Riley's Night (IV), Part 3

The first silence lasted about eight heartbeats. That was as long as it took for Riley, collapsed against Andy’s chest, to realize her entire body had gone from third-rail arousal to a kind of floaty, open-ended need. She lay there, head pillowed on his arm, sheets sticking to her skin in all the best ways, and told herself she could stay like this forever—just float, just breathe, just be.

On the eighth heartbeat, her pulse started counting up again, which is how she knew she wasn’t done.

The air in the bedroom was thick and salty, sweet with the warmth of four bodies and the slow, hypnotic drag of the surf outside. Riley sat up, not all at once, but by degrees—first her elbow, then her shoulder, then her hair, which spilled forward in a glossy sheet and fanned out over Andy’s face. He didn’t flinch or blink, just let the strands caress his cheek as if they belonged there.

A foot away, Chloe lay on her back, eyes closed, arms thrown up in a victory pose she probably didn’t even know she was making. Her hair was a mess, tangled and fine, sticking to her face in wet, fluttery arcs. Emily was spooned against Chloe’s side, legs braided together, one hand flat on Chloe’s stomach and the other curled in a loose fist near her own chest. Andy couldn’t see Emily’s face, but the rise and fall of her breath was slower than the rest—a syncopation that only she had access to.

Riley rolled sideways, propped her chin on Andy’s sternum, and said, “Hey.” Her voice was lower than usual, a little rough, but it was the voice of someone who knew exactly what she wanted.

Andy blinked at her. “Yeah?”

She looked over his shoulder, saw that Chloe and Emily were still fully in the afterglow, then whispered, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I want you again. Right now. Actually, I want you even more than before. I think I’m broken.”

Andy snorted. “I’m not sure that’s a defect.”

Behind him, Chloe made a dreamy noise, not quite awake but definitely aware. “Is it a defect if I want to keep him too?” she said, voice muffled by the pillow.

Riley’s eyes narrowed, but not in a mean way. She wiggled up Andy’s body so her face was even with his, then twisted her hand in the sheet for leverage. “We can share,” she told Chloe, over Andy’s mouth. “But he’s coming with me for round two.”

Chloe laughed, sharp and bright, and in one move rolled herself halfway on top of Andy’s lower half. “Mine, too,” she said, and bit his hip through the sheets.

Emily, slow and serene, just extended her arm and laid her palm flat on Andy’s thigh, like she was planting a flag. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to.

Andy blinked at the three of them. “This seems like a problem,” he said, half to himself, “but not the kind I want solved.” He looked at each of them, then at his own hands, and tried to calculate a solution. Chloe’s nails digging into his leg didn’t help his focus. Neither did Riley’s mouth, close and hungry, or Emily’s soft, wordless claim.

Andy glanced between Riley’s expression and the tangle of limbs that was Chloe and Emily, did the math, and decided the situation called for the obvious solution. He’d been getting faster at it—the split barely registered anymore, less like a trick and more like switching hands. He exhaled once, let it happen, and then there were two of him.

Both Andys settled into place with the easy familiarity of someone finding a comfortable chair.

The silence that followed was entirely the women’s.

Riley was the first to move. She recoiled backward, then, seeing that both Andys were smirking at her, she started to laugh—a huge, unselfconscious laugh, all teeth and delight. “You have been holding out on us,” she said, poking the nearest Andy in the sternum.

The second Andy, the one closest to Chloe and Emily, grinned. “I wasn’t holding out,” he said, “it just never came up.”

Chloe, once she’d determined she wasn’t hallucinating, gave a low whistle. “This is amazing,” she said, and kissed the second Andy on the mouth, as if to make sure he was the real deal. He kissed back, a kiss with its own voltage.

Riley watched both Andys at once, eyes darting back and forth. “Which one’s the real one?” she asked.

Both Andys said, at the exact same time, “I am both.”

Chloe clapped her hands, delighted. “I love that,” she said. “We’re going to have so much fun with this.”

Emily, at last, found her voice. She sat up, pink hair tumbling forward, and fixed the second Andy with a stare. “You’re really him?” she asked.

He nodded, then ran a hand through her hair, gentle. “I’m really me.” He tilted his head at Riley and the first Andy. “I’m still the same, just… a little split.”

Emily mulled that over for all of half a second, then kissed him, slow and deliberate. The first Andy felt it, too—less direct than the first one, but with enough overlap that it made his toes curl. “I like it,” she said, and wrapped her arms around the second Andy’s neck.

Riley was quick to recalibrate. She shimmied up the first Andy’s body, straddling his hips, and grabbed both of his wrists in strands of her hair. “Stay here,” she commanded, “and don’t move until I say so.”

He grinned at her. “Yes, ma’am.”

Chloe wasted no time, either. She rolled fully onto the second Andy, pressing him down into the sheets, and immediately started kissing along his jaw, then down his neck, then to his collarbone. Emily, not to be left out, slid her body along the side, nuzzling into his shoulder, her hand never leaving the small of his back.

The room was a study in fractals: two Andys, three women, ten hands, a head of prehensile hair, a million points of contact.

Riley leaned forward, bracing herself above the first Andy’s face. “You can feel both, can’t you?” she asked, something sly in her voice.

He nodded. “Yeah.”

She smiled, slow and dangerous. “I’m going to make you forget how to count.”

He opened his mouth to retort, but she kissed him before he could, biting his bottom lip hard enough to make him groan. The second Andy, kissing Chloe, felt the echo of that bite, a weird feedback that went straight to the base of his skull.

Riley pushed herself down, all muscle and intent, and in one practiced motion lined up with him and slid him inside. She let out a long, shivery exhale, hair draping across his chest in a veil. “Oh fuck, that’s… different,” she said. She started to move, slow at first, then faster, chasing the pulse that had woken up under her skin.

Across the mattress, Chloe had straddled the second Andy, her knees on either side of his thighs. She looked at Emily, a question in her eyes, and Emily nodded: permission granted. Chloe reached down, took Andy’s cock in both hands, and guided him to her. When he pushed up inside, she gasped, then beamed—bright and full, like she’d just gotten away with something tremendous.

Emily lay alongside, watching the whole thing with open fascination. She ran her hand up and down the second Andy’s arm, then dipped her head to his shoulder, her tongue running circles around his nipples, pressing soft kisses there in rhythm with Chloe’s movements.

Both Andys—one under Riley, the other under Chloe—were perfectly aware of everything happening, sensation jumping back and forth between them like they shared a nervous system. It was wild, disorienting, and weirdly intimate, the kind of connection that went deeper than anything he’d ever imagined.

At some point, Riley’s hair, which had been fanned across the pillow, split a single length away from the rest. It snaked out, slow and lazy, across the sheets, and wrapped around the ankle of the second Andy. Neither Riley nor the Andys seemed to notice when it happened; the hair just wanted what it wanted.

Riley was lost in the rhythm now, hands braced on Andy’s shoulders, head thrown back. She let herself be unguarded, all sound and motion, not performing for anyone except herself. Andy watched her, loving the way she rode him without apology, like he was a wave and she was determined to surf until she wiped out.

Chloe, on the other Andy, was less relentless but more focused, her hips moving in a steady, circling motion that drove Andy absolutely crazy. She kept her eyes open, never breaking contact with the man beneath her, and when she leaned in to kiss him, it was possessive, like she’d finally gotten something she’d wanted for years.

Emily, at last, got involved in the action more directly. She crawled up next to Chloe, pressed her chest against Chloe’s back, and reached down to cup Chloe’s breasts in her hands. Her touch was gentle, reverent, and every time she squeezed, Chloe moaned in pleasure.

Riley, gasping and flushed, reached out for something to hold, found Chloe’s hand across the gap, and interlaced their fingers. The two Andys were close enough that their partners could touch each other even while they were locked up with their own targets. For a second, all of them formed a continuous circuit: Riley, Chloe, the second Andy, Emily, the first Andy, and back to Riley. No beginning, no end.

The two rhythms held, side by side but never truly separate. They moved together, sometimes in sync, sometimes in counterpoint, sensation cycling from one cluster to the other and back again. There was no jealousy, no awkwardness, just four people working in perfect counterpoint, each giving and taking in exactly the way they needed.

Andy felt Riley’s body tense around him, her hips grinding in tighter circles. She let go of the sheet, grabbed both his hands, and pulled them to her breasts, squeezing until she gasped again. “Don’t you dare stop,” she said, words nearly slurred with need.

He didn’t.

Chloe was the first to come, her whole body seizing in a drawn-out, shuddery arc. She bit down on the second Andy’s shoulder, hard, and the first Andy felt it in his own skin, a jolt that pushed him to the edge. Emily, caught up in the chain reaction, pressed herself against Chloe and rode the aftershocks, her hair falling around both their faces.

Riley was next. She shuddered, gasped, and clenched hard around the first Andy, her whole being focused into the point of contact. Her hair went wild, wrapping around his arms, his wrists, the headboard, anything it could catch.

The second Andy felt the wave as it rolled through the room, and together, both versions of Andy came, not exactly in sync but close enough that the sensations blurred into a single, world-ending moment.

Chloe: Master Pleased in Stereo! +3 VP
Riley: Master Pleased in Stereo! +3 VP

For maybe an hour, Andy managed to keep himself split, sensations crisscrossing from body to body in a weird, heady tide. He liked the way it let him give everyone what they needed, liked the delight it sparked in Riley, the unspoken hunger it sated in Chloe, the way it made Emily feel less like an afterthought and more like a key piece of the circuit. It was fun. It was a hell of a party trick. So they went again.

The first Andy rolled back to Riley, who hooked a leg over his hip before he’d even fully settled, impatient and grinning. The second Andy moved to Emily, who received him with a soft, wondering exhale, her arms coming up around his neck like she was steadying herself against something tall.

Chloe, displaced but not deterred, migrated to Riley’s side. She leaned over her, hands finding Riley’s breasts, kneading in slow, attentive circles that made Riley’s back arch off the mattress. Riley’s hair, fanned out beneath her, responded to the attention the way it always did—autonomously, hungrily. A thick coil unwound from the pillow with slow, deliberate purpose and began working its way up Chloe’s inner thigh. Chloe’s hands stilled on Riley’s chest. Riley felt it happen—not just saw it—a warm pull that started somewhere at the base of her scalp and moved downward through her whole body, tightening as the hair tightened. She exhaled hard through her nose and grabbed the first Andy’s forearm.

Chloe recovered her rhythm, but the hair didn’t let her forget it was there. Each time it moved, Riley felt the echo of it, intimate and insistent, a sensation she couldn’t localize or argue with. She was already close from Andy, and this was something else on top of that, something that bypassed thought entirely. Her hips started moving differently, less controlled.

When Chloe finally came—sudden, wrecked, clutching Riley’s breasts so hard Riley laughed even as she gasped—the hair surged with her, and that surge went straight back to Riley like a snapped wire. She came almost immediately while Chloe was still riding her orgasm, her whole body locking up around the first Andy, her hair flaring outward across the mattress in every direction at once, pulling taut, then going loose and trembling.

Both Andys crested together in the crossfire, sensation ricocheting between them until it had nowhere left to go. Emily, pinned under the second Andy and watching all of it with wide eyes, dug her heels in and let the wave take her too.

Chloe: Simultaneous Quadruple Orgasm (Partially Hair-Induced)! What the Fuck Just Happened?! +5 VP
First! x2
Riley: Simultaneous Quadruple Orgasm (Partially Hair-Induced)! What the Fuck Just Happened?! +5 VP
Emily: Simultaneous Quadruple Orgasm (Partially Hair-Induced)! What the Fuck Just Happened?! +5 VP

Riley noticed first. Of course she did.

She’d gone from giddy to thoughtful, the way she did sometimes when she was happy, and now she lay on her side, propped up on an elbow, just watching Andy—both Andys—move around the bed. She waited for a lull, then caught one of him by the wrist and pulled him close, until his face was inches from hers.

“You’re allowed to want to be just one person,” she said. “You don’t have to keep splitting yourself for everyone’s comfort.”

Andy tried to joke it off, but the look on her face told him not to. “You want the real thing?” he said, low.

She nodded, a long slow blink. “I want to look you in the eyes and know it’s you. Just you.”

He nodded. The other Andy, across the sheets, went soft at the edges, then blinked out, as if he’d never been there. Riley watched it happen and smiled, something complicated in the curve of her mouth. She tugged Andy onto the mattress and rolled until she was underneath him, her legs wrapping around his hips with a strength that told him she had no intention of letting go.

The others drifted in around them: Chloe, her skin warm and damp, pressing in from the left, a hand on Andy’s shoulder, another tangled in Riley’s hair. Emily, soft and fluid, curled in from the right, her cheek pressed against Andy’s arm, her other hand tracing slow spirals on his back.

Andy looked down at Riley, her face open and bright, her body arched into his. He felt the others around him but kept his eyes on her, using her as his anchor in the flood of sensation.

He pushed into her, slow at first, the way you test the tension on a rope before trusting it with your weight. Riley let out a breath, her whole body going soft and then hard at the same time, her arms locking around his back. Chloe ran her hand up Andy’s spine, then around to cup the back of his head, guiding him down until his mouth met Riley’s. They kissed—hungry, messy, nothing held back—and Andy could feel Chloe’s breath on his cheek, Emily’s lips against his shoulder, the press and squeeze of hands and thighs and heat everywhere.

He moved in her, picking up pace, Riley’s hair a living thing under his palms. Whenever he squeezed her hips, it would wrap around his wrists, a reflex or a spell, he wasn’t sure which. Riley never took her eyes off his, not for a second.

Chloe propped herself up on one elbow, her other hand still buried in Riley’s hair. She kissed along the line of Riley’s jaw, then down her throat, her own breath coming faster as she watched the two of them move together. Andy felt her touch on Riley as if it was on him, too—a doubled sensation that ratcheted everything tighter, closer.

Emily, shy but never reluctant, pressed her body against Andy’s back, her lips finding the point where his shoulder met his neck. Her hands slid down his sides, then lower, fingers tracing every ridge of muscle, every flex and tremor. When Andy shifted his weight for leverage, she scooted down behind him, her arms circling his waist, her hair fanning out across his back. He felt the way she matched his rhythm, hips pressed tight against him, the heat of her obvious even without looking.

They went like that for a while—no race, no contest, just four people wrapped around one need. Riley’s breathing grew louder, each exhale a little sharper, her hands clamped to Andy’s back so tight he could feel the half-moons of her nails. Chloe’s hand never left her hair, and at some point she bent forward, tongue flicking at Riley’s nipple, making her arch and whimper into Andy’s mouth. Emily, in the background, kept up the pressure—her hands, her breath, her own soft moans as she rocked in time with the rest.

Chloe was the first to tip over. She shivered, then shuddered, her fingers tightening in Riley’s hair so hard Andy thought she might yank it out by the roots. She buried her face in Riley’s neck and let out a sound that was almost a sob, sharp and bright and real. The ripple effect was immediate: Riley gasped, her own body clenching down on Andy’s, and then she broke, a long, slow tremor that went all the way through her. Her legs locked around his hips, her hands scrambled at his back, and for a few seconds, she forgot how to breathe.

Chloe: 5-Time Combo! +3 VP
Riley: 5-Time Combo! +3 VP

Emily followed close behind. She had her forehead pressed between Andy’s shoulder blades, her body flush to his, and when the wave hit her, she went utterly still. The only sign was the sudden wet heat and the way her fingers dug into his waist, but Andy felt the whole thing as if it happened inside his own head, a static charge that snapped every circuit to overload.

Andy waited, holding on through all three, trying to savor it. He didn’t let go until Riley—still trembling, still half out of her mind—reached up, grabbed his jaw, and whispered, “Come with me, Andy. Now.”

He did. The release was total, a white-out of sensation that made his fingers and toes tingle, his breath catch in his chest. He pressed his forehead to Riley’s, her hair wrapped around them both, and for a second he forgot that anything else existed outside the four of them.

For a long minute, no one moved. The only sound was the slowing rhythm of breath, the twitch and relax of spent muscles, the low, satisfied hum that seemed to vibrate from the bed itself.

Chloe’s hand stayed tangled in Riley’s hair. Emily didn’t pull back from where she was pressed against Andy’s spine. Riley’s arms went loose, but she kept her legs wrapped around Andy, as if letting go would mean the world would end.

Andy thought about saying something, but the moment was too good for words.

They breathed, together, in the dark. The sound was unison, full and soft, the only rhythm that mattered.

Eventually, sleep started to creep in at the edges. Chloe’s grip on Riley’s hair loosened, but she didn’t let go completely. She fell asleep first. It was almost comic: one minute she was curled against Riley’s side, murmuring sleep-drunk nothings into her shoulder, and the next her head was lolling back, her mouth slightly open, breath deep and even as a metronome. Her arm stayed thrown over Riley’s stomach, a last act of will before she let herself fall.

Emily went next. She’d found her way to Andy’s back, her body soft and loose as a cat. She tucked her face into the space between Andy’s shoulder blades, drew her knees up, and within minutes her breathing slowed, the faintest of snores whispering against his skin. She looked utterly at peace, her pink-and-gold hair fanned out across both of them, covering Andy and Riley alike.

Riley didn’t sleep.

She stayed very still for a long time, as if the world would shatter if she shifted even an inch. Her hair, now more tangle than river, was spread across the pillow, the sheets, and the floor. Every so often, Andy felt a twitch—a muscle spasm, a barely-suppressed tremor. He thought she might be dozing, but then he’d feel the pressure of her hand against his ribs, or the tiny exhale of breath on his collarbone, and he knew she was wide awake.

Andy let the quiet fill up the room, let it run as long as Riley needed it to. He wasn’t sure when he fell halfway asleep, but he felt the exact moment Riley started to cry.

It was a soft thing at first, just a hitch in her breath. Then another, longer, one. He felt the wetness on his chest before he heard any sound, her face pressed in so tight it could have left a mark. He didn’t move right away; he waited, let her decide if she wanted to wake him, or if she just needed the dark.

She woke him anyway. After a minute, Riley’s arm tightened around his middle, fingers digging in, and her breath stuttered hard enough to wake the rest of him. Andy turned toward her and pulled her close, careful not to jostle Chloe or Emily. Riley made a sound—half a sob, half a laugh—and buried her face deeper against him.

He ran his hand up and down her back, slow and steady. The way you do when there’s nothing to say that wouldn’t be a lie or a disservice.

She whispered, “I can’t sleep. I’m so fucking tired, but every time I close my eyes I think I’m going to wake up and it’ll all be gone again.”

He pressed his cheek to her hair and held on. “He’s not going anywhere,” he said. “Not if I can help it.”

She sniffled, a wet sound. “You say that, but you don’t know. You can’t promise. I used to think I’d get better at this. That if I kept hurting long enough, the next thing wouldn’t hit as hard. But tonight? This is…” She trailed off, her hand fisting in the sheet behind his back. “I don’t know how to hold something this good in my chest. It just makes everything hurt worse.”

Andy let her keep going. Sometimes that was the only thing you could do.

“I miss him,” she said, and Andy could tell she meant both the past and the present. “I miss my son. I miss JJ. I know he’s in the other room, but I miss him. I miss the part of myself that didn’t expect everything to burn up when I touched it.”

He wanted to say something, to offer proof that she was safe, but he didn’t. Instead, he just stroked her back, let her have the room.

After a while, Riley’s crying went from silent to full-bodied. She shook against him, breath coming in sharp bursts, each one edged with a new, raw panic. Andy let her break, didn’t shush or hush or try to steer her away from the grief. He just held her, let her live in the feeling, let her make whatever noise she needed. The others slept on, oblivious, as if the sound was woven into their dreams.

When she could speak again, Riley said, “I want to keep him. I want to wake up tomorrow and have it be true. But I don’t know how to do it. What if it’s a trick? What if it’s just the Hotel messing with my head, and I lose him all over again?” She didn’t say the rest: that the loss would be hers alone, and she’d still have to make it make sense for the world.

Andy shifted, so that they were face to face, noses touching. “You’re allowed to be scared,” he said. “You’re allowed to want it, even if you think you shouldn’t. You’re allowed to hope and to not believe at the same time. Both can be true, Riley.”

She shuddered out a laugh, the sound wet and embarrassed. “I used to think there was some trick to it. Like if I got hard enough, or if I suffered enough, the wanting would stop hurting.” She met his eyes, and for once she didn’t look away. “I think I finally figured out that’s not how it works.”

He kissed her forehead, gentle. “You don’t have to be okay. Not right now. But we’ll all be here when you are ready.”

She cried for a long time after that, and Andy let her, not fixing, not promising, just staying. He kept his hand moving, slow, along her back, tracing the bumps of her spine, the soft press of skin. He let her hold on, as hard as she needed, until the worst of it bled out of her.

Eventually, her breath went quieter, and she said, “Thank you,” against his chest, the words barely making it out.

He smiled into her hair. “Anytime.”

She stayed awake for a while after that, but the crying faded to just the echo of it. Andy could feel her hands relax, her body go from brittle to just tired. When she finally slept, it was all at once, the way a light goes out when there’s no one left to see it.

He stayed awake a little longer, making sure she didn’t let go in her sleep.

Andy lay awake, listening to the triple rhythm of breathing in the bed: Riley slow and deep, her cheek still stuck to his chest; Chloe curled in at Riley’s side, her head wedged into the crook of Riley’s arm; Emily wrapped along his back, her own breath feather-light as the inside of a seashell. If he held perfectly still, he could almost pretend the rest of the world had shrunk down to just this: three women, one impossible day, a single bed afloat in a suite high above a fake, perfect ocean.

The thing was, Andy couldn’t fall asleep. Not yet. Strictly speaking, none of them needed to sleep anymore. Sleep was a pleasure, no longer a necessity, for him even more so than for most of the other women, except Laura. He was used to his mind working at night, used to the compulsion to scan for missed details, bad signs, anything that might ambush him if he let his guard down. But tonight, what kept him up wasn’t anxiety. It was the shape of a thought he’d spent all evening running from, and which was finally, in the hush after everything, ready to be let in.

He stared up at the ceiling, the whitewash just visible in the spill from the bathroom’s night-light, and let himself walk through it, one step at a time.

The note.

The handwriting.

He’d said, at the cemetery, that he didn’t know who wrote it. Four days old, a perfect copy of his own hand, promising Riley “more hours” before either of them had reason to believe it could be real. At the time, he’d told himself, and Riley, that perhaps Arabella had written it. He wanted it to be something simple, something with an answer you could dig out with a little logic and enough time. But there was no logic that fit. No time machine, no plant, no benign trickster god leaving comfort notes for fun.

He rolled the question over, slow and careful, so he wouldn’t startle himself away from the answer.

It wasn’t Arabella. He was sure of that now in a way he hadn’t been hours ago—not because of anything she’d said or done, but because of the physical reality of it. The script was his, all the way down to the loop of the y’s and the slant of the t’s. Not just a copy, but the real thing. And Arabella, for all her powers and masks, never went for forgery when she could just say it to your face and make you believe it.

It wasn’t any of the women. He went through each of them in his head, matching voice and intent and reach, and none of them fit. Not Claire’s precision, not Sam’s humor, not even Myra’s sense of obligation. Besides, none of them could have known about JJ’s resurrection.

Which left the only answer he’d been avoiding since the first second he read it: him.

Or, more exactly, a version of him. A version of him that, for whatever reason, could reach four days into the past and leave a note in perfect script, aimed right at Riley, delivered in such a way that it could prepare her, a little, for the one night she would need it. Not a panic, not an accident. A message.

He lay there, feeling the weight of that settle in. He waited for the usual spike of dread or denial to show up—the fear that becoming something more than human would hollow him out, turn him into a law machine or a monster, or just a ghost wearing his face. But it didn’t come. Instead, what came was a kind of awe, and then a quiet, real hope.

He let himself walk all the way to the end: in three or four days, one way or another, he would either cross the Gate or he wouldn’t. If he didn’t, maybe the magic would fade out, the world would spin back to normal, and he’d just… go home. But if he did—if the thing Arabella kept hinting at was real, if he ascended, if he became the person who could do what he’d already, in some small way, done—then that meant something survived the crossing. Something stubborn and personal and full of care. Something that, instead of becoming an untouchable god or a hollowed-out warden, still wanted to reach back and spare Riley the extra days of pain. Something that still cared. Something that loved her enough to use all the future magic, not for power or spectacle or immortality, but for a single act of mercy that only she would ever know happened.

He thought about that for a long time. He let the possibility in, and waited for it to make him feel less like himself. It didn’t.

If anything, it made the future feel lighter.

He followed the logic: if, in four days, the “flare-ups”—Marissa parents’ apparition, JJ’s miracle—if those were just consequences of an overfull tank, of the engine of him running without a governor, and he didn’t ascend, then the ability to write a note into his own timeline should burn out, not become more precise. But this was not an accident, not a chaos event, not a pop of uncontrolled magic. It was a surgical insertion. A scalpel. A message, written for the exact woman who would need it most, at the exact moment she would need it. And unlike his flare-ups, he hadn’t been present for the delivery.

Which meant he had learned to use it. Which meant he had, on some level, become the thing he was so afraid to be.

He waited for the dread to catch up. It didn’t. Instead, what he felt was something like relief, and then a slow, honest, almost-painful happiness. The kind that comes when you finally realize the monster under the bed was just you, grown up, checking for someone else.

He looked down at Riley, still asleep, her arms banded around his ribs, her leg thrown over his hip as if, even in sleep, she wasn’t willing to risk waking up alone. Her hair blanketed both of them, and even though it was probably smothering him a little, he didn’t want to move it. He could hear, or almost feel, Chloe’s breathing across the pillow gap—soft, steady, occasionally interrupted by a little whimper, as if she was still working through the last tangle of dreams. Emily’s hair brushed the small of his back, her hand flopped on his hip, her entire body in the fluid, entropic sprawl of someone who never, ever expected to be allowed this much comfort.

He thought about the note again, what it meant for Riley, for himself, for what was coming. If the future version of him could reach back and thread a line of hope into the precise place it needed to go, then maybe the future wasn’t a loss at all. Maybe the future, if it had to happen, could at least be an act of mercy.

He remembered, too, what he had decided, what he had promised. That he would never cross through unless all the women agreed. And Laura’s plea, that she would change her decision if only he could find the angle nobody else saw, and he would make it work for everyone. Maybe the person who wrote the note had done it.

It wasn’t a promise of victory. It wasn’t even a guarantee of survival. It was just proof that whoever he became, he didn’t lose the thread. He didn’t stop being himself, even if “himself” became a word with a thousand more meanings. He could still love these women. He could still want, specifically and selfishly and tenderly, for them to hurt less.

He closed his eyes. He thought about all the things he would need to do in the next three days, the challenges, the choices. He would not be accidental. He would do it on purpose, if he had to. For Laura, for Riley, for Myra. For the part of him that believed in the value of waking up every day with the chance to choose the better option. He would become the thing only if it meant he could do more of this: more of the impossible, more of the kind that mattered.

He looked at Riley, still breathing on him. He could have woken her, could have told her that he thought the handwriting belonged to himself, could have said that he thought they might have more time—he could have said a thousand things, but he let her sleep. Sometimes the best thing you can give is the extra hour, the note that doesn’t have to be explained.

He let the weight of her, and of the room, and of the decision, settle onto him. And for once, he let go. Let himself drift. Let himself rest.

Author's Note: Don't forget to send your questions for the cast! Deadline is August 23.