Chapter 8 #2
When she pulled me up her body, her hands urgent now, I came over her and into her in one long slow stroke, and we both went still at the feel of it, foreheads together, breathing the same breath.
The sand was warm beneath the blanket and the air was cold and clean off the water and she was hot and tight around me, her ankles crossed at the small of my back, her hands mapping my scarred shoulders.
I moved in her slow — slower than the kitchen, deeper, the urgency of that first night replaced now by something with no clock on it, the luxury of a man who knows he has all the time there is.
The waves kept the rhythm with us, in and back, in and back, and she met every stroke, her body rising to mine, her eyes open on the sky and then open on me, switching between the stars and my face like she couldn't decide which was the bigger thing she'd been given.
"Look at me," I said, low, and she did, and I held her gaze while I moved in her, and I watched the pleasure build behind her eyes the way I'd once watched her fear, except this was the opposite, this was a woman being slowly filled with something good in the open air she'd never been allowed.
I felt her start to climb again, felt it gather and tighten, and I shifted my angle and slid my hand between us to where we joined and she came undone — a long, unhurried unraveling, her whole body arching up off the sand into me, my name breaking out of her and scattering across the water.
I followed her over, buried as deep as I could get, shaking against her, her arms locked around me holding me to her like she'd never once held anything she was afraid would be taken.
She lay against my chest the way she had the night of the nightmare, except now her face was turned up to the stars and there was nothing guarded in it at all, just a woman who'd been given a thing she never thought she'd have, lying in the open air she'd never been allowed, in the arms of a man who'd been dead for twenty years and was, finally, all the way alive.
"I've never done that," she said softly. "Outside. Under the sky."
"I know," I said. "You told me. That's why."
She was quiet. Then I felt her smile against my chest. "You've been collecting them," she said. "The things I never got to have. You're keeping a list."
"Yeah," I said. There was no point denying it; she'd read me again, the way she always did. "It's a long list. I've got a lot of years to work through."
She laughed, soft, and pressed closer, and we watched the stars wheel over the cove, and I started, quietly, on the next item.
I made the declaration four nights later, at a club dinner.
I want to be clear about what that cost me, because the men of the Saltwater Kings will understand it even if no one else does.
I don't speak at dinners. In all my years with the club I had never once voluntarily addressed the group — I sat at the edge, I ate, I watched the doors, I left early.
I was the man at the perimeter. Standing up to speak in front of the whole brotherhood was, for me, a more exposed thing than walking into gunfire, and they knew it, which is why the room went so quiet so fast when I got to my feet.
Dominic caught my eye from the head of the table.
He didn't smile, but something in his face did — the recognition again, the thing he'd been waiting to see in me, finally arrived.
Stella was beside me. I put my hand on her shoulder, and I looked around the table at the men I'd bleed for and had finally, after all these years, let myself belong among, and I said it plain, the way I say everything, every word meaning exactly what it weighed.
"Stella is my Old Lady." A breath. The room dead silent. "Anyone who threatens her answers to me."
For one heartbeat nothing. And then the room came apart — the table erupting, the brothers on their feet, the noise of it, Nash pounding the table and Maddox's bark of a laugh and Catalina's whoop and Piper's hand pressed to her mouth and Dominic just watching me with that quiet, satisfied nod.
The man at the perimeter had walked into the fire.
And Stella turned to me with her whole face open, the okayness-smile gone forever now, replaced by something realer, and she kissed me in front of all of them, and I held her against me in the middle of the loud warm room, careful with my strength the way I'll always be, and I felt the darkness in me do a thing it had never done.
It didn't disappear. I want to be honest about that, because she was, from the start — she never asked me to be a different man, never asked the dark to go, only ever asked it to point the right direction.
It didn't disappear. It's still in me, the leash and the dog, the twenty years, the rooms that don't exist. It'll always be there.
That's the inventory and the inventory doesn't change.
But it made room. There in the loud bright room full of the family I'd finally joined, with the woman I'd been resurrected by held against my chest, the darkness shifted over and made room for something else.
Something brighter. Something I'd been certain I would never get to hold and was now, against every law I'd ever lived by, holding in both arms and never, ever letting go.
She'd taught me the name of the broken part so I'd never need anyone again.
And then she'd stayed anyway.