m standing in this corridor right now, and it is not why I turned around four blocks from here because I couldn’t make myself keep driving." My voice was doing something it hadn’t done in a very long time.

It was shaking slightly, not with fear but with the particular trembling of someone telling the complete truth after a long time of telling something smaller.

"I’m here because this is where I want to be. Not where I ended up. Not where obligation brought me. Where I want to be." He didn’t say anything but didn’t turn away either and I was grateful.

"I was terrified," I poured out, the word came out stripped of everything except what it actually was.

"Not of you. Never of you. Of how much I felt when I was around you. Of how fast it happened and how real it was.

How completely unprepared I was for someone like you to show up in my life and just, without any announcement, become the person I looked for in every room." I pressed on, because if I stopped I would not start again.

"And when I got scared I did the cruelest thing I could think of, I aimed it directly at you, at the part of you I knew would hurt the most, because I thought if I made you leave first then I would be in control of it. Of losing you."

My chest was rising and falling too fast now. I could feel it, the shallow, uneven rhythm of someone who had been underwater and had finally broken the surface.

"Like I said, I’ll understand if you close this door again," I said, and I meant it, I meant every word of it.

"I will understand it completely and I will not blame you for a single second of it. But I need you to know something first." I looked at him, directly, with none of the protective distance I usually kept between myself and anything that mattered this much.

"Even if you shut this door, I’m never leaving this corridor, Ren. I’ll stand here until you open the door, because I care about you in a way I don’t have the right vocabulary for, and I am done pretending that I don’t." I was breathing hard by the time the last word left my mouth, my breath coming in shallow, unsteady pulls, my hands trembling slightly at my sides.

My heart so loud in my own ears that I was certain he could hear it from where he stood.

I had never said anything like that to anyone. I had never let anything that large and unguarded leave my body and just exist in the open air between me and another person.

Ren looked at me for a long moment. Long enough that the trembling in my hands moved up into my chest.

Long enough that I started to believe he was going to say nothing at all, that he was going to close the door quietly and that would be the answer and I would have to find a way to live with it.

Then he straightened up from the doorframe and stepped back, opening the door wider.

He didn’t say anything. He just stepped back and left the entrance open, and turned and walked back into the apartment, and I stood in the threshold catching my breath.

Then I stepped inside.

The apartment was exactly what the outside had suggested. Clean, spare and entirely without pretension.

A wide main room, a kitchen along one wall, one sofa, a low table, bookshelves that were actually being used.

No artwork, no decoration, just the evidence of a person who lived in a space and didn’t need it to say anything about him.

He lowered himself onto the sofa with the careful, deliberate movements of someone whose body was quietly fighting something and losing, and rested his forearms on his knees and looked at the floor.

I sat in the chair across from him, because it felt like the right distance for now.

The silence between us was different from the one in the corridor. That one had been a wall. This one had a kind of breathing space.

"You should have said that," he said finally, his voice still flat but with something underneath it now that hadn’t been there at the door. "The scared part. You should have just said that."

"I know," I said.

"Because I would have..." He stopped. His jaw tightened and he looked at the floor for a moment before he looked back up.

"I would have slowed down. I would have given you more time. Whatever you needed, Lumi. I wasn’t trying to rush you into anything. I was just there because that’s where I wanted to be."

I looked at him and felt the full weight of that land somewhere in my chest, and I didn’t trust my voice enough to answer it, so I didn’t.

The room was quiet for a moment.

Then I stood up from the chair, crossed to the sofa and sat beside him, close enough that I could feel the warmth radiating off him.

I reached up and pressed the back of my hand gently against his forehead but then I pulled my hand back immediately and then I pressed it against his cheek.

My stomach dropped.

He was burning, the deep, radiating heat of a fever that had been climbing for days without anyone doing anything about it.

The moment I registered it the fear came flooding in, cold and immediate, overriding everything else in my chest.

"Ren." I pulled my hand back and stood up, already turning toward the kitchen. "You’re burning up. How long have you been like this? Have you taken anything? Do you have painkillers? Where..." His hand caught my wrist.

His fingers wrapped around the inside and I stopped mid-step and turned back to look at him confused.

He was looking up at me from the sofa, his dark eyes heavy with fever and tiredness and something else underneath.

"Stay," he said. His voice was low and rough. "Don’t go anywhere. Just stay here. Please."