Chapter 4 #3
I'm aware, distantly, that my own hands are steady.
That's the thing I notice, holding hers.
For four days I've been shaking apart with want and guilt and the impossible weight of lying to Theo, my hands so unsteady I've been botching simple welds at the marina, and now — now, with a drunk's threat still ringing in the room and adrenaline still burning down my arms — I'm calm.
Calm the way I used to get calm on Vane Street the second a situation actually went bad, when all the dread of the maybe collapsed into the simplicity of the now.
There's no decision to make when she needs something.
There's no math. The man who runs the numbers every night, who can't make any column come out right, who lies awake torn in half — he just isn't here.
He vanished the instant that hand closed on her wrist, and what's left is somebody much simpler, somebody who crossed a room without remembering the crossing, somebody whose whole confused war resolves into a single clear line the moment she's in danger: not her. Not while I'm standing here.
That's what scares Griffin thinks I already know about what I'm made of.
I think I just found out. I'm made of this.
Whatever else I am — the record, the felony, the kid who learned to feel nothing — underneath it I'm a man who will put his body between her and the world without checking the cost first, and I didn't know that about myself until ninety seconds ago, and now I can't un-know it.
"Thank you," she says. Her voice is steady again. That took effort I can see.
"Always," I say.
And the word hangs there in the locked, quiet shop, bigger than it has any right to be, because we both know it isn't about the tourist. It's a vow I don't have the standing to make and I make it anyway.
Always. Whatever you need, whenever, however it costs me.
I've got nothing to give you but that, and I'm giving you all of it.
She doesn't take her hand back.
We stand there a long time, my hands around her still one, the boardwalk muffled through the locked door, the unfinished tourist design abandoned on the tray.
She's looking at our hands. I'm looking at her.
And I understand that something just changed that can't change back, that the careful stilted distance of the last few weeks died the second that drunk idiot put his hand on her, that you can't almost-stop-making-a-mistake forever, that eventually the world forces your hand.
"You moved before I even registered he'd grabbed me," she says quietly. "You were just — there."
"I told you. Always."
"You keep saying that word like it's small."
"It's the biggest one I've got."
She looks up at me then, and the ice is gone, all of it, and what's underneath is something I've only seen flashes of — the raw, unguarded thing from the day she found the drawings — and it's looking right at me, and it's not retreating, and her still hand turns inside mine until our palms are together, until her fingers thread through my fingers, deliberate, a choice, the first real choice either of us has made out loud.
"Friday," she says.
My heart stops, then starts. "Friday what?"
"The raincheck." She doesn't let go of my hand. "I'm cashing it. Not for a lesson."
"Freya —"
"Don't talk me out of it. I've spent three months talking myself out of it and I'm tired and you just put a man out on his ass to keep my hands safe and I'm done being smart about this.
" Her jaw sets, the Katsaros jaw, the one that's won arguments with men twice her size.
"Friday. My studio. After close. And we'll figure out the rest of it — Theo, the patch, all of it — after.
But Friday's mine. I've earned one thing in this whole mess that's mine. "
I should say no. I know all the numbers. I run them every night.
"Friday," I say.
She squeezes my hand once, hard, and lets go, and turns back to her station, all business, already cleaning the tray, already rebuilding the professional calm she lives inside.
But there's color high on her cheekbones that wasn't there before, and her hands have stopped shaking entirely, and as I unlock the door to go — because the only decent thing left to do is leave before I ruin Friday by reaching for it early — she says, without turning around:
"Kieran."
"Yeah?"
"The way you moved." A pause. "Nobody's ever stood between me and anything. My whole life, everybody told me they were protecting me and what they meant was controlling me. You didn't tell me anything. You just stood there." Her voice goes quiet. "Nobody's ever just stood there."
I don't have a word big enough for that.
So I give her the only one I've got. "Always," I say, one more time.
And I walk out into the cold boardwalk evening with my torn-up hands and my screaming heart and a Friday on the calendar that's going to cost me everything I've spent four months building, and for the first time since I bought a roll of paper towels I didn't need, I'm not afraid of the cost.
I think about Griffin on the dock, driving pilings in the rain, telling me the test. The closer you get, the more there is.
I think about three months of lessons, each one making her more interesting, never less.
I think about how the heat off the wall should have burned down to nothing by now if that's all it was, and instead it's deepened into something so specific it has her exact frown in it, her exact way of saying prospect like it's both a dismissal and a dare.
I ran the test without meaning to. I've been running it for months.
And the answer was the same every single time, and I just didn't have the nerve to call it what it was.
I've got the nerve now. She gave me that too, along with the charcoal.
I'm just counting the days.
Three, this time.
I'm getting good at counting down to her.