17. Emilia
EMILIA
The word leaves my mouth and hangs in the smoggy air between us. Our mountain. I don't take it back. Don't soften it. Don't add a qualifier or a nervous laugh the way I've been trained to do my entire life when I said something honest in a room full of people who punished honesty.
Justice goes still.
Not the kind of still that means he's thinking.
The kind of still that means something inside him just broke open.
I can see it happen. The rigid set of his shoulders, the iron jaw, the wall he's been building since we pulled through those gates three hours ago.
All of it fractures at once, and what's underneath is raw and enormous and aimed entirely at me.
He doesn't speak. He moves.
One stride around the front of the truck. His boots crack against the imported Italian pavers of my father's circular driveway, and the sound is almost obscene. Heavy, working-man treads grinding against stone that was laid by a crew of twelve and cost more per square foot than most people's rent.
I'm still standing on the running board, one hand on the door, when he reaches me. His palm finds the back of my skull. Fingers threading through my hair, tipping my head back. His forehead drops to mine and he holds there, breathing. Just breathing.
Then his mouth finds my forehead. Not gentle. Hard. A brand. A seal. Something permanent pressed into my skin with the kind of pressure that says I will remember the exact coordinates of this moment for the rest of my life.
He pulls back just far enough to look at me.
Those cold, cynical blue eyes aren't cold anymore. They're cracked wide open and burning and wet, though he'd probably throw himself off a cliff before admitting that. His throat works. His hand tightens in my hair.
And then he kisses me.
Not the way he kissed me in front of the fireplace.
Not the reverent, careful, am-I-allowed-to-touch-you kiss of a man terrified of spooking a wounded animal.
This is different. This is the kiss of a man who just sees the woman he loves choose him over forty million dollars and a smog-free future and a world full of men with clean fingernails.
This is desperation and disbelief and fury and gratitude all compressed into one single point of contact between his mouth and mine.
His arm hooks around me. Lifts me off the running board like I'm a feather.
My feet leave the ground. My back presses against the side of his battered, oil-stained truck, and the metal is sun-warm through my shirt.
His shirt. His flannel that I've been wearing for days because nothing I own fits my body the way his clothes do, loose and soft and saturated with pine and diesel and him.
He pins me there. Between the truck and the solid, immovable wall of him.
One hand still cradling my skull like it's something irreplaceable.
The other gripping my hip hard enough to leave marks that I want to keep.
His mouth is relentless. Hungry. He kisses me like he's trying to memorize the architecture of my lips before someone takes them away.
I grasp the front of his jacket with both fists. Pull him closer. Which is physically impossible because there is no closer, but I pull anyway, and he groans into my mouth. Low. Guttural. A sound that vibrates through my teeth and settles in the base of my spine.
A car horn blares from the street. Some Beverly Hills housewife in a white Range Rover, scandalized by the mountain man devouring the small woman against a truck that leaks transmission fluid.
Justice doesn't care. Justice doesn't even register the sound.
His world has narrowed to the space between our bodies and he has no interest in anything outside of it.
He breaks the kiss. Presses his forehead to mine again. His breathing is ragged. His hands shake. This man who disarmed a gunman without blinking, who carries me up mountainsides, whose hands are steady enough to sketch a ridgeline in charcoal detail so fine it looks like a photograph. Shaking.
"Say it again."
"Take me home, Justice."
His eyes close. His grip tightens. He swallows once, hard, his Adam's apple dragging against my chin.
"I want our mountain," I whisper against his jaw. "I want the stove that takes twenty minutes to heat. I want the road with no name. I want the sound of you in the garage at six in the morning swearing at a carburetor."
A sound leaves him. Not a laugh. Not a groan. I've never heard from him before and that I realize, with a sudden sharp clarity, is joy. Unfamiliar. Unpracticed. Dragged up from somewhere so deep he probably forgot it existed.
He sets me down. Slowly. My feet touch Italian pavers and I'm looking up at his face and he's looking down at mine and the entire city of Los Angeles is humming around us and neither of us hears a single note of it.
"Get in."
I climb in. He closes the door. Walks around the hood. The engine turns over.
We point north.
The Pacific disappears behind us somewhere outside Barstow. It hides in the side mirror, a thin blue thread unraveling from the world, and I feel nothing. No pull. No pang. No backward glance that lasts longer than the half-second it takes for the highway to bend and swallow the coast whole.
Justice drives the way he does everything. Focused. Deliberate. One hand on the wheel, the other resting on my thigh like it belongs there. Like it has always belonged there and the thirty-two years before he met me were just a prolonged and irritating waiting room.
His thumb moves in slow circles against the worn denim of his jeans that I rolled four times at the cuff and still trip over.
He's not even aware he's doing it. The motion is unconscious, automatic, the same way he checks mirrors or shifts gears.
I've become something his body accounts for without consulting his brain.
I curl my legs underneath me on the bench seat and lean into his shoulder.
He smells like he always smells. Pine resin.
Motor oil. The wisps of woodsmoke that live permanently in the collar of every piece of clothing he owns.
Underneath all of it, something warm and mineral and distinctly him, like sun-baked granite.
The desert slides by. Red rock and scrub brush and long, empty stretches of nothing that would have terrified me two weeks ago. All that open space with nowhere to hide. Now it just looks like breathing room.
"You hungry?"
I nod against his shoulder. He pulls into a truck stop outside Kingman that looks like it was built during the Eisenhower administration and never updated since.
The neon sign buzzes and flickers. Half the letters are dead.
The parking lot is cracked asphalt and diesel fumes and a single rusted newspaper machine that still advertises papers for fifty cents.
He parks between two semis that make his tow truck look modest. Kills the engine. Turns to look at me.
"Stay close."
Old habit. I should probably tell him that we left the danger six hours south of here, that the PIs are in county lockup and my father is sitting in his study with a knife wound in his desk and a very clear understanding of what happens if he sends anyone else.
But I don't tell him any of that. Because the way he says it, the low gravel of the command, the way his eyes sweep the parking lot before he opens his door.
That's not paranoia anymore. That's just who he is.
That's the man who will walk into every room before me for the rest of my life, checking corners, counting exits, making sure the air is safe before he lets me breathe it.
I don't want to fix that. I want to live inside it.
The diner is fluorescent lights and cracked vinyl booths and a waitress named Darlene who calls everyone "sugar" and means it.
Justice orders without looking at the menu.
Black coffee. Double cheeseburger. Fries.
He orders me a grilled cheese and tomato soup because he noticed three days ago that I eat like a child when I'm tired.
He's right. I am tired. The good kind. The kind that lives in your bones after something is finally, irreversibly over.
We sit across from each other in a booth by the window.
His knees press against mine under the table.
He is too large for this space. Too large for most spaces.
His shoulders span the entire width of the booth back and his head nearly grazes the hanging lamp above us.
He looks ridiculous in here, among the truckers and the tourists, this enormous weathered man with grease under his fingernails and a hunting knife sheathed on his belt and eyes that could cut glass.
He looks at me and his whole face changes.
Not softens. That's not the right word for what happens to Justice's face when he looks at me.
It's more like the architecture shifts. The hard lines rearrange themselves into something that is still fierce, still sharp, but oriented differently.
Pointed inward instead of outward. A fortress that faces itself.
I reach across the table and take his hand.
Turn it over. Run my finger along the calluses on his palm, the old scars across his knuckles, the permanent stain of grease in the creases of his skin that no amount of soap will ever fully dissolve.
This hand that fixes engines and sketches mountains and holds my face in my father's driveway like I was the single most valuable object in the known universe.
I trace his lifeline. His jaw works. His blue eyes track my finger with an intensity that borders on bewilderment, like he still can't fully process that someone is touching him with tenderness instead of transaction.
"You know you deserve this."
His gaze lifts to mine.
"All of this. Me choosing you. Not because you saved me. Not because you stood between me and them. Because you're good, Justice. Under all the rust and the growling and the barbed wire, you are the best man I have ever known."