Chapter Twenty-Five
THREE MONTHS ON, the clubhouse threw a party for no reason anybody could name, which is the only kind worth throwing, and I stood at the edge of it with a beer going warm in my hand and watched my woman dance.
I'd lit the bonfire myself, out in the yard where we run the bikes, and somebody had a speaker going loud enough to annoy the neighbors we don't have, and half the club was out there under it making fools of themselves the way men do when there's nothing chasing them. And in the middle of all of it was Bee.
She was dancing. Barefoot in the dirt with her hair coming loose and the firelight all over her, laughing at something Jewel said, spinning Wren around by both hands like a girl half her age, and when the song changed to something with more bottom to it she threw her head back and laughed with the rest of them, loud, no hand flying up to catch the sound, no flinch, nothing held back.
Throttle came and stood next to me with his own beer and we didn't say anything for a minute, just watched her, two men who'd carried that girl out of two different kinds of dark.
"That's her," he said finally, rough. "Right there. That's who she was. Before." He took a pull off the bottle. "I didn't think I'd ever see that again. I'd made my peace with not seeing it."
I knew what he meant, and I also knew the thing he didn't, that standing there beside him, quiet, nursing my beer like a man just watching a fire, I was getting knocked clean off my feet.
Because I did know that girl. I knew her before.
The loud one, the barefoot one, the one who used to laugh too loud and stand too close and turn her whole self toward me like she couldn't help it, back when I was nothing but her brother's shadow and she was never once mine to want, and I wanted her anyway, quiet, from a step back, for years.
Then the woods took that girl, and the one who walked back out of them was smaller and quieter and scared of the dark, and I loved her just as hard, fierce and whole, the flinching one, the one who counted the exits in every room.
I'd have spent the rest of my life loving her exactly that scared and counted myself the luckiest bastard in Arizona.
And now here came the first one, walking back.
Loud and barefoot and unafraid, dancing in my firelight like the dark had never once had its hands on her, four years down in it and climbing out like she'd only stepped away for air.
And the dumb truth of it is I fell all over again, right there in the dirt, over a woman I was already married to in every way that counts.
The girl I couldn't have. The girl I stood guard over.
And now this one, the one I'd wanted first and wanted longest, walking back to me through the sparks, and mine.
She was going to be the death of me, because she'd just caught me looking and she was coming this way through the firelight with that look on her face, and God help me I wanted her so bad my teeth ached.
"You're doing it again," she said, when she got to me. Breathless, grinning, sweat at her temples.
"Doing what."
"Watching the gate." She didn't ask it. She'd caught me. I'd let my eyes drift off her to the dark line of the fence the way I do maybe forty times an hour, the old sweep, counting shapes that aren't there. "You've done it twice since I started dancing. I've been keeping track."
"Force of habit."
"No." She took the warm beer out of my hand and set it on the ground and stood up into my space, close, her chin tipped up, not letting me off it. "It's not a habit, Eli. It's him. He's dead and gone and you're still standing a guard for him in your own yard."
I didn't say anything. There's no good answer to a true thing.
"You think I don't know what you carry around," she said, quieter, just for me now, under the music.
"The road you rode the wrong way. The door you left open.
I know you've got it filed somewhere behind your ribs with your name on it, and you take it out when you think I'm not looking and you do your penance.
" Her hand flattened on my chest, right over the spot.
"I'm going to tell you the same thing I've decided about myself, and then I want you to actually hear it, because you're thick as a fence post about exactly one subject and it's this one. "
"Yeah?"
"He wanted me afraid." Her eyes were steady, fierce, the steadiest thing in that whole loud night.
"That was the entire point of him. He told me so himself, he spent his life looking for the place a person stops.
He wanted me to flinch at doors and check the locks twice and spend the rest of my life small and quiet and watching the dark for him.
That's the only thing he ever actually wanted, the only win there was.
And if I live like that now, if I spend my one life scared of a dead man, then he got it.
He's in the ground and he still gets it.
" Her jaw set. "I won't. I flat refuse. I'm not handing that man one more thing of mine, not one, and especially not the rest of my life. "
"Bee—"
"And I'm not going to stand here and let you hand him yours either.
" She fisted my shirt. "Every time you guard a gate nobody's coming through, every time you bleed for a road you rode three months ago, you're giving him the exact same thing, you're letting him keep you up at night, scared and standing watch.
You think you're protecting me. You're just letting him win slow, off in a corner, where you think I can't see it.
" Her voice cracked, just slightly, the only give in the whole speech.
"I came all the way back, Eli. I clawed every inch of it back.
Don't make me do it next to a man who's still down there in that room with him.
Come up here with me. Come all the way up. "
I took her face in both my hands, this loud free impossible woman, twice-mine, and I made her a different kind of promise than the ones I'd been keeping, not I'll stand in front of you, not nothing will ever touch you, but the harder one, the one that cost me something real to mean.
"Okay," I said. "I'll come up."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. I'll put it down." I dragged in a breath that went all the way to the bottom for the first time in three months. "Gonna take me a minute. I been a wall a long time."
"I don't need a wall." She was already pulling me by the shirt, backward, toward the fire and the noise and the brothers making fools of themselves, that grin breaking back out over her face. "I told you what I need. I need you up here. Now come dance with me before I die of old age."
"I don't dance."
"You do now."
And the hell of it is—I did. The Sergeant at Arms of the Devil's House MC, a man who has put grown men through tables, got dragged out into the dirt by a hundred-and-ten-pound woman and made a complete jackass of himself in front of his entire club, and they hooted and they hollered and Throttle laughed so hard he had to sit down, and Bee threw her head back and laughed again, that big unguarded sound, and spun in my arms in the firelight with her hair coming loose, and I held on, and for the first time since I was a kid I wasn't watching the gate.
I was watching her.
She caught me doing it and didn't tell me to stop.
"This one you can watch," she said, breathless, laughing, going up on her toes against me with the whole loud living club roaring around us. "This one's yours."
"Yeah," I said. "Mine."
And out past the firelight the gate stood open and dark and quiet, the way an open gate is supposed to be when there's nothing on God's earth left to keep out, and I quit looking at it, and I pulled my girl in close, and I danced with her until the fire burned down to coals.
The End
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