Chapter 8
EIGHT
DAWSON
Boot prints. That’s the whole haul.
One set, deep in the soft ground on the Blackwater side of the Corridor gate, toes pointed at the house like whoever wore them stood here long enough to get comfortable about it.
No shell casings. No fiber snagged on the wire.
No cigarette butt with a story to tell. Whoever stood at this fence less than an hour ago knew exactly how long a security gap lasts and left before it closed.
Sage crouches beside me with a flashlight, jeans pulled on over what I’d bet money is a nightgown.
Her hair is knotted up fast and messy, the same careless way it used to fall out of its braid the summer we used to meet past these exact trees.
The wind carries just enough of her, warm skin, something floral, that I lose a full second remembering the last time her hair looked like this and what we were doing right before it did.
“Nothing,” she says. Not a question.
“Nothing we can use.” I snap out of my daze and straighten, scan the tree line one more time out of habit, not hope. “Whoever it was, they’ve done this before. This isn’t a first try.”
“Comforting.”
“I didn’t say it to comfort you.”
“I know. That’s what makes it comforting.
” She stands, brushes dirt off her knees, flashlight beam swinging across the grass like she’s still hunting for something the ground refuses to give up.
“So. This is it. Married six hours, and I’m standing in a field with my husband checking a fence line for a stalker instead of doing anything a wedding night is supposed to involve. ”
I look at her. Mud on her boots, gun holstered at her hip that she put there herself without asking me for one, moonlight catching the sharp line of her cheekbones and turning her full lips pale, her eyes gone darker gold than whiskey in the low light, the color they only turn at night.
Flippant is safer than saying what I feel standing here, so I go with flippant.
“I did promise you the wedding of a lifetime.”
She bites down on her full lower lip before she answers, and it sends heat, unwelcome and immediate, straight through me, the exact wrong reaction for a man looking for a stalker.
“You promised me nothing. I read the contract. Very thorough. Not one clause about romance.”
“There’s a clause about full threat disclosure.” I nod at the boot prints. “This is me disclosing.”
“You’ve got a real gift for hospitality.”
“My mother would agree with you.” I holster my own gun, check the gate latch one more time, more for my hands than for the latch. “For what it’s worth, most men don’t get their wedding night interrupted by a possible hostile surveillance operation.”
“Most men don’t marry into one.” She says it light, an edge of real nerves underneath the joke that she doesn’t quite manage to hide.
“And for the record, when I asked for a photo two hours ago, this isn’t what I meant.
I wanted abs. You sent me a stalker on night vision and told me to lock my door.
That is, and I cannot stress this enough, not the same category of picture. ”
“I panicked.”
“You do not panic. You’ve never panicked in your life. You executed a tactical redirect.”
“Fine. I tactically redirected you away from my body and toward a home invasion.”
“Very romantic. I’m still thinking about it.”
We walk back to the house close enough that our shoulders brush twice, and the heat from it travels straight past every rational thought I’ve got and settles low, my cock twitching against the fabric of the wedding suit pants I never bothered to change out of. Thank fuck it’s dark out.
Inside, she disappears upstairs to change out of the nightgown-under-jeans situation, and I check the exterior feed twice, walk the ground floor once, set the alarm to a setting Erin’s system calls Paranoid, which feels correct.
By the time I’m satisfied the house is as locked down as I can make it without sitting up all night with a rifle across my knees, it’s a few minutes past midnight, and the adrenaline that got me through the gate check has nowhere left to go.
I stand in my kitchen with my hands flat on the counter and remember, too late, that she wanted abs two hours ago and got a stalker instead. Seems only fair to fix that now that the house is locked down and she’s safely upstairs.
I unbutton the rest of my shirt standing right where I am, forearm braced on the counter, nothing staged about it. I take the photo and send it with one line under it.
Did you think eight years took these off me?
Her reply takes four minutes. Long enough that I check the screen twice to make sure it delivered.
Finally. Worth the wait.
Though technically I already had visual confirmation yesterday, courtesy of your shirtless victory lap past the porch. This is just the notarized version.
I laugh, alone, in a kitchen with a possible intruder somewhere past the fence line I just walked.
Notarized.
A woman likes documentation, Dawson. Verbal testimony only gets you so far in a court of law.
Then let the record show I’m happy to keep supplying evidence.
Careful. I might start requiring it nightly. Surprise me next time.
I’ve never once in my life turned down a dare from this woman, not at twenty-four and not now, and I’m not starting tonight.
I send her a second photo. Lower. My charcoal grey dress pants open, waistband pulled down half an inch, nothing explicit, just enough to make a point.
The three dots appear immediately and disappear twice before her answer comes through.
Oh.
Oh, that’s cheating.
I said surprise me, not incapacitate me.
You started this, I type. I’m just better at finishing things.
We’ll see about that.
Her next photo takes longer, long enough that I pour a glass of water I don’t drink and read the same line of a security log four times without absorbing a word of it.
My phone buzzes once in the middle of it, not her, Tate this time, three words with no context.
Still working it. I don’t need him to say more than that.
Somewhere out past this kitchen the rest of tonight’s other war is still grinding forward without me, whatever it is, while I stand here half undone by a photograph.
I set the phone face up this time instead of face down, because I won’t let myself forget both fights are running at once, even now.
When her photo finally comes through, it’s her hand, just her hand, pressed flat against bare skin low on her stomach, the edge of black lace barely visible at the corner of the frame, the kind of thing a woman puts on for a wedding night, not for an empty room and a phone screen.
My grip finds the edge of the counter. Knuckles white. The whole kitchen lists sideways.
Somewhere under the want there’s a second thing, quieter, uglier, sitting in my gut.
She’s wearing lace upstairs in her bedroom and I’m standing in the kitchen instead of her doorway.
The only reason is a contract she wrote because I taught her, a long time ago, that trusting me with her heart was a mistake.
I don’t get to resent the distance. I built the road that led her to it.
Your turn to be incapacitated, she writes underneath it. Welcome to the club.
I’ve been a member since the tack room.
Liar. You’ve been composed since the tack room. Infuriatingly.
I’m not composed right now.
Prove it.
I don’t answer with words. I answer with the truth of my own hand, unsteady enough in the photo that she’ll see it if she looks close, and I know she’ll look close, because she’s spent her whole life reading rooms for exactly this kind of tell.
There you are, she writes back, and my own line handed back to me, softer, almost fond, ties a knot in my throat tight enough to strangle me, worse than anything explicit could manage.
We go quiet for a while after that. Not finished.
Recalibrating. I take the stairs two at a time, phone still in my hand, and it’s not until I’m sitting on the edge of my own bed that the whole day finally catches up with me at once, the wedding, the gate, the boot prints, the six hours since I stood in a courthouse and made this woman my wife in the eyes of a county that’s spent two years betting on which of us draws blood first. I can hear her, faint, across the hall, the exact creak of her mattress when she shifts her weight, and I sit there with my phone in my hand like it’s a live wire, counting the minutes until she sends the next one.
When it comes, it isn’t teasing anymore.
She’s cropped it careful, controlled, the same precision she brings to a contract or a hearing, showing me exactly as much as she’s decided to show me and not one inch more.
Dark ink at her hip, a road running into the base of a mountain, something I’ve never seen on her in my life.
Lower, past that, a glint of metal I wasn’t expecting and can’t stop looking at, small and entirely, devastatingly new information about a woman who used to be mine.
Every curve, every scar, and every sound she made when we made love, I thought I still knew by heart.
Eight years is a long time, she writes. You don’t know this body anymore, Sullivan. Not even close.
I read that four times before I can make my hands work well enough to type back.
When did you get that?
Twenty-three. A very ill-advised weekend in Nashville. Ask me about it sometime.
I’m asking now.
Not over text. Some stories you have to earn.
I intend to.
Bold claim from a man who’s still fully clothed.
She’s right. I’ve been sending her pieces of restraint dressed up as pictures, disciplined, measured, the same control I bring to everything, and she’s been handing me actual truth, open, new, nothing I could have built from memory no matter how many nights I spent trying.
I could have had this. All of it. Not a photograph through a wall, but her, tonight, in a bed that’s supposed to be ours instead of two separate rooms with a hallway keeping score between them.
I don’t let myself finish that thought all the way to the end, because the ending is always the same, that I’m the reason there’s a hallway at all, the reason she wrote a contract instead of just walking through my door and trusting I’d still be the man who deserved her there.
Wanting her this much and still not reaching for the door is the closest thing to penance I know how to pay her.
I stand up. I strip down to nothing, and I take the photo, no posing, no careful crop like hers, just the plain fact of a man who’s spent years telling himself one version of her was enough to live on and just found out how wrong he was.
I send it before I can talk myself into a safer version.
The reply takes over a minute. Long enough that my pulse starts running a rhythm I don’t love the feel of, half want, half the old fear that I’ve finally handed her more than she wanted.
Well, she writes finally. That escalated. And also. Wow.
Is that a yes or a no?
That’s a give me a second, Dawson, I need to remember how words work.
I laugh again, quieter this time, alone in a dark room, cracked wide open by a woman who belongs to me now on paper and hasn’t let me anywhere near her since the judge said so, and who I’ve spent every second since pretending doesn’t matter.
I want to hear your voice, she writes, after the second has stretched into several. Not tonight. I don’t trust what I’d say tonight.
When?
Tomorrow. A pause, then: Tonight I just want to lie here and think about that photo like the disaster I apparently am.
That makes two of us.
Good. A beat. Goodnight, husband.
The word sits strange and warm in me, a term I’ve heard a handful of times today and felt nothing about until right now, past midnight, from a woman across the hall who just handed me a lifetime of catching up to do in the space of one very long text train.
Goodnight, Blackwater.
It’s Sullivan now. Legally.
Goodnight, Sullivan.
I set the phone face down on the nightstand, and I lie in the dark a long time after, staring at a ceiling I haven’t gotten used to yet, listening for a floorboard creak through the wall that never quite comes again.
I thought I already knew the worst and the best of wanting this woman.
She’s just proven me wrong on both counts in under an hour, with nothing but a phone and the length of a hallway between us.
Somewhere past the fence line, whoever stood there less than an hour ago is still out there, patient enough to wait for a gap in the cameras and smart enough to leave nothing behind but two boot prints.
No new message needed tonight, not when the old one is still sitting in my phone from the same night my father handed down the house.
She’ll like it there again.
Whoever wrote that already knows how this ends.
I thought I was ready for this. The marriage, the war, the weight of two names stitched together under one roof and one target.
I wasn’t ready for how heavy it would actually feel, married for less than a day and already exhausted down to the bone, carrying a wife I can’t protect from a threat I can’t see, on top of a family name that’s been on trial in this county since a truck stopped running with a dead man inside it.
I lie there running the photographs back one at a time, deliberate, patient, the tattoo and the piercing and the curve of her hand against her own stomach, memorizing every new inch of her, relearning a body I used to know by heart.
Down the hall a door is shut that I have a key to and will never use without her asking first. I said vows today in a room the size of my mudroom, meant every word of them, and I still don’t get to walk twenty feet and prove it.
Some men would call that a technicality.
I call it the bill finally coming due for something I broke a long time before either of us knew what a contract was.
I don’t know yet that somewhere in the dark, on the other side of a fence line I trust and a name I’ve known my whole life, patience with a familiar face is already awake, and I haven’t found a way to see it coming.
I fall asleep anyway, phone charging on the nightstand, alarm still set to Paranoid, too tired to check the feed one last time before I go under.