8. Marcus
MARCUS
I carried her down the hall and I told myself to be careful, to go slow, to remember that this was a woman I'd already broken once, and then she pulled my shirt over my head and put her mouth to the scar on my collarbone and every careful intention I had went out of me like air.
Three years. I'd had three years to convince myself I'd built the memory of her up into something it wasn't, that no one woman could be the thing my body insisted she'd been.
I was wrong. She was more. She was the realest thing I'd ever held, and the second I laid her down on her bed and looked at her looking up at me, undisguised, wanting, the door open at last, I understood that everything I'd done to forget her had been a complete waste of three years, because the body doesn't forget the one thing it was built to want.
"You're sure," I said again, because I'd promised her I'd never misunderstand, and I meant to keep at least that.
"Marcus." She pulled me down. "If you ask me one more time, I'm going to lose my mind. Yes. I'm sure. Stop being careful."
So I stopped being careful, and I let myself have the thing I'd burned down three years ago, and I will keep most of that night to myself, because the best things I have are the ones I don't hand to anyone. But I'll say this, because it's the truest part.
I worship. That's the word for what I do, what I did, with her.
The whole league thinks my hands are weapons, and they are, I've made them weapons, but that night they remembered they could be something else, the same hands gone reverent, learning her again, slow now despite everything, because some things you don't rush even when you're starving.
I learned the places that made her breath catch.
I learned the sounds she makes, the ones I'd heard exactly once and never forgotten.
I learned the way she says my name when she's coming undone, Marcus, not Chase, never the name the league uses, the real one, the one almost nobody says, and I'd have given up the rest of my career to hear it like that for the rest of my life.
And she learned me. That was the part that took me apart.
I'd braced, somewhere underneath, for it to feel like a transaction, like the conquest the tabloids would assume, because that's what they think I'm capable of.
Instead she put her hands on my face and made me look at her, made me stay, made me be present in a way I never let myself be, and when I tried to make it only about her, only about giving, she wouldn't let me hide in the giving, she pulled me back, said my name, said I'm here, you're here, stay with me, and slowly the wall I'd kept up even in this, the last wall, the one that says a man like you doesn't get to be loved all the way, came down too.
She wouldn't let me hide, even in this, which is the thing I hadn't braced for.
I'd assumed, in the half-second I had to assume anything, that I'd give and she'd take, that I'd worship her and keep myself walled even here, the way I kept myself walled everywhere.
But every time I tried to make it only about her, only about giving, only about staying safely behind the act of worship, she'd take my face in her hands and make me look at her, make me be there, all the way present, no part of me standing guard at any door, and she'd say my name, the real one, Marcus, not Chase, until I answered it with my whole self.
She dismantled the last wall I had, the one even I didn't know was still standing, the one that said a man like me doesn't get to be loved all the way, only to give and never to receive.
She made me receive. She made me let her see me.
And being seen, all the way, by a woman who didn't flinch from what she saw, was more terrifying and more healing than anything that had ever happened to me.
When I finally moved over her and into her, both of us past speech, she wrapped herself around me and held on like she was afraid I'd vanish, and I held her the same way, and it was nothing like a conquest and nothing like the night three years ago, because the night three years ago I'd been running even while I held her, already planning the escape.
That night I wasn't running anywhere. For the first time in my life I was exactly where I wanted to be, all the way in the room, all the way in her, with no part of me standing guard at any door.
The difference between this and three years ago was the thing that undid me, lying there after.
Three years ago I'd held her exactly like this, in a hotel in the dark, and even then, even in the best night of my life, some part of me had been standing at the door already, planning the exit, bracing for the morning when I'd burn it down.
I'd held her and grieved her at the same time, because I'd already decided to lose her, already decided that a man like me doesn't get to keep a thing this good.
This time there was no part of me at the door.
That's what frightened me. For the first time in my life I was all the way in the room, all the way in the moment, no exit planned, no brace, no part of me standing guard, and the total presence of it was the most terrifying thing I'd ever felt, because a man with no exit planned is a man who can be destroyed, and I'd spent thirty-one years making sure I always had an exit planned.
I traced the line of her spine and felt the absence of the door, the absence of the brace, and I understood that she'd done a thing to me that no one had ever done, which was to make me forget to plan my own escape, and that forgetting was either the bravest thing I'd ever accidentally done or the most dangerous, and lying there in the dark I genuinely could not tell which.
After, we lay tangled in the dark, her heart slamming against my chest, slowing, and I traced lazy lines down her spine and felt something I had no name for, something that frightened me more than any fight I'd ever been in, because a fight I know how to survive.
"I have to tell you something," she said into my chest, drowsy, and my whole body went tight on reflex, here it comes, here's where it ends. "And don't go cold on me. I can feel you doing the thing, the bracing thing. Don't."
"Tell me."
I want to say a thing about the worship, because the city would never believe it of me, and it's the truest part.
The whole league knows my hands as weapons.
I have made them weapons, deliberately, for eleven years, the tools of the most feared man on the ice.
And that night, in the dark, those same hands remembered they could be something else entirely.
I learned her slowly, with the patience I usually save for waiting out a fight, except there was no fight, there was only the discovery that the hands my father built for destruction could also do this, could be gentle, could worship, could make a woman come apart not through force but through attention, through the slow reverent learning of what she needed.
It was the first time in my adult life my hands had done a thing my father's hands had never once done, which was give instead of take, and the discovery undid me as much as it undid her.
That's the thing nobody tells you about a man who's spent his life believing he's only good for violence.
When he finally finds out his hands can be gentle, can give, can worship, it isn't just pleasure he feels.
It's a kind of grief, for all the years he believed the lie, and a kind of vertigo, standing at the edge of a self he never knew was possible, and a kind of terror, because if the hands can be gentle then the whole story he told himself about being only his father's son was wrong, and if that story was wrong then he has no idea who he actually is, and there is nothing more frightening to a man than not knowing who he is.
She lifted her head and looked at me in the dark, and there was no armor in her face at all, just the truth, terrifying and soft.
"This isn't nothing to me," she said. "I tried to make it nothing for three years.
I told everyone, including myself, that you were a mistake I'd survived.
But I was lying, and I'm done lying, because lying is what cost us three years in the first place.
" Her hand spread over my heart. "I never stopped, Marcus.
That's the thing I have to tell you. Three years, a whole new life, a son, and I never once stopped loving you.
I just got really good at pretending I had.
And I don't know what we do with that, I don't know if it's brave or insane, but you should know it before we go any further.
I'm still in love with you. I never left. "
And there it was. The exact thing I'd spent my whole life making sure no one would ever say to me, because a soft thing that loves a man like me ends up broken by the very thing in him that was supposed to keep it safe.
The terror rose up so fast it stole my breath, the old voice, my father's voice, you'll ruin her, you ruin everything, get out before you do.
I didn't get out.
For one black second the old programming ran at full volume.
Get out before you ruin her. You destroy what you love, it's the one thing you're sure of, so leave now, leave the way you left three years ago, leave before the leaving costs her everything.
The voice was my father's and it was Viktor's and it was my own, all the same voice, the one that had run my entire life, and it told me, with total certainty, that the loving thing to do with a woman who'd just said she loved me was to break it now, cleanly, before my love could break her.
And I heard the voice, and for the first time in thirty-one years I noticed it as a voice instead of mistaking it for the truth.
That was the whole difference, that tiny distance, hearing the programming as programming.
I didn't know it then, I had no words for it, that would come later with Dr. Osei and the half-second and the space.
But lying there in the dark with the best thing that ever happened to me telling me she loved me, I heard the get-out voice and, instead of obeying it the way I'd obeyed it my whole life, I did the opposite of what it said, just to see if I could.
I pulled her closer instead, against every instinct I'd built over thirty-one years, and I pressed my mouth to her hair, and I said the truest thing I had, even though it terrified me, because she'd been brave first and I owed her brave back.
"I'm scared of how much I want this," I said.
"I'm not going to lie to you and say I'm not, because the lying is the thing that broke us.
I want you and Luca so much it makes my hands shake, and the wanting is the exact thing that scares me, because everything I love, I'm scared I'll..." I stopped.
Made myself finish. "I'm scared I'll do to you what my father did.
That's the truth at the bottom of me. But I'm not running this time.
I want it on the record that I'm scared and I'm staying anyway. That's the most I've got. I'm staying."
She kissed me, and it was an answer, and we fell asleep tangled together in her bed, and for a few hours the world was exactly the size of that room and contained everything in it I'd ever wanted.
My phone woke me at dawn. Three missed calls, all Viktor, and a text that turned my blood cold.
We have a problem. A reporter from the Tribune is asking questions about a kid at the community rink and a certain enforcer.
Someone talked. I'm trying to kill it but you need to call me NOW before this becomes the story that ends your contract.
And Marcus, before you go soft on me, think about what a public scandal does to the kid too.
You want his face in the papers? Call me.
I lay in the dawn light with Sophia asleep and warm against me, the best night of my life still on my skin, and I understood that the secret I'd had for three weeks, the secret she'd kept for three years, was about to stop being ours.
Someone had talked. And I had a sick, certain feeling, looking at Viktor's name on the screen, that I knew exactly who.