Page 4 of Let Me In

“But if I see you out here after dark alone again...” his gaze hardens just slightly. “It’ll be a different conversation.”

His words flood me, warm and strange and almost too much, this duality of quiet mercy from a stranger, and the warm, unfamiliar thrill of being…seen.

Not glanced past or looked over. Not just tolerated... but noticed.

Marked.

He doesn’t smile. Doesn’t soften it.

After another breath to let it sink in, he adds: “You should stick to the main path when the sun dips. Things get tricky in the dark.”

It’s not a warning.

No, it’s something else… a rule. A line. A quiet kind of care I don’t know what to do with.

And I feel it again. That flutter deep in my chest.

Not just relief, not just surprise.

Because something in his voice sounds an awful lot like a door left open.

Not just an invitation to come back.

But a promise that if I do, I won’t leave untouched.

That once he lets me in…

I won’t be walking away the same.

2

CAL

She flinches.

Not visibly. Not dramatically. Her shoulders pull in, just slightly. Like she’s bracing for something sharper than what I gave her. Like she didn’t expect kindness. Not even something that small.

And when she hesitates, when that flicker of fear or uncertainty ripples through her posture, I want to step forward. I want to sayit’s alright, you’re safe here. I’m not going to hurt you.

But all I said was, “You can keep doing that,” and now she’s looking at me like it doesn’t make sense. Like she’s waiting for the catch. Like no one’s ever just… let her be.

That does something to me. I don’t show it, but it does.

The moment she peeled the helmet away hit me like the breath I didn’t know I’d been holding.

She’s smaller than I expected. Round-cheeked and flushed, dark hair long and damp. Eyes too wide and too bright. Probably almost a foot shorter than me. She looks young—younger than me, anyway. But not untouched.

There’s a softness in her that hasn’t been burned out. Not naïve. Just unguarded in places that make my chest tighten. Like she still leads with kindness, even if the world’s tried to teach her not to. And that? That undoes something in me I thought was long since dead.

I’m forty years old. Built from the kind of past most men don’t walk away from. The kind that teaches you how to end a threat before it starts. How to keep your back to a wall. How to make a man disappear if you have to.

And this girl steps into my space, into my quiet, without knowing a damn thing about who I was or what I’ve done… and something in me shifts.

Tightens, low and sharp.

It lives deeper than simple desire—older, rooted in instinct. Protective. Territorial. Possessive in a way I haven’t felt in years.

Something that whispers:don’t let anything touch her.Not even the wind unless it’s kind.

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