Prologue #3
By the time she’s near enough that I can feel the warmth coming off her bare arms, I’ve stopped pretending either of us means to win.
I curve my hand around the back of her neck, her skin cool and her pulse going hard under my thumb, and she trembles, and it isn’t fear.
I’d know fear. I’ve caused enough of it to tell the two apart in the dark.
This is the other thing. The thing I’ve had no business turning over in my mind for half a year.
“If I touch you,” I tell her, and my voice has dropped lower than I meant to let it, “there’s no going back. I’ll see you as mine. And I’m not a man who shares what’s his.”
She catches her lower lip between her teeth, her gaze fluttering downward.
“Don’t do that,” I murmur, drawing the pad of my thumb slowly along the line of her jaw until she lifts her eyes to me again. “Don’t hide from me. Tell me what you want.”
There’s a silence between us in which I can almost hear her heart, that careful four-in, six-out rhythm she keeps without seeming to know she keeps it.
Then she lifts her chin to that brave angle again, the one she wore out on the steps with the whole city watching, except there’s nothing brittle holding it up this time.
“So do I,” she says, flushed to the roots of her hair, her voice not wavering for a second. “I don’t like to share either.”
I hadn’t expected that. I’d braced for surrender, or retreat, or the soft helpless yielding that would have let me feel like the only one in the room with his eyes open.
Instead she has drawn a line of her own across the floor between us and dared me to stand on the right side of it, sweet and stubborn in the very same breath, and the thing in my chest that has lain dormant for years rolls over and wakes.
My mouth curves. “Good,” I tell her, soft against her temple, and feel her shiver run all the way through me where I’m holding her.
Then I stop talking, because there’s nothing left worth the air it would cost, and I lower my head and kiss her like a man who has gone six disciplined months and discovered all at once the true price of the discipline.
She makes a small sound against my mouth. Her hands come up and find the front of my shirt and fist there, holding on. The careful count of her breathing falls apart, and I’m the one who took it apart, and I won’t pretend the knowing of that didn’t take something apart in me as well.
Afterward I won’t be able to recall the walk down the hall.
I’ll recall her hands, and the moment the trembling stopped because she decided that it would, the moment she quit yielding to me and began instead to meet me, and one last coherent thought arriving from somewhere very far off, that I have made a serious error somewhere in the accounting and have lost all interest in ever finding where.
After, she curls into me.
I am not built for after. I’ve spent my entire adult life arranging my nights so that there wouldn’t be one, so there’d be a polite distance and a car idling at a curb and a clean morning with no one’s breath warming the side of my neck.
And yet here she is, fitted along my side as though some careful hand had shaped the space to hold her, one palm resting open over my heart as though she’s counting it the way she counts her own.
The city burns cold and silent in the windows.
Her breathing slows by degrees. I lie in the dark and let her stay, and the letting is the most reckless thing I have done all day, and I have bought and gutted a company today.
I like this.
That’s the whole of the problem, put as plainly as I am able to put anything.
The team, the win, the eleven-year ache finally gone quiet.
I had braced for all of it. What I never once braced for is the weight of a sleeping girl I have known a single day and married for the coldest of reasons, and the discovery that those reasons have gone soft on me in the dark without ever asking my permission.
The taste of her is still on my mouth, and I find that I want it there.
She fought her own shyness the whole way across that room and chose me at the end of the fight, and I want that too, more than I’ve wanted anything that ever came free of a contract.
Strip away every term and clause I’ve built my life on, and what is left is a girl asleep against my chest who trusts me utterly, and a man who cannot remember the last time he was trusted by someone who wanted nothing from him but this.
I like all of it. A little too much.
And that is the one figure on the whole balance sheet I don’t know how to make safe, because liking her was never any part of the plan.
The plan was the team. The win. A wife in name only, a clause satisfied, a door I could close on my own terms the day the owning was done.
The plan was every last thing I have thrown away tonight, and lying here in the dark holding the wreckage of it, warm and asleep and certain of me, I cannot for my life bring myself to regret a single piece.