Chapter 35
35
W hen I walk into the kitchen, freshly showered to get rid of the stench of the bowels of the city I’ve been dealing with all day, my gaze immediately searches for my girl.
However, it’s only Grey’s hazel eyes there to greet me from where he stands on the other side of the kitchen island. As he wordlessly chops up a side of beef, his gaze flicks toward the glass window overlooking the courtyard outside.
I don’t stop to ask any further questions; I just make my way to the sliding door and scoop up a throw blanket from beside the couch as I go past.
“You need to have a proper conversation with her.” Grey’s voice calls after me with more than a hint of warning.
The man knows I’ve been avoiding this means of communicating. He knows it’s one of the many ways I’ve kept myself guarded over the years, only allowing a select few into the simple act of conversing that is at my fingertips, and yet I don’t want to open myself to giving that part of me to just anyone.
Even though I’ve wanted to with Poe for so long, the thought makes my stomach turn with the unease of feeling like she’ll disappear the moment she gains the ability to see the kind of man I am at my core.
Stepping outside, the sky sprawls out in a lazy wash of orange and salmon pink, with streaky clouds high overhead. The temperature is cool, but not too much so to be out here, and I see where Poe is sitting with her legs tucked against her chest and chin propped on one knee, watching the sky. Something reaches right through to the spot behind my ribcage and squeezes my heart so fiercely the damn thing might burst, taking in the sight of her.
Those long, dark strands of hair hang in damp waves, tossed over one shoulder, and the baggy sweater she wears is bunched over her fists. At the sound of my footsteps, Poe tilts her head my way and blinks a couple of times, as if she’d been lost in a waking dream, and I can’t even begin to understand why she gifts me a soft curve of her full lips while watching me walk toward her.
Like the overbearing fool I am, I’ve got the blanket ready to go and immediately wrap the both of us up, tucking Poe against my side so that we can share the warmth. She leans into me straight away and uses my chest to cushion her head, giving me the hit of all her sweet scent and shampoo to sit here and inhale without any hope of stopping.
“I was with Hawke.” Her words come out so quietly, and beneath the blanket, I feel her fingertips brush against the front of my t-shirt. Each tentative press says the hidden questions behind those four words.
Is that ok with you? Are you upset with me?
My arm scoops around her, tightening my grasp and cocooning our bodies beneath the blanket.
“You don’t mind… knowing that I was with him?” We’re sitting side by side, with faces tilted to the sky, so I can’t see Poe’s face, and she can’t see mine. But I know she’ll be able to feel my movements .
I shake my head.
We sit there for a few more heartbeats that fill the pause, and then my girl lets out a long exhale.
“See, that’s the thing, Angel. I understand you’re saying you don’t mind. I trust that you’ll be honest with me. But there’s so much nuance to that simple word.”
Poe wriggles her hands free from the blanket and, with them, takes my right palm and tips it face up toward the candy floss skies overhead. Methodically, slowly, she traces the lines and grooves and calluses of my hands that have seen so much destruction and despair as she talks.
“That no could mean, ‘I’m ok, but I also want to strangle Hawke’...” The corners of my lips twitch since she’s not wrong there.
“Or it could mean, ‘I’m totally fine with it and understand that you’ve been together before, except when that happened, it was in a mutual group situation’...” Her forefinger drags along the roughened edge of skin where all the years of fighting and surviving have left their calling cards.
“Worst of all, I’m most worried that by shaking your head and being sweet to me about it, you’re actually saying, ‘I don’t mind, but I also don’t want anything more to do with you now that you’ve slept with someone else,’ and I’m sitting here struggling to know if I could ever forgive myself if you feel like I’ve betrayed you in some way.”
Fuck. Grey was right. That asshole is always right.
Swallowing hard, I shift my weight and use the free hand not being held in Poe’s tiny grasp to dig out my phone.
As we sit together, I hold it out so that we can both see the screen and open up the messages I've saved on here that are all in a thread kept to myself. They’re all addressed to the girl pressed against my side, but I’ve never had the goddamn guts to press send on a single one of those words.
It’s mostly just meaningless bullshit. Conversations I’ve had in my own mind at two in the morning when sleep has evaded me, and those long stretches of hours and hours alone in the darkness felt so goddamn empty.
But I’ve kept them all the same.
“What is this?” Poe reaches forward and scrolls back a little, seeing the string of bubbles filled with text, some long, some short, some admittedly less tactful than they should have been, but how else was I supposed to fucking know what to do when there was so much I’d been desperate to say and simply couldn’t.
My heart hammers like a runaway train as I bring my thumbs to the keypad and quickly type while she watches on.
My words.
For you.
She sucks in a sharp breath.
“All of this?” Her voice is a little unsteady, and I’m immediately freaking the fuck out and fighting every urgent need to hit delete on it all, to erase every single character from existence.
You don’t have to read any of it.
My palms are clammy, and my thumbs shake a little as I damn near spell every single thing wrong, needing to erase and re-try what feels like fifty times while she watches on. In my rush to try and get the words down in reply, it’s clunky, and my thumbs are too damn big for the size of this stupid piece of shit phone anyway. This is why I have such a love-hate relationship with writing like this to communicate. It takes so long, and it’s awkward, and half the time, I can’t even express myself this way without messing it up, so I’d rather settle for glances and simple movements that give a yes or a no in a simple black and white fucking means of getting my point across .
“Angel. You wrote all of this… to me?” Poe’s soft palm covers my wrist when she can sense I’m about ready to throw the thing and let the screen smash into a thousand shards.
My chin dips into a nod.
“Will you let me read them sometime? Not now… but maybe later?”
The rate of my heart kicks into overdrive.
Another nod. Yes.
“Can we talk like this? Like right now?”
She sounds so hopeful and bright about it, not like it’s a chore to have to sit here with my words taking a millennia to be spelled out on a tiny little screen. How the hell would I ever deny Poe anything when she has that sweet tone to her voice?
Anytime you want.
“Can you tell me… truthfully… how you feel about the thing with Hawke?” She shifts against my side, and on reflex, I draw her legs to drape across my lap so that we’re in a better position for me to be able to hold the phone in front of both of us and let her see the screen. “I deserve whatever you’ve got to say.”
Poe’s worry is still front and center, as if she’s blaming herself for something that we’re all deeply intertwined in any way.
Did you enjoy being with him?
Her head shifts against my chest in a small agreement. “I didn’t understand it. Maybe I still don’t, but it felt like there’s been something there ever since that first night.”
That’s all I care about.
“So, you don’t mind if he’s part of this… whatever this is between all of us? You, me, Grey?”
The thing about Hawke, is that I’d walk through the fire for him.
As much as he can be an asshole.
He’s our asshole.
Poe makes an odd noise, and then I feel her shoulders shake. “That was exactly what I thought the other night at the club, too.” Laughter trickles through from where her head has turned against my t-shirt, and a smile catches my lips.
As long as it’s what you want.
Grey and myself, we’re in. You don’t have to worry about us.
For however long we’ve got, you want us individually, together, you just have to say the word.
Consider us yours.
My girl slips her palm beneath my t-shirt so that her touch settles against my bare skin, and this might be the best goddamn moment of my life.
“Promise I can read what you’ve written to me sometime?”
I take a deep inhale against her hair. It’s about as much of a yes as I can acknowledge because it’s terrifying to share these parts of myself with her, but she deserves to know.
“Can I have your number… so I can text you like I do with Grey?”
Swiping to the contacts section briefly, I show her where she’s already saved in my phone.
Please do.
Just don’t be disappointed when I’m not even half as charming.
Those two dickheads have got all the pretty boy looks and the clever words.
Poe nuzzles against me with a chuckle. “There’s something to be said for knowing other ways to communicate, you know.”
Hearing her say that leaves me feeling like a damn king sitting out here with such a beautiful woman in my lap, and finally having that ease settling inside me that I’ve got something that the other two will never have with Poe.
While I want her to find her way to connect with them as well, I’m secretly grinning on the inside at the thought of us having our own language. I’ve already got that with Grey, and to some extent Hawke, too.
Now, I can add Poe to that list.