Because suddenly, devastatingly, I got it. Every morning coffee where he’d appeared like clockwork. Every lingering glance I’d catalogued and dismissed as wishful thinking. Every bullshit excuse to extend his stay in my father’s house when this whole fucking apartment existed—it was me. Always me.

The realization hit with the force of a semi-truck doing ninety on the FDR. Caleb O’Brien, successful businessman with his own Manhattan apartment and actual life choices, had been playing houseguest in my father’s suffocating mansion for one reason. My brain short-circuited trying to process this information while my body—traitorous, honest thing—practically vibrated with the knowledge it had been hoarding all along.

“It was always you,” Caleb said, and fuck if those four words didn’t rewrite my entire reality like some cosmic editor had just taken a red pen to my life story.

He moved closer, each step deliberate, purposeful. The space between us contracted with every inch he eliminated. “Watching you fight against everything they tried to make you. Seeing you refuse to break even when they kept pushing.”

His voice dropped, raw honesty replacing the careful control I’d grown accustomed to. “You’re brilliant and bold and so fucking beautiful it hurts to look at you sometimes.”

The words poured out like he’d been storing them in some emotional vault, each confession landing like a physical touch. “I told myself I was there for business, for rebuilding friendship with your father. But I was lying. To him, to myself, to everyone. I stayed for breakfast conversations where you’d destroy some CEO with three words. I stayed for the chance you’d wear that green dress again and I could pretend for five seconds you wore it for me.”

My carefully constructed walls—twenty-two years of reinforced emotional concrete—crumbled spectacularly. Weeks of confusion, denial, that constant ache whenever he entered a room. It all crashed together in a tsunami of want that threatened to drag me under.

“You absolute bastard,” I breathed, but I was already moving toward him, my body making executive decisions without consulting management. “Do you have any idea what you’ve put me through?”

The accusation lacked heat because my hands were already fisting in his shirt, pulling him closer even as I spoke. “Making me think I was losing my mind. That I was some sick freak for wanting my father’s friend. That every time you touched me was just—”

He cut me off with a kiss that was nothing like the hotel.

There was no caution, no hesitance. Just heat and hunger—years of unsaid things crashing into the way his mouth devoured mine. His hands gripped my face like he didn’t trust me to stay, like if he let go for even a second I’d disappear.

This wasn’t careful exploration. This was desperate honesty.

Our teeth clashed. Tongues slid and tangled. He kissed like he was starved—starved—and I was the only thing that would ever satisfy him again.

We collided like atoms splitting. Every inch of careful distance we’d held for so long? Gone. Obliterated. We clawed at each other like clothing was a curse. He tore my top off, and I yanked his sweater over his head so hard we nearly tripped.

“Fuck,” he groaned when my nails raked across his chest. “I’ve wanted this since you walked into that birthday dinner. Every. Fucking. Day.”

His mouth crashed down to my throat. Hot, wet kisses. Scraping teeth. He sucked at the place just under my ear, hard enough to bruise, and I arched into him like I wanted to brand myself with his mouth.

“You’re shaking,” I whispered, breathless.

His hands stilled on my ribs. “Because you’re real,” he said. “Because you’re finally here.”

That wrecked me. My chest cracked open with something too raw to name, and then he was pressing me back against the wall, his hand already slipping into my pants like he needed proof I was just as undone.

He found it instantly.

“You’re soaked,” he growled, voice wrecked and reverent all at once. “God, Mikaela—”

“Stop talking,” I gasped, but my voice cracked on the words. Because no one had ever seen me like this. Not as a Wallace. Not as a symbol. Just… me.

He dropped to his knees.

There was no hesitation. He dragged my pants down, kissed my inner thighs like he was worshipping at an altar, and then buried his face between my legs.

I screamed.

His tongue was relentless—licking, sucking, fucking me with his mouth like he wanted to erase every memory of anyone who came before him.

He groaned against me when I tangled my fingers in his hair and ground against his face, chasing the orgasm he was giving me like it was his goddamn mission.

I shattered. Loud. Messy. Real.

He kissed up my body slowly, eyes on mine the whole time as he rolled on a condom, and when he lined up at my entrance, he didn’t tease. He didn’t drag it out.

He slammed into me.

I gasped—pleasure and pressure and finally filling me in one overwhelming rush. He held still just a beat, forehead pressed to mine, and then he started to move.

Not gentle. Not brutal. Just real.

His thrusts were deep, hard, claiming me like he’d waited too long and couldn’t bear to go slow. Our bodies slapped together, breath loud and ragged. I wrapped my legs around his waist, pulling him deeper, faster. I wanted all of it. I wanted him.

He kissed me. Bit down on my shoulder like he wanted to mark me. Whispered, “You’re mine now,” like he didn’t care who heard.

And I came again—loud, wild, shaking—because of him. Because this wasn’t performance. This was a fucking reckoning.

“Mikaela,” he groaned as he buried himself to the hilt one last time, pulsing deep inside the condom, his whole body trembling against mine. “Jesus—fuck—Mikaela.”

I cried. I didn’t mean to, but I did.

Tears slid from my eyes because this wasn’t just sex—it was a lifetime of longing breaking open in my chest. It was being wanted without shame. Without transaction.

Eventually, we made it to the bed.

Tangled in expensive sheets, sweat cooling on our skin, we lay silent. It was just us. Skin against skin. His breath in my hair. The weight of everything we couldn’t take back. And I didn’t want to.

I traced patterns on his chest, feeling simultaneously destroyed and rebuilt. Like someone had taken me apart and put me back together, but some pieces were in different places now, creating a new configuration of who I was.

“This complicates things,” I finally said, master of understatement. My voice sounded wrecked, like I’d been screaming, which—fair.

Caleb’s laugh rumbled through his chest, vibrating against my cheek where I’d collapsed. “Things were already complicated.”

True. But now they were complicated with the taste of him on my lips and bruises on my hips that I’d feel tomorrow. Complicated with the knowledge that he’d chosen my father’s guest room over this paradise just to be near me. That every morning I’d tortured myself over inappropriate feelings, he’d been doing the same dance down the hall.

“My father will kill you,” I said conversationally, like we were discussing the weather instead of patricide.

“Probably,” he agreed, fingers playing with my hair. “Worth it.”

The silence that followed wasn’t empty—it was full of everything we weren’t saying.

Everything that shifted when he’d been inside me, whispering truths against my skin.

Everything that couldn’t be taken back now that we’d crossed every line my father had drawn around my life.