Chapter 13
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Rooster
My mother comes through the gate at four in the afternoon in a car driven by a man I've never met, and I'm at the fence before it stops rolling.
She gets out slowly.
She's still in the wool coat, too warm for the afternoon, like nobody's told her she can take it off yet.
She's smaller than she was, gray coming in at her temples she used to cover and hasn't, and she stands up out of that car and looks at me across a chain-link gate that's already open, because I opened it the second I saw the dust come up off the road.
"Finn," she says.
And then I've got her.
I've got my arms around my mother for the first time in ten years. One of us is shaking, and I can't tell which.
She's got two fistfuls of the back of my shirt and her face buried in my chest, saying my name into it over and over like she's checking it holds.
"You're taller." She says it into my shirt. "How are you taller? You're thirty-five."
"I'm not taller, Mom."
"You're something." She pulls back and puts both hands on my face, thumbs going over my cheekbones, her eyes wet and running all over me like she's counting to be sure it's all still here.
"Look at you. Look at this beard. Your father grew one like this for about a week, and I made him take it off. "
"You can make me take it off."
"I might." Her chin trembles. "Ten years, Finn."
"I know."
"Ten years."
"I know, Mom."
I hold my mother in a courtyard in Mexico while she cries into my shirt.
Over the top of her gray head, I see Mila in the doorway of the main room with her arms crossed, watching us.
She's not smiling, but her face has come open in a way I've seen maybe twice since the gate, and when she catches me looking she doesn't divert her eyes away.
My mother comes apart, and I've never once known what to do with her crying.
Mila crosses the courtyard and lays a hand flat on my mother's back, "Come on, Marie. I know somewhere quiet. Plus, I know where Ruby hides the good tequila."
My mother goes to her, turns right out of my arms into Mila's like water running downhill.
The two of them head off toward the hall with their heads bent together, my mother already talking, Mila already listening.
I stand in the courtyard by myself and watch the two women I'd walk into a fire for walk away from me arm in arm.
Dante comes and stands next to me. "Your mother?"
"Yeah."
"She staying?"
"Till it's safe."
He nods, watching them go. "Good women look after each other," he says. "Your only job is to stay out of the way and let them." He claps me once on the shoulder, hard, and goes.
So, I stay out of the way.
I go to the garage and work on nothing for a couple of hours, and every so often my mother's laugh comes down the hall, cracked and watery and real, with Mila's voice low underneath it.
I don't go in, check on them, or see how they’re both doing.
Whatever's happening in that room is bigger than me, and I've done enough deciding for the women in my life.
I let them have each other.
* * *
It's nearly midnight when the knock comes.
I'm on my bunk with my boots off and a book I've read the same page of six times.
The knock is soft, two knuckles, and I know it's her before I'm off the bed, because nobody else on this property knocks like they're not sure they're allowed to.
If it was any of the brothers, they would’ve busted in by now.
She's in the hall in a T-shirt and sleep shorts, bare feet on the cold concrete, her hair down around her shoulders.
"Your mother," she says, "is asleep on my bed."
"She's what?"
"Three shots of Ruby's tequila and a full accounting of every stupid thing you did between the ages of four and eighteen, and then she stopped talking mid-sentence and she was gone.
Out cold. Wool coat and all." Mila's arms are crossed and she's losing a fight with a smile.
"I got her shoes off. I wasn't about to move a sleeping woman who's had the day she's had. "
"I'll come get her. I'll put her in my—"
"Don't. Let her sleep." She goes quiet for a second. "It was good for her. The talking. She needed it and so did I, and we're good, Finn. Your mother and me. We're good."
"Then where are you sleeping?"
And she looks at me.
It's the look she used to give me when we were kids and she'd already decided something and was waiting for me to catch up.
A look I haven't gotten off Camila Bacani since she was twenty-two years old.
My body knows it a full second before my head does, heat coming up the back of my neck, my pulse gone loud.
"Is that why you're here?" Keeping my voice level is the hardest work I've done all week. "Because my mother's in your bed? Because if you need a place to sleep, I'll take the floor. I'll take the couch in the main room. Say the word."
"No."
"No?"
"That's not why I'm here." She uncrosses her arms, stands there in my doorway with her hair down and her bare feet on the concrete, and she doesn't step in, because she wants me to hear it before she does. "You know why I'm here."
My heart's slamming and I'm certain she can hear it.
"Say it. I need you to say it out loud, because I'm not putting a hand on you over an assumption. Not one more time in my life do I guess at what you want."
Her breath goes ragged and her eyes fill, and then her whole face softens.
"I'm here because I want you," she says.
"Sober. Clear-headed. My mother's dead, and yours is asleep in my bed, and there are men coming for the both of us, and I could be in the ground in two weeks. I have spent ten years being taken, and I’m done being taken.
Tonight I decided I get one thing that's mine, and it's you. "
I'm on my feet without deciding to be.
"So the only question left," she says, and her voice holds steady, "is whether you make me stand out here in this hallway, or you let me in."
I let her in.
She steps in, shuts the door, and turns the lock.
The one she checks in every room she enters, and the small click of it is the loudest sound in the world.
Then she turns around and looks at me.
Everything in me wants to close the distance.
Ages of wanting it, every muscle strung tight with it, and I make myself stand exactly where I am with my hands loose at my sides, because tonight is hers.
All of it. Every inch of it is hers to steer, and I'm not taking a single step she doesn't hand me.
"You're not moving," she says.
"No."
"Why?"
"Because you'll tell me when." My voice drags rough. "You crossed this whole club to get here. You'll cross the last of it too, when you're ready. I've got nowhere else in the world to be."
Her eyes go bright, and she crosses the room.
She comes up flush against me and lays her hands flat on my chest—the way she did in the sunroom, the way she did in the courtyard—except now there's nothing under her palms but thin cotton.
I feel the warmth of every finger through it.
She slides them up and hooks them behind my neck and draws my mouth down to hers.
And then it stops being slow.
She kisses me like she's been holding it in for years, because she has, and I give it back and let her set the tone of it.
How hard, how deep, when to pull me down and when to slow me.
She fists both hands in my shirt and shoves it up.
I get it off over my head and let it drop, and her palms spread flat on my bare chest and my stomach, pressing, mapping, like she's making sure I'm real.
"Bed," she says against my mouth. "Now."
I walk her back to it and we go down together.
I catch my weight on my forearms so I'm over her and not on her, and she hooks a leg around me and pulls me down onto her anyway, because that's her call to make too.
Her hands go everywhere and mine follow behind them.
Wherever she puts her hands, I'm allowed.
Wherever she doesn't, I wait.
She notices me waiting—I watch it move through her, the small hitch of breath, the way her eyes come open to check my face and find me watching hers—and me holding back reaches her deeper than any move I could've made.
"You're letting me run it," she breathes, pulling back to look at me.
"Yeah."
"The whole time?"
"The whole time. Every time. The rest of my life, if you'll have me." I get a hand into her hair, slow, and she leans her whole head into it and lets her eyes fall shut. "I'm not in a hurry, Mila. I've never once in my life been in a hurry with you."
She sits up.
Straddling me, she pulls her own shirt off over her head, and I keep my eyes on her face, because she hasn't told me I can look anywhere else, and she watches me do it and her eyes go wet and bright.
"You can look," she says.
So I look.
And she's beautiful in a way that puts an ache behind my ribs, narrow and marked and so alive it hurts to see.
I don't tell her any of that, because tonight she doesn't want to be told she's beautiful.
She wants to be wanted, plain and loud and without one ounce of pity mixed into it, so I put my hands on her waist and I let her feel exactly how much I do.
Then she does the thing I'll carry to my grave.
She climbs off me and stands up beside the bed in the low lamplight, and she turns around.
She turns her back to me on purpose.
Stands there in nothing but the lamp and lets me see all of it.
Every rope, ridge, and silver seam of nine years, laid out plain in the light where I can't miss an inch.
She doesn't say a word, and she doesn't look back over her shoulder, and I understand what she's handing me.
She's showing me the worst that was done to her, in the light, on purpose, and she's waiting to feel what I do with it.
Every man who ever saw that back either put the marks in it or couldn't stand to look.
She's decided she'll know exactly what I am by what I do in the next ten seconds.
And it takes everything I've got.
Because it's unbearable.
It's the body of the only woman I've ever loved, and it's a ledger of her time in hell.
There's a version of me that wants to drive a fist through the wall, another version that wants to point a truck north tonight, and a version that wants to grieve every mark out loud, one at a time.
Every one of those is about me.
My rage. My horror. My grief. My remorse.
If she catches a flicker of any of it she'll read it as pity, and pity's nothing but the flinch in a better coat.
So I hold all of it down off my face, and I get up off the bed.
I come up behind her slow enough that she can hear me coming, and I set my hands on her shoulders.
I bend my head and put my mouth on the worst of it—the top scar, the one that runs up under her shoulder blade.
I press my lips to it.
Then to the one below it.
I kiss my way down the ruin of her back with my hands steady and warm on her hips, not shaking, not hurrying, like it's the most ordinary thing in the world, because to me it is.
It's her. There is no part of her I would cross a room to avoid.
She's gone completely still.
"Finn." Her voice cracks straight down the middle of it. "What are you—"
"Nothing you don't want." I straighten and wrap both arms around her from behind and draw her back against my chest, and I put my mouth to her ear. "Turn around when you want to. Stay like this if you want to. I've got you either way, and I'm not going anywhere."
She turns around in my arms.
Her face is wet, and she isn't hiding it.
She looks up at me, and whatever she'd braced herself to find, she didn't find it, and I watch her understand that.
"Okay," she says. It's the same okay she gave me in the sunroom, except now it holds everything the first one couldn't. "Okay."
And she takes me back down to the bed, and she has the power here.
All of it, start to finish, exactly the way she wants and not one second faster, and I follow her every single place she goes, slow when she's slow and with her when she isn't.
My hands where she puts them and my eyes on her face, and when she comes apart it's with her forehead pressed to mine and my name in her mouth.
I hold every piece of her together while she does.
After, she doesn't leave.
That's what takes me apart.
She's got her head on my chest and one leg thrown over mine.
My hand's moving slowly up and down the scars on her back because she reached around and set it there herself.
She's breathing slowly and even against my ribs, and she doesn't leave.
"Stop thinking," she says, not opening her eyes. "I can hear it."
"Sorry."
"You're happy. It's loud." She burrows in closer. "Be happy quieter."
"Yes, ma'am."
She almost laughs—I feel it move through her against my chest—and then she goes heavier, and her breathing steps down into sleep.
I lie there with my hand on her back, my mother down the hall, and the woman I love asleep and safe and choosing it, choosing me.
For the first time since I was twenty-five there's nothing at my back and nowhere on this earth I'd rather be than right here.
I don't sleep.
I keep watch over her instead.
Old habit. But there's no fear in it tonight.
Tonight I'm only a man guarding what he thought he'd buried ten years ago and got handed back anyway.