Chapter 5 #2
Because here's the thing I figured out standing in front of my brother: I was so busy being scared of what wanting Kieran would cost that I never once stopped to feel how much I wanted him.
And now Theo's drawn the line in the loudest possible terms, laid out the whole price tag, and instead of scaring me sober it's done the opposite.
It's burned off the last of the fog. I'm not confused anymore.
I'm not weighing it. I jumped off the cliff the second I said if it's Kieran and refused to deny it, and I'm in the air now, and the only thing left to decide is whether I hit the water alone or with him.
I don't wait for Friday.
He's across the yard, by the bays, stacking crates — of course he is, he's always working, my beautiful idiot who thinks if he just works hard enough the wanting will leave him alone.
He's got his sleeves shoved up and his forearms are corded from the lifting and there's charcoal under his nails because there's always charcoal under his nails now, and he doesn't see me coming until I'm almost on him.
He straightens. "Freya? What are you —" His eyes cut toward the bay where Theo is. "Is everything —"
"Come with me."
"What?"
"Just —" I take his hand. Right there in the yard. I don't care who sees, and the realizing that I don't care is its own kind of freedom. "Come with me. Now. Don't argue. You're terrible at arguing with me anyway."
He comes.
I lead him out of the compound and to my truck and I drive us to the boardwalk in a silence thick enough to cut, and I take him up the back stairs to the studio above Black Tide Ink — my private space, the room nobody comes into, where the work that isn't for clients lives.
My own paintings on the walls, the ones I never sell.
Sketches pinned in drifts. The smell of linseed and turpentine and the salt coming off the water through the window I leave cracked even in winter.
It's the most honest room I have. It's the version of me I don't show people.
I've never brought anyone up here. I want to be precise about what that means, because he won't know unless I tell him, and I'm done not telling him things.
Dietrich never saw this room. The handful of men I dated in my twenties never saw it.
Theo's been in it twice, both times to fix something, both times I stood in the doorway the whole time like a guard.
This is the room where I keep the work I make for no one — the paintings that don't sell because I won't sell them, the studies of my mother from memory, the self-portraits I do every January and show to nobody, the whole interior life I built so carefully behind so many walls.
It's not a studio. It's the actual inside of me, rendered in oil and graphite and pinned to plaster, and I have kept it locked my entire adult life.
And I just walked a prospect up the back stairs and turned on the light.
I show him.
"This is yours," he says, turning slowly, taking it in the way he takes in everything, like it's information he'll keep forever. "This is the stuff you don't —"
"It's the stuff that's mine," I say. "Just mine. I've never brought anyone up here."
He stops turning. He understands what I'm telling him. He always understands.
He doesn't grab at it, the way most people would — doesn't crowd the canvases, doesn't perform appreciation, doesn't reach for the thing I've just handed him.
He just stands very still in the middle of my whole hidden self and looks, slow, the way he looks at everything, and his eyes go from the self-portraits to the studies of my mother to the cracked window and back to me, and I watch him understand the size of what I've done, the trust of it, and I watch it land on him like weather.
His throat works. When he speaks his voice has gone careful in a way that tells me he knows exactly what room he's standing in.
"Freya," he says, very carefully, like he's afraid of breaking something. "Theo —"
"I talked to Theo." I cross to him. The room is small and getting smaller.
"I know exactly what it costs. He laid it all out.
The patch, the club, all of it." I stop close.
Closer than the inch I've been guarding for three months.
"And I'm here anyway. So unless you want to tell me the numbers came out different on your side —"
"They didn't." His voice has gone rough. "They never came out different. I just kept hoping you'd be the smart one."
"I'm done being the smart one." I lift my hand and lay it against his jaw, the scarred eyebrow, the face I drew before I let myself want it. "I've been smart my whole life. I built a whole tower of smart. I'd rather be happy for one night than smart for the rest of them."
And I kiss him.
I kiss him surrounded by every honest thing I own — the paintings I never sell, the sketches that are only mine, the salt air I keep letting in — and for one suspended second he goes completely still, like he can't believe it's real, like he's bracing for it to be taken away.
And then his arms come around me, and he kisses me back, and the way he holds me — God, the way he holds me — it's not the way young men hold women they want to brag about.
It's the way you hold something you were certain you'd never be allowed to have.
Careful and starving at the same time. Reverent and undone.
He holds me like the green bottle that finally got picked up, and I feel the held breath go out of both of us at once, three months of it, gone, into the salt and the turpentine and the dark.
When we break apart he presses his forehead to mine, and we just breathe, and he says, against my mouth, like he can't help it, "I don't deserve this."
"Stop," I say. "Everybody deserves to be picked up off the floor of a holding cell.
Everybody deserves to have somebody see the drawings.
You spent twenty-four years thinking you didn't deserve anything.
You're wrong. You've been wrong your whole life.
" I kiss him again, softer. "Let me prove it to you. "
He pulls back just far enough to look at me, the old eyes in the young face, and for once there's nothing guarded in them at all.
And I think, looking at him in the lamplight surrounded by every honest thing I own, about the soldier and his anchor.
You say the true thing out loud and it gets smaller.
It's the not-saying that lets it grow. For three months I built this into something enormous by refusing to name it.
I made it a catastrophe, a cliff, a law of physics I was betraying.
And now I've named it — I want him, said out loud to an empty shop, said again with my hand on his jaw — and it hasn't gotten bigger.
It's gotten true. It's gotten simple. All the architecture of dread I built around it turns out to have been holding up nothing but my own fear.
The thing itself, underneath, is the simplest thing in the world: a man I understand and who understands me, standing in the one room I've never shown anyone, holding me like he can't believe he's allowed.
I'm so tired of not being allowed. I'm so tired of being the one who knows better. Knowing better got me a tower with a beautiful view and no one in it.
"Friday was supposed to be —" he starts.
"It's not Friday," I say. "I got tired of waiting."
"We could still be smart about this." He says it like he's giving me an exit, like he'd let me take it, like even now, with three months of held breath finally let go, he'd put my safety ahead of his own wanting.
"There's still a version where you walk it back.
I'd understand. I'd hate it, but I'd understand. "
"I know you would. That's exactly why I'm not walking it back.
" I take his face in both hands. "You keep offering me the door out.
Every man in my life decided things for me, and you keep handing me the choice and meaning it.
Do you understand how rare that is? Do you understand that you offering me the exit is the precise reason I'm not taking it?
" I kiss him, slow and certain. "I choose this.
I choose you. Not because I have to, not because I got swept up, not because the heat off the wall got to me.
Because I looked at all of it — the cost, the club, my brother, the whole price tag — and I want you more than I want the tower.
That's the truest thing I've got. And I'm saying it out loud so it gets smaller and I can carry it. "
And I take his hand, the one with charcoal under the nails, and I lead him deeper into the only honest room I own, and outside the cracked window the water moves the way it moves in his drawings, dark and patient and going somewhere, and for the first time in my carefully built life I stop being the woman who knows better.
I let it happen.
I give it room to breathe.
And the tower I built with my own two hands, the one with the beautiful view and no one in it, the one I thought was freedom and turns out was just a prettier cage — I leave it standing empty behind me, and I don't look back, and for the first time in twelve years I am exactly where I want to be instead of exactly where it's safe to be, and the difference between those two things turns out to be the whole difference between a life and a fortress.