5. Darcie
DARCIE
Iwake up with a Razor’s arm across my waist.
I don’t move. I don’t breathe. I lie there staring at the grey morning light on my ceiling and I wait to see if it’s a dream or if I’m going to need to deal with it being real.
His thumb moves on my hip. Once. Small.
Nope, not a dream. My best friend’s ridiculously hot brother is definitely in my bed.
“Morning.”
His voice. Low. Rough with sleep. Right next to my ear.
I turn my head very slowly.
He’s on his side. Propped up on one elbow. Already watching me. His hair is a mess and his jaw is stubbled in a way it wasn’t yesterday, and he’s looking at me like he’s been looking at me for a while and has no intention of stopping.
“Hi,” I whisper.
“Hi.”
“How long have you been awake?”
“A while.”
I don’t know what to do with the fact that he is in my bed, in the morning, warm and heavy against my side, looking at me like I’m something he doesn’t plan on letting go of.
“This is weird,” I say.
“Which part.”
“I don’t know how to do this. What are we supposed to say to each other?”
His thumb keeps moving on my hip. Slow. Absent.
“We don’t have to say anything,” he says.
I want to stay exactly where I am for the next hundred years with his hand on my hip and the smell of him on my pillow.
It’s a terrifying thing to realize at seven in the morning.
I pull on his t-shirt when I finally get up, because it’s just there. Not to mention, the fact that there is something about his scent that I find ridiculously attractive.
It’s enormous. It hits me mid-thigh. I roll the sleeves twice and catch a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror — hair wild, lips swollen, wearing a man’s shirt that smells like him — and I don’t recognize the woman looking back at me.
I like her.
That’s the part that shocks me.
I’ve spent my whole life looking in mirrors and seeing the sensible one, the one who does things properly, the one who doesn’t make trouble.
This morning I see a woman who had sex last night with a man she’s wanted since she was sixteen, and she let him have her, and she wants him to have her again.
She’s smiling. Small. Private.
I’ve never been pleased with myself a day in my life.
When I come out of the bathroom, he’s sitting up against the headboard with the sheet low on his hips. He looks up when I walk in. His eyes go all the way down me in his t-shirt and all the way back up, and I feel his gaze like a hand.
“Come here,” he says.
I come.
I climb onto the bed, and he catches my hip and pulls me across him so I’m sitting on his lap, my knees either side of his thighs. His hands come up to my hips under the hem of the t-shirt and splay there.
“Morning,” he says again, softer this time.
“Morning.”
He’s looking up at me now. I’ve never looked at Razor from this angle in my life.
His eyes are dark. His jaw is rough under my palm when I reach up and touch it.
I’m sitting on him and I can feel him, hard already, through the thin fabric of his boxers, and I can’t quite believe I’m here, straddling him and noticing that.
I lean down and I kiss him.
I’ve never kissed him first. This morning I’m the one on top and he’s the one looking up at me, and I want to know what it’s like to lead.
I kiss him slowly. I take his bottom lip between mine and I trace the shape of his mouth with my tongue, and I kiss him until his hands tighten on my hips and a sound comes out of him that I haven’t heard before.
“Darcie.” Low warning. “Baby.”
“What?”
“You know what.”
“I don’t, actually.”
He lets out a breath.
“Tell me,” I whisper, even though I know what he’s getting at.
“Keep kissing me like that and this morning’s going somewhere.”
“Oh good.”
His eyes change.
I’ve surprised him. I surprised me. I sit back a little on his thighs and I look down at him — this man I’ve wanted since I was a teenager, underneath me, and something bold and warm unfolds in my chest.
“Can I—” I start.
“Yes.”
“You don’t know what I was going to ask.”
“I don’t care. Yes.”
I laugh. And then I sit up and I pull his t-shirt off over my head and drop it on the floor, and his eyes go down me and his hands tighten on my hips.
“Christ,” he breathes. “Darcie.”
Then I lean down and kiss him again.
It’s different this time. I know what he likes. I take his mouth the way he took mine, and when his hand comes up to cup the back of my neck I catch his wrist and put it back down on my hip.
“No,” I say. “Let me.”
He stills.
For a second I think I’ve gone too far. And then his eyes go very dark, and his hands slide down and settle obediently on my thighs, and he looks up at me and says, quiet: “Go on then.”
I don’t know who this woman is. I like her.
I kiss him until I’m breathless. I kiss my way down his jaw, the side of his throat, the hard line of his collarbone.
I pay attention to his breathing the way he paid attention to mine.
When I trace the ink over his ribs with my fingertips he makes a small sound I’m pretty sure he didn’t mean to make, and it’s the most powerful I’ve ever felt in my life.
I sit up. I shift my weight. I push his boxers down, clumsy, and he helps me because my hands have started trembling a little — not scared, just alive — and then there’s nothing between us.
He doesn’t move. He’s letting me. He’s watching me like I’m something he can’t quite believe he gets to watch.
I lift up and take him in my hand and I line us up, and he inhales sharply through his teeth and his hands flex on my thighs, and I lower myself onto him.
Slow.
He goes very, very still.
It’s different from this angle. Deeper. I can feel every inch of him as I sink down, and when I’m finally flush against him I have to stop and breathe because my whole body is shaking. His hands are on my hips. He’s not moving. He’s letting me have this.
“Look at me,” he says.
I look at him.
His jaw is locked. He’s holding himself so still I can see the muscles in his forearms jumping with the effort.
“You’re in charge,” he says, quiet. “Take what you want.”
Something inside me breaks open.
I take what I want.
I move slowly at first, learning the shape of it, finding the angle that makes me gasp. His hands stay on my hips — guiding, not controlling — and when I look down at him, his face is undone in a way I’ve never seen. Lips parted. Eyes on mine. His chest rising and falling fast.
I go faster.
My hands brace on his chest. I ride him, and I watch his face, and I listen to the sounds he’s making — the low groans, the quiet curses, my name — and I feel a kind of power I didn’t know my body could hold.
I’m gasping. I’m close. I can feel it building.
“Baby,” he says. “Baby, I need—”
“What?”
“I need to move. Tell me I can move.”
“Yes.”
He flips me.
It happens so fast I lose my breath. One second I’m on top and in the next I’m on my back and he’s above me, braced on his forearms, and he’s looking down at me with something ferocious in his face.
“My turn,” he says.
He moves.
Harder this time. Deeper. He’s watching my face the whole way and his hand comes up to my throat — not gripping, just resting, thumb against my jaw, grounding me — and I have never in my life felt as wanted as I feel under him right now.
I come apart with his name on my mouth and his eyes on my face, and he follows me a breath later with a groan torn out of him, and when he collapses over me I wrap my arms around him and hold on.
We don’t speak for a long time.
His mouth is against my shoulder. His hand is in my hair. His weight is pinning me to the mattress and I don’t want him to move.
“Darcie.”
“Mm.”
“You didn’t know you could do that.”
“I didn’t.”
He turns his face into my neck and I feel him smile.
“Well,” he says. “You can.”
He goes out around eleven. Something about a meeting with King and picking up a bag from his place — he’s vague about it, and I don’t push, because I’m learning that vague is what work looks like in this world.
He kisses me at the door. Hard, quick, his hand cupping my jaw. “Back in an hour.”
He goes.
I make myself a cup of tea and curl up on the couch in his t-shirt with my legs tucked under me, and I sit there in the quiet feeling like a woman who has been turned inside out and then put back together wrong in the best possible way.
Then the knock comes.
I freeze. I look at the door.
“Darce?” Kate’s voice from behind it. “It’s me. Open up.”
I close my eyes.
I’d forgotten.
Kate is standing in my hallway, holding a paper bag of pastries, and I watch her face do three distinct things as she takes me in.
One: she registers that I’m wearing a man’s t-shirt.
Two: she registers that the t-shirt is her brothers.
Three: she registers that I am not wearing anything else.
“Darcie,” she says, very carefully. “Why are you wearing my brother’s clothes?”
“Kate—”
“No. Don’t. Just — step back. Let me in.”
I step back. She walks in. Her eyes go round the apartment, and I watch her clock everything — his boots by the door, his jacket over the chair, the bike helmet on the counter, the fact that the couch hasn’t been slept on.
She know’s he’s been staying here, but she is now registering it’s not quite going the way she thought.
She sets the pastries down on the table very gently. She turns around.
“Darcie.”
“Don’t.”
“Darcie.“
“Kate. Please.”
She stares at me. Her face is doing a thing I’ve never seen it do before — not angry, not exactly. Frightened. She’s frightened for me.
“When,” she says.
“Last night.”
“How long—”
“Kate. It’s not like that. It’s not—”
“It’s not what, Darcie. Tell me what it isn’t. Because from where I’m standing it looks exactly like the thing I would have bet a thousand dollars didn’t happen in this apartment.”
I don’t say anything because what am I supposed to say?
She puts her hands on the back of the kitchen chair and grips it hard enough that her knuckles go white.
“You don’t know him,” she says.
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t know him, Darcie. You know a version of him. You don’t know what he does. You don’t know the people he knows. You don’t know what he comes home from.”
“Kate—”
“Do you know why I don’t go to the clubhouse?
Because that world is bad. It’s not exciting.
It’s men who handle things with their fists and their guns, and the things they handle don’t always wash off.
And I love my brother. But I have spent my whole adult life making sure nothing I love ever has to touch that side of him.
Now you’re standing in your kitchen in his shirt and I’m watching you walk into it—”
She stops. She swallows.
“You’re a nice girl, Darcie. You’re a good girl.
That’s not a bad thing, that’s who you are.
Vet school, top of your class, rescuing animals that didn’t stand a chance without you.
That’s you. My brother hangs around with men who — I don’t even want to know what they do.
I have spent many years not asking. You’re going to be the one he comes home to after the things I don’t want to know about, and I don’t think you know what you’re signing up for. ”
My chest hurts. My eyes are hot. I love her. I love her because she is my best friend. And she isn’t wrong about any of the facts.
“Kate.”
“Don’t.”
“Kate. Look at me.”
She looks at me.
“I know all of that,” I say. “I know exactly all of that. I don’t have illusions about what he does.
I’ve never had illusions. I grew up sleeping over at your house.
I saw him come home at four in the morning with his knuckles split, and I saw your parents not ask.
I saw him disappear for weeks, and you didn’t know where, and I understood even then that I wasn’t supposed to ask. I know what he is. I know.”
“Then—”
“And I’m still choosing him.”
Her face cracks.
“Darce—”
“I have spent ten years being exactly the girl you’re describing right now.
The good one. The nice one. The sensible one.
And I have been quietly miserable for most of it, and nobody ever noticed, because being miserable quietly is literally my entire personality lately.
I’m not doing it anymore. I want him. I’ve always wanted him.
He wants me. And I’m not going to deny myself that for anyone. Sorry, not even you.”
She stares at me.
I’m shaking. My hands are shaking. I have never in my life said that many words in a row to Kate about anything that mattered.
Her mouth opens. Closes. She looks at me like she’s seeing me for the first time.
“Jesus, Darcie.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologise.” She drags a hand through her hair. “Okay. Okay. I hear you. I’m going to need to sit with it for a while. But I hear you.”
She picks up her bag. She looks at me for a long second.
“He’d better be good to you. He’d better be exactly as good to you as you deserve, because if he isn’t, I’m the one he’s going to answer to. Brother or not.”
“He will be.”
“Yeah.” Her voice softens. “Yeah. I actually think he will be.”
She leaves.
I close the door behind her. I stand with my back against it and slide down until I’m sitting on the floor in his t-shirt with my knees pulled up, and I breathe.
I made a scene. I meant it. Nothing terrible happened.
Kate is still my best friend. I’m still myself. I’m maybe more myself than I’ve ever been.
I sit on the floor and smile into my knees.
Razor comes back forty minutes later.
I don’t tell him about Kate. Not yet. I want to keep it to myself a little longer — what I said, how it felt, the new shape of me. I’ll tell him tonight. Tomorrow. Some time when the words aren’t still raw.
He’s on his phone when he comes through the door, and his face is set in the flat careful way it gets when something’s happening.
“Yeah,” he says into the phone. “Yeah. I’m here now. Twenty minutes.”
He hangs up. He looks at me.
“We’ve found them. Lock’s got eyes on the location. We go tonight.”
I stand up slowly.
“Okay.”
“You stay here. Doors locked. Phone on. You don’t open up for anyone. Only me.”
“Understood.”
He takes my face between his hands the way he did that first night, and he kisses me — hard, fast, something urgent and unfinished in it.
“I’ll be back.”
“You better be.”
His mouth twitches. “Yes ma’am.”
He’s gone.
The apartment is very quiet without him.
I try to read. I can’t. I check the locks twice. I check my phone. An hour passes. Ninety minutes.
I’m in the kitchen when I hear footsteps in the hallway outside my door.
More than one set. They stop outside my apartment.
Something thumps against the door. Not a knock. Something heavier. A shoulder, testing.
A voice, low: “She’s in there.”
Another: “Told you.”
I don’t breathe.
I go very, very quietly to my phone. My hands are steady. I don’t know why my hands are steady. I open the message app and type as softly as I can.
Someone’s here.
Send.
I press my back against the wall of the kitchen. I close my eyes. I listen to the men in the hallway.
And I wait and pray.