Chapter Four
EIGHT YEARS AGO
Valerio had come to say goodbye.
He'd rehearsed it, which should have been his first warning, because he'd never rehearsed anything in his life.
Deals, threats, funerals, he did all of them cold.
But he'd sat in the car outside her campus library for eleven minutes putting words in order, and the words were simple ones.
This was the last time. He wouldn't be coming back.
She'd be hurt for a week, maybe two, and then she'd be safe for the rest of her life, and those two things weren't even close to the same weight.
Men like him didn't get to keep girls like her. Men like him got girls like her killed.
He found her at their table, the one by the tall windows, buried to the elbows in books, hair escaping its knot one strand at a time, and when she looked up and saw him, her whole face did the thing it always did. Opened. Like a door in a city where nobody locked anything.
"You're early!" she whispered, delighted, because the library made her whisper and delight made her loud, and the combination was a small ongoing war.
"Sit, sit. I saved your chair. Well, I defended your chair.
A philosophy major tried to take it and I told him it was reserved for a working stuntman and he got so depressed about his life choices he just left. "
"Aislinn."
"I have your orange." She was already digging through her bag. "It's Tuesday. Don't think I forgot, I never forget, it's a whole system now—"
"Aislinn." He didn't sit. "I came to tell you something."
She stopped digging.
He watched her read his face, watched her find something in it she didn't have a name for yet, and watched her decide, with that terrifying kindness of hers, not to make it harder for him.
She just folded her hands on top of her constitutional law notes and waited, and somewhere behind her eyes a door started, very carefully, to close itself in advance, so that he wouldn't have to see it happen.
That. That was what did it.
He had a speech. It was a good speech. It was eleven minutes old and structurally sound and it would've kept her alive until she was ninety, and he opened his mouth to give it, and instead he leaned down across the table, across the books and the notes and the orange rolling loose between them, and kissed her.
Her breath caught. Her hand came up, not to push him away, but to hold on to his sleeve like the floor had tilted, and somewhere a chair scraped and a librarian made a small disapproving sound, and none of it mattered even a little, because he was kissing her, actually kissing her, in the actual library, and some small shrieking part of her brain was already composing the text she would never send anyone, not in a hundred years, not even Steph.
When he finally pulled back, her eyes stayed shut a second longer. Just to make sure it had really happened. Just in case opening them made it stop being true.
"Um." She touched her own mouth like it belonged to someone else now. Then, with tremendous, wobbling scholarly composure, she managed a whole sentence. "Riiiight. So. What did you come to tell me?"
"That."
"That," she repeated.
"I've been meaning to say it for five weeks."
Her smile started small and got away from her, the way everything did.
"Well," she managed, going back to her notes and reading absolutely none of them, "I hope you're not expecting the chair back."
THE SECOND TIME VALERIO came to end it, three weeks had passed, but he only made it as far as the diner window.
This time the speech was shorter, because he'd learned.
This time there had been a reason, a real one, a name from his world spoken too close to hers, a reminder delivered on schedule that his life had teeth and hers had none, and he'd driven to the diner where she worked the closing shift with two sentences prepared and a plan to be cruel enough that it would stick.
Through the window, under the tired fluorescent hum, Aislinn was laughing at something a customer had said.
The customer was a student. Tall, easy in his skin, parked on the counter stool like he owned real estate there, and while Valerio watched, the boy said something else and reached across the counter and touched her hand where it rested next to the coffee pot.
Touched it like he'd done it before. Like he intended to do it again.
She pulled her hand back, pleasant and practiced. The boy laughed and let her. And offered, loudly enough to carry through glass, to walk her home, since it was late, since the neighborhood was what it was, since somebody ought to.
Somebody ought to.
The Italian was out of him before the thought finished forming, low and vicious and entirely involuntary, three generations of his father's blood expressing an opinion, and by the time Valerio caught up with his own body he was already through the door with the bell still ringing behind him.
"She has a ride," he said.
The diner went quiet. Aislinn's face swung wide open, the way it always did around him, and then immediately tried to arrange itself into something casual, which failed everywhere at once.
The boy on the stool turned, took in the suit, the shoulders, the expression, and demonstrated the first good judgment of his evening by remembering he'd left something in another building.
"That was Franklin," Aislinn said, when the bell had rung him out. "He tips in exact change and he's been offering to walk me home for a month."
"He's done offering."
"Valerio." She was fighting a smile and losing, wiping down a counter that was already clean. "Were you jealous just now? You were. You came through that door like a repossession."
"I came," he said, with what remained of his dignity, "to talk to you."
"Mm. And what did you come to tell me this time?"
He looked at her. Apron, pen behind her ear, one shoelace untied because some things in this universe were constants, smiling at him across a chipped counter in an empty diner at eleven at night like he was the good news.
The speech died the way the last one had. Quietly, and unmourned.
"Get your coat," he said.
He walked her home through streets he'd already had checked, to a building he already hated, and at the bottom of her stairs she stopped, and turned, and didn't let go of his hand.
"You keep coming to tell me something," she said, "and you keep not telling me. So I'm going to say my thing first, because one of us has to be brave, and you're clearly the muscle of this operation, not the brains."
"Aislinn—"
"Stay."
One word. She said it with her chin up and her heart in her voice and both of them completely undefended, no strategy anywhere in her, this girl who apologized to radiators, standing on a cracked step asking the most dangerous man on the eastern seaboard to stay like it was a small thing. Like it was tea.
And Valerio, who had ended it twice now and gotten a kiss and a jealous fit for his trouble, understood at last that there had never been a version of this where he left.
"Ma chérie," he said, against her hair, and felt her shiver at the sound of it. "I was never going anywhere."
Her apartment was a single room that had been apologized for in advance the entire way up the stairs, it's small, it's really small, the radiator sings, ignore the ceiling.
He didn't look at any of it. He looked at her, backing slowly into her own home with her eyes on his and her courage finally running out of words, and then there was no more counter between them, no table, no orange, nothing at all.
He kissed her the way he'd wanted to since the library, without an audience and without a speech, and she came up on her toes and answered it, and the radiator sang, and neither of them heard.
He undressed her slowly, carefully, like she might vanish if he moved too fast. She laughed once, nervous, wobbling, "I've never, um, with a stuntman," and then his mouth found her throat and the joke and the nerves went wherever words go, and when he finally laid her down on a bed that was too small for him by a foot and a half, she reached up and put her hand over his heart, the exact way she'd stood in an intersection once, no self-preservation anywhere in her.
"You're shaking," she whispered, wondering.
"I know."
"You saved my life. You're not scared of anything."
"I know," he said, and kissed her palm, and let her see it anyway, all of it, everything he'd rehearsed away twice, and when he made her his at last, slow and thorough and reverent in that terrible singing radiator heat, she cried out, and clung to him, and said his name like she'd known it forever.
Mine, he thought, consumed, final, a man signing something. Mine.
Afterward she lay tangled across his chest in the dark, tracing shapes on his skin, one shoelace of a girl who'd rearranged his entire existence in five weeks, and he stared at her water-stained ceiling and did the only math that mattered now.
He would tell her the truth soon. Not tonight.
Soon. He'd find a way to make his world safe enough to hand her, and then he'd give her his real name, all of it, and she would do that thing her face did. She'd open the door.
"Stay for breakfast," she mumbled into his chest, already half asleep. "I make legendary rice."
"For breakfast?"
"Legendary," she insisted, and was gone, asleep between one breath and the next, safe in the one place in the world he occupied.
Valerio held her in the dark and made plans.
He had, though neither of them knew it, seven weeks left.