Chapter 13
DOLL
We come off the steps with my hand in his.
The lot is half dark, the floodlights doing their work along the fence, and nobody we pass says a word.
Halfway across the lot, a whistle comes down off the roof, two notes.
Angel’s hand leaves mine and lands on my shoulder, moving me, all in the same second.
His body between me and the fence before I understand there’s anything to be between.
A sedan rolls past the gate, slow, lights off.
It doesn’t stop. The floodlights track it, and up on the roof a prospect follows it.
“Tonight’s first?” Angel asks the dark, not me.
“Second,” the roof says.
The sedan takes the corner and is gone. Angel watches the empty street exactly as long as he needs to, and then his hand finds mine again.
“Somebody’s counting our cameras,” he says. “Let them count. Counting’s free.”
And then we get to my door and he stops.
He could open every lock in this compound, and he stands in the hallway holding my hand, waiting for me to open my own door. I asked him to come. He came exactly that far. Everything past the threshold is still mine to say.
I open my door.
Around us the clubhouse is turning itself down for the night but voices in the bar are still loud, one bike coming in late and shutting off after a loud growl.
Out past the gate are the Quinlans and whatever we’ll find out about them tomorrow.
Ian Durey is out there. Victor is out there in his big house, minus the only two boxes in it that mattered.
The entire world is out there. Tonight it can wait.
He toes off his boots and lies down on top of the blanket like he did last night, arms crossed behind his head, space between us. Last night I slept beside him at the end of the second-worst day of my life, too wrecked to be afraid of anything smaller than everything.
Tonight the asking was mine.
That should make this easier. It makes it worse. Fear I know how to carry. Want has no handles yet.
I lie down facing him and leave the lamp on.
“You can sleep,” he says. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“I know.” My hand crosses the blanket and finds his forearm. His arm comes down from behind his head, slow, turning under my palm until his hand is open beneath mine. “That’s not why I asked you here.”
He turns his head on the pillow. Up close, the danger on him is a fact, like his height but then the surprise comes from his hands, how carefully they do small things.
“Still asking?”
Here is what costs. Not the wanting, the saying.
“Yes.”
He moves without hurry, and then his mouth is on mine.
The kiss is slow, slow enough to have parts. He kisses on purpose, one hand at my jaw, thumb on my cheekbone. When a sound I’ve never made comes out of me, he stops and waits. I press forward, and he takes that for the answer it is.
Heat rolls up from somewhere below my navel and settles, specific as a pin on a map.
I get my fingers into his collar. I touch his jaw where the stubble starts, the corner of his mouth where the split from the alley is still rough, and he lets me look.
His breath has an edge now, and the arm bracing him is doing slow, deliberate work at being gentle. Control costs him.
“Here?” His hand at my waist, over the shirt.
“Yes.”
“This okay?” Fingertips under the hem. Skin. One inch and no more.
“Yes.”
None of it sounds like doubt. Every question is a door, and every handle is on my side.
His hand travels up my ribs and my breathing forgets its training. Then his thumb crosses the band of my bra, and I do the thing that gives me away.
I go still. A cursor on an empty page, waiting for input I don’t have.
He stops. His hand simply rests where it is, and his mouth lifts from mine far enough to see my face.
“Sloane.”
Not Doll. My name, so I know which conversation we’re in.
“I’m not scared,” I say. True, but not enough. The lamp is right there and he can see everything, so I give him the rest before he has to ask for it. “There hasn’t been anyone. Ever. I don’t know where my hands go.”
I wait for the reaction. I’ve read enough books to know men keep a shelf of reactions to that sentence.
His face does none of them. He draws his hand out from under my shirt, smooths the hem flat like he’s closing a book he means to come back to, and settles onto his side, level with me.
“Tell me how,” he says.
“How what?”
“How does a woman like you make it to twenty-two alone?”
“Victor never locked me in,” I say. “There was no tower. I had a studio over the garage, my own door, my own stairs. But his cameras were on the driveway, his name on my phone plan, his card under every purchase, his driver whenever my car happened to be in the shop, which was whenever I had somewhere to be that he hadn’t approved.
A date meant giving Victor a name, and a name was one more thing he could hold over me.
I never let a boy walk me to my car twice. ”
Angel doesn’t move.
“He never had to lock the door,” I say. “He owned every road away from it.”
I watch the anger arrive, jaw first, then the breath. And I watch him put it away.
“This isn’t about him,” he says. It sounds like a rule he’s setting for himself. “Not tonight.”
“No.”
“Then here’s tonight.” He breathes deep. “Nothing gets taken. Not by me.”
It takes me a second to hear it right, and when I do, an old tired anger in me stands up swinging.
“I’ve had ten years of men deciding what I can have.”
“I know.” He doesn’t flinch from it. “I’m not deciding what you can have.
I’m telling you what I won’t do. You want to sleep, we sleep.
You want my mouth and my hands, they’re yours.
What I won’t do is take your first time while the worst week of your life is still on your skin.
That’s not me making your choice. That’s me refusing to let this week make it. ”
I lie there and take the offer apart, checking for a hook. I turn it over twice and find none.
He’s a man on top of the covers with his hand flat on a blanket, waiting.
“I want that,” I say, and my voice holds.
“Look at me while you say it.”
I look at him. “I want your mouth and your hands, Angel.”
“Okay, Doll.”
The blanket vanishes.
He is unhurried in a way that dismantles me. He kisses my throat and asks. He gathers my shirt and asks. I lift my arms and let it go. When he reaches for the lamp, I say leave it. I want to see him keep his word.
I’ve inventoried powerful men for a decade, the barbering, the watches, the gym-bought shoulders. There’s no line item for him. Lamplight on the ink, on the scar, on all that careful strength holding itself in check for me. He is the first beautiful thing in years that nobody purchased.
He looks at me for a long moment, hands still. Not appraisal. Not a bid. Attention, all of it, aimed at me.
“Tell me if I move wrong,” he says.
“You haven’t yet.”
“I plan to keep it that way.”
His mouth starts at my jaw and travels. Slow at the throat. Slower at the collarbone. He learns me in order, top to bottom, like a man reading a document he intends to sign. Halfway down I stop hearing questions and start hearing a man keeping his word out loud.
When his hand slides low and finds me, my body pulls tight as a hoisted sail. He goes exactly that much slower.
“Breathe, Doll.”
I breathe.
“That’s it. You’re allowed.”
Nothing in my life has ever been allowed to build like this. For me. About me. Nobody keeping score. He watches my face while his hand keeps its slow, patient rhythm, and every time my breath catches he does it again, exact, remembering.
When I’m shaking, he stills his hand and puts his mouth to my hip bone.
“I want my mouth on you,” he says against my skin, and waits. “Say yes or say …”
“Yes.” No bracing anywhere in it.
I know what this is. I’ve read it in books. But knowing a thing on paper turns out to be nothing at all.
His breath arrives first, warm. Then his mouth, and everything I’ve read goes out of print.
Nothing on paper mentioned the patience. Nothing mentioned that he would pay attention to what makes my breath stutter and then come back to it, unhurried, thorough, in no rush to be anywhere else. Nothing mentioned the sound he makes against me, low and wrecked, like I’m the one giving.
It builds again, higher, no ceiling anywhere I can find. My hands finally learn where they go. His hair. His shoulder. He hums against me when my fingers tighten, and the sound nearly finishes it.
I wait for the turn, the shift that means now it’s about him. It never comes. There’s no turn in him tonight. There’s me, his patience, and the lamp I asked him to leave on.
I break with his name on my lips.
He stays with me through it, hands steady on my hips. When I come back, he kisses the inside of my knee and says my name against my skin.
After, the room comes back a piece at a time. The lamp. The floodlight stripe on the ceiling. His heartbeat under my ear, and it is not calm. That’s the part that undoes me. He wants. I can hear it running under his ribs. He set every bit of it down and asked for nothing.
Old training reaches anyway. My hand starts down his chest with a purpose I only half understand, and he catches it, laces our fingers, brings my knuckles to his mouth.
“No.” Gentle, and not negotiable.
“But you—”
“Not because you owe me.” He sets our hands flat over his heart. “When you touch me, and Doll, you will, it’ll be because you want to. Not to get square.”
“Okay,” I say, and find out I mean it.
He reaches over me and turns off the lamp.
The floodlights keep their stripe on the ceiling, the club’s idea of a night-light, the fence lit because tomorrow we have to face the Quinlans and the world out there gets loud again.
His arm comes around me. I fit against his side, my mother’s ring a small warm circle between us.
“Tomorrow’s going to be loud,” I say.
“Probably.”
“Should I be scared?”
“You should sleep. Scared’s my shift.”
I laugh into his shirt, and my eyes are already closing.
I asked for what I wanted. The most dangerous man I’ve ever met said yes and took nothing.
His arms aren’t a place I was put. They’re a place I decided to go, and to sleep in.