The officer’s club hummed with restless energy that night — the clink of glasses, the brassy rise of the piano in the corner, bursts of laughter that tried too hard to sound carefree. Men crowded the bar in flight jackets and half-buttoned uniforms, their voices pitched high with whiskey and the reckless joy of simply being alive for another day. Cigarette smoke curled upward in lazy spirals, thickening the air until the room itself felt like it was exhaling.

You sat tucked away at one of the smaller tables along the wall, a glass of something watered-down cradled between your palms. You should have been back in your quarters finishing reports, or at least trying to sleep, but discipline had slipped from you weeks ago. Nights like this had a way of swallowing you whole — or perhaps it was him who did.

John Egan.

It wasn’t as though you hadn’t tried to keep your distance. You told yourself you would, after that first kiss outside the hangar — sharp and sudden, his mouth tasting of smoke and adrenaline, his hand fisted in your collar as though daring you to pull away. You told yourself the same thing after he found you again a week later, alone by the airfield fence, when his grin softened into something darker and his fingers slipped beneath the hem of your blouse before you could breathe a protest. And you told yourself again on those long evenings when he found excuses to linger: a card game gone late, a bottle of bourbon “he couldn’t finish alone,” hours that started with laughter and ended with you pressed against the doorframe of his quarters, lips swollen and pulse unsteady.

And yet — here you were.

You felt him before you saw him. The shift of the room, the way voices bent unconsciously toward him as he walked in — broad-shouldered in his bomber jacket, shearling collar framing his jaw, the swagger in his step both infuriating and magnetic. He looked like he owned the place, though he never tried to. That was just the problem: John Egan didn’t have to try.

He found you instantly. He always did.

Blue-gray eyes locked on yours across the haze of smoke and light, and in that moment the clamor of the room dropped away. His mouth curved, not quite into a smile — more of a knowing acknowledgment, as though he’d been expecting you. The memory of his last words to you — We’re not done, baby — pulsed at the back of your mind, and you hated yourself for the shiver it drew down your spine.

He cut through the crowd with lazy confidence, the way a man did who’d already had your back pressed to the wall, who already knew how easily your resolve faltered under his touch. By the time he reached your table, you’d forgotten how to breathe.

One hand braced on the back of your chair as he leaned in — close enough that the faint bite of whiskey and tobacco clung to him, close enough that your pulse quickened traitorously in your throat.

His voice came low, rough and deliberate, pitched for you alone.

“Still pretending you don’t miss me? Because I’ve been thinking about the last time — and I don’t plan on stopping there.” in