# Chapter 10: Ours

The key turns in the lock with a soft, decisive click. Not a rental. Not a temporary stop. Ours.

I stand on the threshold of the third-floor apartment, duffel bag slung over one shoulder, phone buzzing against my thigh with a reminder I completely ignore. The air inside smells like pine cleaner and fresh drywall, the kind of sterile scent that only exists before life rushes in to claim it. Sunlight cuts through unadorned windows, painting long, golden rectangles across the hardwood. The place is empty, but already, I can hear the future in it. The echo of footsteps. The clink of mugs. The low rumble of Liam’s voice reading something aloud while I chop vegetables. The quiet, heavy thud of bodies falling onto a mattress that hasn’t been tested yet, but will.

I drop my bag. The zipper splits open at the seam. Socks spill out onto the floor. I don’t care.

Behind me, the hallway door clicks shut. Liam’s footsteps follow, measured but lighter than they’ve been in years. He doesn’t say anything at first. He never does when we’re standing in a new space, not even one that used to belong to a fake script and a staged performance. He just takes in the room the way I do, eyes tracing the corners, the ceiling line, the space between the kitchen and the living room. He steps up beside me, close enough that our shoulders brush. He smells like cologne and the faint, clean scent of the rain that fell earlier. His hand finds the small of my back, fingers splaying, warm and certain.

“How many boxes are you hiding in there?” he asks, voice low.

“Enough to make you regret not hiring movers,” I say.

“I’m already regretting not taking your call yesterday. You said you’d be back by four. It’s six.”

“I got distracted. By boxes. And you.”

He chuckles, the sound vibrating against my spine. His palm shifts, pressing just slightly, an anchor. “Then let’s get distracted properly. Before I start unpacking your life before you’ve even let me touch it.”

I turn to look at him. Really look. The dark circles under his eyes have faded. The sharp, defensive line of his jaw has softened. The man standing in front of me isn’t the CEO who learned to wear a smile like armor, or the stepbrother I was supposed to pretend to date for a PR campaign that died a quiet death in the papers. He’s just Liam. My Liam. The one who memorizes how I take my coffee, who leaves the bathroom light on when I have late shifts, who holds me like I’m something precious and entirely his. The one who never once made me doubt that what we have now is real.

We start unpacking like we’ve done it a hundred times before. Which, in a way, we have. We’ve been living out of suitcases and each other’s clothes for months, merging routines, stealing showers, collapsing into bed without the pretense of separate apartments or separate lives. But this is different. This is a lease signed in both our names. This is a door we lock from the inside. This is no longer a performance.

I carry a stack of books to the living room wall. Liam follows, setting a box labeled KITCHEN on the counter. His sleeve rides up as he lifts it, revealing the faded scar on his forearm from when he cut himself fixing a sink in my old place. I reach out, thumb brushing the ridge of skin. He catches my wrist, pulls me in. His mouth finds mine, slow and sure, tasting like the mint tea he had an hour ago and the quiet certainty of coming home.

We don’t rush it. We never do anymore. The fake dates, the staged hand-holds, the press conferences where we played at love while our actual feelings grew roots in the dark—that’s all behind us. We know what real looks like. It’s this. It’s Sunday mornings in sweatpants. It’s splitting the bill for groceries down to the penny. It’s knowing exactly how the other breathes when they’re asleep. It’s the absence of performance. The luxury of just being.

By the time the sun dips below the skyline, painting the walls in shades of bruised purple and gold, the apartment feels less empty and more like a canvas. We’re standing in the kitchen, passing a cutting board back and forth, chopping bell peppers and zucchini for a stir-fry that’s probably going to taste like ash because neither of us is actually cooking. Liam’s phone buzzes on the counter. He glances at it, ignores it. I do the same. Let the world wait.

He leans against the counter, watching me. “You’re quiet.”

“Just thinking.”

“About?”

“About how weird it is that we never talked about this. The move. The lease. Just… assumed it.”

He steps closer, hands sliding around my waist, pulling me flush against him. The wooden board clatters to the floor. “We talked about it in every way that matters. You stopped pretending you don’t want to stay. I stopped pretending I don’t want you to.”

His mouth finds my neck, right where my pulse jumps. I shiver. He knows exactly where I’m sensitive. He’s memorized me. Not the stepsister. Not the PR prop. Me. Zoe. The woman who cries at dog food commercials, who hoards good pens, who falls asleep with her head on his chest and refuses to admit she likes it.

He lifts me onto the counter. I wrap my legs around his waist without hesitation. The wood is cool against my thighs, but he’s warm. So warm. His hands slide up my shirt, pushing it up, over my ribs, past my breasts until my nipples are bare to the cool air. He groans, low and rough, and presses his forehead to mine.

“Tell me to stop,” he murmurs.

“Don’t you dare.”

He doesn’t. He never does when I say it like that. His mouth crashes into mine, deep and hungry, but it’s still gentle. Always gentle, even when he’s unraveling me. He works my jeans open with practiced ease, fingers slipping past the waistband, past the lace of my panties, and I arch into him as he finds me. I’m already wet. I’m always wet for him. My body knows him better than it knows my own name.

“Look at me,” he says.

I open my eyes. His are dark, pupils blown wide, but his expression is clear. Focused. Present. No masks. No scripts. Just us.

He slides two fingers inside me, slow, curling them just right. I gasp, head falling back. He strokes my clitoris in tight, steady circles while I whimper, my nails digging into his shoulders. The rhythm is familiar, practiced, but it still hits like lightning. He adds a third finger, stretching me, and I grind down against his hand, desperate.

“Liam—”

“Breathe,” he says, voice rough. “I’ve got you.”

I do. I breathe. He works me open, stretching me, filling me, and when I finally climax, it’s not a wave but a collapse. I shake through it, crying out into his mouth, my body clamping around his fingers. He holds me through it, thumb circling my clit, keeping the pleasure rolling until I’m trembling and boneless. Only then does he pull his hand out, wipes his fingers on a dish towel, and kisses me like he’s memorizing the taste.

We clean up in silence, the kind of silence that doesn’t need words. I pull his shirt over his head, shove his jeans down, and he steps out of them like a man shedding armor. I drop to my knees. He grips my hair, not hard, just enough to keep me there as I take him in. He’s thick, heavy, perfectly hard. I wrap my hand around his base, stroke his length, and feel him twitch against my mouth. He lets out a broken sound, hips jerking forward.

“Fuck, Zoe,” he breathes. “So fucking good.”

I hum against him, the vibration making him gasp. I take him deeper, angling my head, sucking slowly. He’s slick from earlier, already pre-cum coating his skin, and I use my free hand to slide down, stroking his balls, his perineum, keeping him teetering on the edge. He’s always so controlled. In boardrooms, in press rooms, in public—he’s ice. But here, with me, he melts. He comes apart. And I love it. I love that I’m the only one who gets to see it.

His hand slides into my hair, fingers threading through, and he groans when I take him deeper. “I’m gonna—Zoe, baby, I’m gonna come—”

“I know,” I whisper against his skin. “Let go.”

He does. He spills into my mouth, hot and thick, shaking through it, and I take every drop, kissing him through it, holding him together as he unravels. He pulls me up, wraps his arms around me, and presses his forehead to my shoulder, breathing hard.

“Ours,” he says into my skin. “This is ours.”

“Yes,” I say. “It is.”

We don’t bother dressing. We walk to the bedroom, hands linked, and collapse onto the mattress. It’s bare except for a thin sheet, but it doesn’t matter. We’ve slept on floors, in hotel rooms, on his couch with his dog snoring at our feet. We’ve never slept more peacefully than we do now.

I trace the line of his collarbone. He catches my hand, kisses my knuckles. “You’re thinking again.”

“I’m just… grateful. For this. For not needing a reason to be together.”

He shifts, pulling me against his chest. His heartbeat is steady. Strong. “We never needed a reason, Zoe. We just needed the truth to catch up.”

I smile against his skin. “It took long enough.”

“Some truths take time to sink in. Like how I’m never letting you go. Like how I’ve wanted you since the day you walked into my office in that stupid red blazer and told me you hated my guts.”

“I did hate your guts. Then I hated that I wanted you. Then I couldn’t stop.”

He laughs, the sound rich and warm. “Same.”

We lie like that for a long time. The city hums outside. A siren wails in the distance. A car door slams. Life happens. We just breathe in it. Together.

Eventually, the hunger returns. Not the desperate, starving kind from the beginning, but the slow, sated kind. The kind that comes when you know exactly what you want and how to get it. He rolls me onto my back, straddling my hips. His cock is already hard again. I stroke it, slow and firm, and he groans, leaning down to kiss me.

“Bed,” he says.

We crawl. He flips me onto my stomach, pushes down my hips, and enters me from behind. I gasp, nails scraping the sheet. He’s deep, perfectly angled, and he stills, letting me adjust. I push back against him, and he follows. The rhythm starts slow, deliberate. He grips my hips, pulls me back onto his cock with every thrust, and I bite my lip to keep from crying out. He’s so good at this. At us.

He shifts his angle, hitting that spot deep inside me that makes my toes curl. I cry out, and he covers my mouth with his hand, not to silence me, but to muffle the sound, his thumb stroking my cheek. “Shh, baby. I’ve got you. Just take it.”

I do. I take him, take every thrust, every roll of his hips, every low curse against my ear. My body moves with his, meeting him, chasing him. He’s relentless, but he’s also careful. He checks in without words. A squeeze of my hip. A pause to kiss my shoulder. A murmur of my name. It’s not just sex. It’s a conversation. A promise. A homecoming.

I come again, hard and fast, my inner walls clamping around him, and he follows, burying himself to the hilt, groaning my name like a prayer. He holds me through it, pressing me down, keeping me pinned as we ride out the aftershocks. Only when he’s soft again does he roll us over, pulling me against his chest, wrapping his arms around me like a shield.

I trace the line of his jaw. “You’re staying tonight?”

“I live here now,” he says, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “I’m not leaving.”

“Good. The fridge is empty. We need groceries. And towels. And… I don’t know. Plants? A rug? Something that isn’t just bare wood and air?”

He smiles, pressing a kiss to my temple. “I’ll buy the whole store. You pick the plants.”

“Deal.”

We stay like that until the moon climbs high. He falls asleep first, breathing even and deep. I watch his face, memorizing it. The way his lashes rest against his cheeks. The faint crease between his brows. The way his mouth softens when he’s not in a meeting or a boardroom or a press line. He’s just a man. A good one. My one.

I don’t need a ring. I don’t need a courthouse. I don’t need a child to tie me to him. I have this. I have him. I have a lease with my name on it. I have a kitchen where we’ll burn toast and laugh about it. I have a bed where we’ll argue about the thermostat and make up in the sheets. I have a life. Real. Ours.

The fake dates are ghosts now. The stepsibling tension is ash. The PR campaign is a footnote in a magazine that no one reads anymore. What remains is solid. Grounded. Built on truth, on patience, on the quiet, relentless work of two people choosing each other, day after day, without an audience.

I slip my hand under his shirt, palm flat against his stomach. He stirs, instinctively curling around me. “Zoe?”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For staying. For not letting me pretend anymore. For being real with me.”

I kiss his shoulder. “Always.”

The apartment is quiet. The city breathes outside. The key still sits on the counter, catching the moonlight. It doesn’t feel like a symbol anymore. It’s just a key. For a door we walk through together. For a life we’re building, brick by quiet brick. No grand gestures. No milestones to chase. Just us.

Ours.

And that’s enough. More than enough. It’s everything.

I close my eyes. His heartbeat is my rhythm. His breath is my air. His hand is in mine. Always.

Sleep comes easily. It always does, now. With him. In our home. In our life. In our truth.

Tomorrow, we’ll buy groceries. We’ll argue about the thermostat. We’ll make coffee. We’ll talk about nothing and everything. We’ll exist. Together. No scripts. No steps. No pretending.

Just real.

Just us.

Just ours.