CHAPTER SIX #2
"It's the best room I've been in all year." She set her bag down. Turned to face him. "You've been giving me up. For three days. Don't tell me you haven't."
He shut the door. Didn't move from it. "I've been doing my job."
"You've been hiding in it." She crossed the small room toward him, slow.
"Three days of ma'am. Three days of letting your eyes slide off my face to the next thing in the room.
You decided the kindest thing you could do was step back and be the shadow and let my father win, and call the giving-up loving me.
I watched you make that call. I've watched men make some version of it my entire life — decide from the far side of a wall what's best for me, hand me a smaller world, tell me it's for my own good.
My father did it this morning at a kitchen table.
And I will not, I will not, do it with you too.
Not after the safe house. Not after you came forty yards through concrete for me and then kissed my torn-up hand like it was worth saving.
You don't get to touch me the way you touched me and then go quiet and dress it up as protection.
That's not protection. That's just one more man deciding my life over my head and calling it love. "
"You don't understand what it costs." His voice was low and rough and he still hadn't come off the door, like the door was the one thing holding the whole rule upright.
"If your father finds out, it doesn't just end the thing between us.
It ends me. The patch, sure, but it's worse than the patch.
I'd be the brother who took the one thing the president forbid, mid-war, with a leak bleeding us out and Coral City circling the family.
You know what that does to a club that's already cracking?
You know what brothers do when they stop trusting each other while men are shooting at them?
People die, Zola. The smart play — the play a man who actually loves you makes — is to keep his hands to himself and keep you alive and not blow the only thing standing between you and the men who tried to put you in a van.
I keep you breathing now. I sort out my own wants later.
That's not me being a coward. That's me doing the cold ugly arithmetic that keeps you above ground. "
"The right play." She stopped a foot from him.
"Listen to yourself. You sound just like him.
The debt and the club and the war and the wound, every one of them true, every one of them stacked up into a wall with you on one side and me on the other, and every brick a reason not to choose.
He builds the exact same wall and calls it keeping me safe, and you build it and call it loving me right, and from in here, Darius, from where I'm standing, the two walls look identical.
I cannot tell you apart from my father right now, and that is the worst thing I could ever say to a man I want this bad.
Hunnuh both build me a little box outta love and ask me to thank you for the air holes.
" Her voice cracked and steadied. "I'm done with the math.
Every man in my life has done the math. I want the one thing not a single one of them has ever offered me, which is the choice.
" She put her hand flat on his chest, over the heart she'd held still two nights running now.
"Stop protecting me like I'm his property.
Start protecting me like I'm your choice. "
It landed. She felt it land, felt his heart kick under her palm, felt the door come loose behind him.
"You want to be his good soldier?" she said, softer now, all the fight in her gone quiet and certain.
"Be it on your own time, at the table, in the field.
I'll never ask you to choose me over the club in a fight; I grew up in this life, I know what loyalty is, I'd never make you small that way.
But not here. Not with me, in the dark, in your own home.
Here you don't get to hide inside the word duty.
Here you have to actually want me — out loud, on purpose, against the only family you've ever had, with both eyes open to exactly what it costs you.
Or you have to look at me right now and tell me you don't, and let me walk down those stairs, and we never do this again.
Those are the only two doors in this room, Darius. " She held his eyes. "Pick one."
For a long moment he didn't move. She watched him stand at the very edge of the biggest thing he'd ever done in his life, the whole gravity of who he'd been — the boy who'd flinched at footsteps in a house that was never safe, the nobody Bishop had pulled up out of the gutter, the man whose entire self was loyalty to the family that saved him — all of it hauling him back hard toward the safe and smart and right and lonely play.
And then she watched him let it go. She watched the wall come down behind his eyes, the one she'd been throwing herself against for three days, and it didn't come down hard or loud.
It just stopped being there, like he'd set down something heavy he'd been carrying so long he'd forgotten it had a weight.
He picked the door.
* * *
He came off the wall and caught her jaw in one rough hand and kissed her, and it was nothing like the safe house.
The safe house had been a thing breaking open after years of pressure, helpless, half an accident.
This was a man choosing, eyes wide open, and she felt the difference in his mouth — no desperation in it, just decision, slow and certain and total, like a vow he was making with his lips because he hadn't found the words for it yet.
It went on a long time, that kiss, his thumbs stroking her jaw and his mouth learning hers slow, like he'd decided and now had no reason on earth to hurry.
She'd half expected, after three days of the wall, that he'd come at her starving like he had in the safe house.
He didn't. The safe house had been a man overrun.
This was a man who'd looked at the whole cost with clear eyes and walked toward her anyway, and there was a steadiness in it that hit her harder than any amount of hunger could have, because hunger is a thing that happens to you and this was a thing he was choosing.
She'd come up those stairs to win an argument. She stayed to take what she'd won.
That was the thing she'd carry out of that room and turn over for the rest of her life: that for the first time in her protected, managed, kept-safe existence, she was the one doing the taking.
She had spent twenty-seven years as the kept thing, the guarded thing, the daughter behind the glass, and she had never once in all of it been the hand that reached.
She reached now, for the first time. Both hands in his shirt, shoving it up, and he lifted his arms like a man surrendering and let her strip it off him, and then she put her palms flat on his bare chest and walked him backward two steps and pushed, and he went — this man who moved everyone and was moved by none — sat down hard on the edge of his own square-cornered bed and looked up at her with his pupils blown black and his breath already coming uneven, and let her stand over him and decide what happened next.
"You're gonna let me run this," she said.
Not a question. It was the thing she wanted most and had never once had — not control over a man, she didn't want him under her boot, she wanted the opposite of that.
She wanted to be the one who reached instead of the one reached for.
The one who decided. A whole life of being handled, kept, guarded, chosen-for, and she wanted one room where she did the choosing with her own two hands.
"Yeah." Hoarse. His hands came to her hips and rested there, light, asking for nothing, the famous dangerous hands gone still and patient on her skin. "Run it. I'm not goin' anywhere."
So she did. She undressed in front of him slow, not a show, just a woman taking off the day in her own time, and his eyes followed every inch of it and his jaw worked and his hands flexed on his own knees with the effort of not reaching, and the want coming off him was its own kind of power, a power nobody had ever handed her before.
When she was bare she stepped between his knees and pushed him back flat on the bed and climbed up over him, and the low gold light from the window laid itself across both of them, and she kissed her way down the center of him — throat, sternum, the old marks she still hadn't asked about, the hard plane of his stomach that jumped under her mouth — and lower, and took him in her hand and then in her mouth, and felt the whole of him go rigid and then shake.
"Zola—" It came out cracked. His hand found her hair, didn't push, just held, his hips fighting to stay still under her. "You don't — God, you don't have to—"
She lifted her head just enough to say it, her hand still working him slow.
"Nobody's makin' me do this. That's the whole point.
I'm choosing to, because I want my mouth on you and for once in my life I get to just have the thing I want.
" And she took him deep again, learning the heavy salt weight of him, the place along the underside where her tongue made his hips jerk, the catch in his breath that told her exactly where to slow down and where to take more.
His thigh went tight as wire under her free palm.
His hand stayed fisted loose in her hair, never pushing, just holding on like she was the only solid thing in a tipping room, and the sounds he made — low, broken, half her name and half a word that wasn't a word — were the most powerful thing she'd ever earned.
She stayed with it until he was coming apart under her, until his hands closed on her shoulders and dragged her up his body, fast, like he could not survive one more second of being the one undone while she watched.