Chapter Thirteen
THE WEEK AFTER Warden's girl, Violet, came, the whole clubhouse went soft.
I don't know how else to put it. A clubhouse full of men who'd put each other through walls for sport spent that week walking around grinning at nothing, passing a phone hand to hand to squint at a picture of a wrinkled little thing in a hospital blanket, arguing in low serious voices about which of them she'd already decided was her favorite.
Warden came back two days later looking ten years older and lit up from the inside, and he let Rex hold her, and Rex—Rex, who I have personally watched bite a man, held that baby like she was made of smoke and might blow away if he breathed wrong. Soft. The whole place.
But that's not what I was watching that week. I was watching Bee.
Because something had shifted in her the night that baby came, in the noise and the crying and the joy, and it hadn't shifted back.
I'd seen it happen, stood close enough to feel it, the second she laughed out loud into that roomful of outlaws and then started crying the good way and didn't run from either one.
Something in her that had been clenched shut for four years had cracked open a half inch in all that warmth, and the crack hadn't closed.
She talked more, that week. Little things, to people who weren't me.
I caught her saying good morning to Jewel like it was nothing.
I watched her thank Ashen for moving a chair, watched Ashen go still and careful and pleased like a man a wild bird had just landed on.
She sat in rooms now instead of at the edges of them.
She'd started touching things as she passed, the back of a couch, the doorframe, the dog, like she was learning the House with her hands, claiming it an inch at a time.
And once, just once, I came in off the lot and heard a sound I didn't recognize coming from the kitchen, and it took me a stupid full second to understand it was her, humming, low and absent over a cup of coffee, and I stood in the hall like an idiot and didn't go in because I didn't want to be the thing that stopped it.
I'd loved her scared. I'd have loved her behind that glass the rest of my life and called myself lucky.
But this, watching her come up out of the dark a degree at a time, watching the girl from before start bleeding back through into the woman I already couldn't breathe right around, this was something else.
This was a man finding out the thing he thought was the whole sky was just the part he'd been able to see.
So of course I started planning how to keep it.
I'd gone out onto the lot for a smoke and a minute of cold air, the want of her got too big to sit still under some nights, and I needed the dark to get my own face back, when the door went behind me and footsteps came across the gravel, and I didn't have to turn around to know it was Holly.
"Maul." She came up and leaned on the porch railing beside me, hip cocked, easy, like we were a couple of old friends picking a thing back up. "You're a hard man to get a minute alone with lately."
"Busy."
"You're never too busy to have a little fun." Her hand found my arm and slid up it, and there was the smile again, the one that used to be enough for what it was. "Come on. It's cold out here. I know somewhere warmer. Old times. No strings."
I took her hand off my arm and set it back on the railing.
"Not happening."
"It used to happen plenty. You sure as hell were attracted to me."
"It was just letting off steam, and it didn't mean a thing, not to me, and you knew that walking into it.
" I kept it flat. I don't have a soft way to say a thing like that and I wasn't about to dig one up, not with another woman still sitting warm in my chest. "A good time, gone by morning.
That's the whole of what it was, Holly. Don't go building it into something it never was.
I thought we had already cleared this shit up. "
Her face pulled tight, and she took her hand back and folded her arms like the cold had got worse.
"Wow." A little laugh with no air behind it. "You know, I think I could almost take it if you were a bastard about it. But you're not even that. You're just done. Like I'm a chore you’re crossing off."
I didn't say anything. There's nothing to say to a true thing.
She straightened up, and pulled her pride back on over the hurt like a jacket, and when she spoke again it was steadier.
"Fine. It doesn't matter. I didn't come out here to beg, whatever this looks like.
I'm done hanging around. I've met somebody, a man who actually sees me, who wants the things I want.
And if it works out, I'm taking it. So you can stop ducking me in the clubhouse like I'm a problem. "
She turned to go. Then she stopped, and looked back at me over her shoulder, and the look wasn't cruel. It was certain.
"You felt something for me once, Maul. Call it a couple of nights if that's what gets you to sleep.
But it's going to get quiet on you one of these days, and you're going to know exactly what you let walk off this lot, and I'll be long gone by then, someplace I'm actually wanted, and there won't be a thing in this world you can do about it.
" The smallest, tiredest smile. "Hope she's worth what you're throwing out. I mean that."
And she went inside and shut the door soft behind her
I finished my smoke in the cold.
She was wrong, is the thing, and I stood out there and turned it over honest, because you owe a person at least that much before you set them down for good.
There was nothing. Not a flicker, not a buried beat, not one inch of me that had ever belonged to Holly or ever would.
What I felt watching that door close was a low, no-account relief that whatever she'd been hauling around all this time had finally found a road out that didn't run through me.
Some man off the compound was welcome to the whole of it.
I even hoped, the dumb way you hope about a stranger you'll never meet, that he'd be decent to her.
I'd handed her careless nights and let her make a life out of them in her own head, and that's not a kindness, even when it never quite adds up to a crime.
Then I put her out of my mind, and I went back inside to the only thing in that whole loud clubhouse that ever carried the real and total weight of me.
She was right where I'd left her, folded into the end of the couch, and she found my eyes before I'd even cleared the door and gave me that small private smile, the new one, the one that's only ever mine. And Holly, and her someone new, went out of my head like smoke off the end of a cigarette.
One woman. That's all I've got in me. All I ever had.
And there she sat in the lamplight wearing it, not even knowing she had it on. So I crossed the room and went to her, and let the rest of the world wait out in the cold where I'd left it.