Chapter 27 Isak #2
I turned back to her fast, braced, because I didn't know what the sound was, and the sound, it turned out, was Clover Freeman starting to laugh, the real one, the one that comes up out of her sideways and takes over, and she had a hand over her mouth and her shoulders were going and there were still tears on her face from before, the brave-about-the-yes tears, and now they were laughing-tears too, both at once, the whole thing breaking out of her in a mess because that's how the real stuff comes out of her, at the worst time, in the worst shape, perfect.
"You're my landlord," she said again, into her hand, helpless. "And there's a body in the brewery."
"There is not a—"
"And your sister has watched all of it from inside a face mask."
"In fairness," Jules said, "the mask only has eleven minutes left and I'm not wasting an eleven-dollar mask on your dignity. We were here first."
Clover dropped her hand. She looked at me.
The laugh was still in her, but underneath it the other thing had settled, the thing that had walked off the elevator already decided, and she was not running, her face was not finding an edge to stand at, she was standing in the middle of the floor of an apartment she'd just learned I owned, and she was looking at me like the building was just a building and the secrets were just things I'd been scared about and the only fact in the room that mattered was the one I'd said in the doorway.
"Okay," Clover said. "We're going to deal with the landlord thing.
There's going to be a whole conversation about the landlord thing.
I have follow-up questions about the LLC, I want to know if you've been undercharging me, because if you've been undercharging me out of guilt I'm going to be furious in a way that takes weeks. "
"I would never tamper with market rate," I lied.
"You absolutely tampered with market rate."
"This is the way," I said, which is not an answer, and she knew it wasn't an answer, and she let me have it anyway.
"Jules," Clover said, not looking away from me. "Fox. I love you both. I mean that. You're about to be family, I can feel it happening to me in real time, it's like a fever."
"It is exactly like a fever," Jules agreed.
"Get out of the apartment."
There was a beat where nobody moved, and then Fox stood up off the couch in one motion with the popcorn bowl tucked under his arm like a football, peeling the mask off his face as he went, and Jules followed, and at the door Jules turned around, her own face pink and clean now and so young, and looked at the two of us standing there, and whatever she saw made her mouth go soft.
"Mom would've liked this," she said. To me. The thing she and I are the only two of us who don't get to remember, handed across the room like a pillow. "A loud love in a brewery. She'd have liked it."
And then they were gone, the door clicking, the elevator carrying off the only two witnesses, and it was just me and Clover and Vito Catleone, who had observed the entire human drama from the top of the cat tree with the flat contempt of a creature who has never once been a coward about anything, and who now closed his eyes, having decided we were boring.
Oh, and look. There was Tig Bitties too. Under Vito.
I think we’d interrupted something more than face masks.
Clover took the two steps we’d put between us.
She didn't come to me fast. She came the way she'd decided everything tonight, on purpose, one step she chose and then another one, and when she got to me she put both her hands flat on my chest, not pushing, just there, feeling my actual heart do the actual insane thing it was doing, and she tipped her head back to look up at me, and the careful list-keeping woman I'd met across a content shoot a hundred years ago was nowhere in the room.
Just Clover. The one underneath. The one who'd driven across a city to find me and was now, deliberately, choosing not to find anybody's edges, least of all mine.
"Sit down," she said.
I'm a large man. There is one piece of furniture in the Broasis built to hold a Kingman who's been hit for a living, the deep leather chair by the window that my brothers fight over at game night, and that's where she steered me, two hands flat on my chest walking me backward like I was the one who needed handling, and I went, because I would have gone anywhere she walked me, and I sat.
She looked down at me for a second, taking the new geography of it — me below her now, my face tipped up to hers, the lit-up river behind her turning the edges of her gold.
"I want to be the one who decides how this goes," Clover said. "All of it. The when and the how and the how fast. I've spent my whole life letting rooms tell me where I'm allowed to stand. I'm not doing that here. Here I stand wherever I want."
"Stand wherever you want," I said, and my voice came out wrecked, the way it had on the balcony with my dad, the way it comes out when the true thing is too big for the fast mouth.
"I'm not going anywhere. I'm a fixed structure.
I'm a load-bearing wall. Tell me where you want me and I'll be there for fourty-hundred years. "
She climbed into my lap.
Facing me. A knee on either side of my hips, settling her weight down onto me, all of her, and I made some sound that wasn't a word, and she went still, watching my face, checking it, and I understood the check, the check was the whole thing, the check was a woman who'd spent too long being told in a thousand small quiet ways that her body was a thing to apologize for.
Sitting her full self down in a man's lap and watching to see if his face did anything but want her was instinct.
My face did not do anything but want her.
"You're going to have to tell me what you want," I said, because the Kingman men were raised by a quiet man and a memory of a loud woman and the one rule that outranked every other rule in our house, the one Dad never had to say twice, was that you do not lay a hand on a single thing that hasn't told you yes, out loud, with its whole chest. "I'm serious.
I need the words. I've got a thousand of them and I need a few of yours. "
"I know about the rule," Clover said. "Your house rule of enthusiastic consent. Trixie told me. A lot of women know the Kingman boys are like this, it's apparently famous, Kelsey called it the only green flag in professional sports."
"It's not a green flag, it's just manners."
"It's a green flag. Shut up. I'm deciding things." And then she smiled, slow, the realest one, the one I'd been chasing since a content shoot, and she said it. The word. With her whole chest, enthusiastically.
"Yes," she said. "I want this. I want you. All the way. That's the word, that's me using it, you can stop holding your breath."
"I wasn't holding my—" I was absolutely about to turn blue. I let it out.
But then I forgot about breathing all together, because Clover lifted the pretty summer dress by the hem, pulled it over her head, and dropped it on the floor. And she was wearing a matching bra and panty set.
"Okay. Yes. Copy. Loud and clear. Receiving."
"You're doing radio voice."
"I panic in radio voice. It's a documented condition.
" But my hands had come up to her waist by then, careful, asking, resting there light enough that she could move and heavy enough that she'd know I wanted to, and she covered both my hands with both of hers and pressed them down her hips, and toward cupping her soft, plump ass.
She was telling me I could, and the breath went out of me all over again for an entirely different reason.
Here’s what nobody tells you about getting the thing you wanted so long you stopped admitting you wanted it.
It's quiet. I'd imagined this — I'm a man, I'd imagined this with some frequency, I'd imagined it the first night on the bike with her arms locked around me and I'd hated myself a normal amount about it — and in every version it was loud, frantic, a highlight reel.
And the real one was quiet. It was her deciding the next thing and then the next thing, and me waiting each time for her to decide it, and the waiting being its own kind of unbearable and its own kind of holy.
She set the pace slow. On purpose. I understood it was on purpose because everything she did tonight was on purpose, a woman who'd spent her life letting other people decide how much of her was allowed in a room taking the whole decision back into her own two hands and going slow with it because she could, because nobody was going to hurry her out of a space she'd finally claimed.
"You can look," she said. Reading my face, the way she read everything. "I can feel you not-looking. You're allowed to look, Isak. I didn't climb up here to be polite about."
So I looked.
I'd been waiting a far too long to look.
I'd said it to her on a motorcycle and at a content shoot and thought it probably four hundred other times in ways that would make anyone blush, the freckles, I wanted to see all of her freckles.
From her nose to her toes, but most especially in all the places in between.
And now she was letting me, and the longing fell away and left just the truth of her skin, her beauty, her body sitting on my lap with nothing to hide behind.
There were so many more freckles than I'd been allowed to know about.
"There's a galaxy of you," I said, and my voice came out stupid and wrecked and reverent. "I'm going to count them. I'm starting a count. One—"
"You are not counting my freckles right now."
"Two. Three. I lost three already, hang on, I have to start over, you keep — you're distracting the census—"
"Isak."
"I'm at a thousand and two," I said, which was not a number I had reached by any honest method, and she laughed, the real one, and the laugh moved through all of her at once and I forgot the census entirely because the laugh was the most beautiful thing her body had done yet and her body had been doing a lot of beautiful things.