18. What I Was Reading At One in the Morning #2
“So I’ve been thinking, and reading,” I say. “Since that night. Not to fix you. Because I wanted to know what it costs. And because, ”
I stop.
“Because what.”
There is a version of this where I do not say it. That version is safe and I am extremely practiced at it and it is available to me right now.
“Because I was trying to work out whether I’m Priya,” I say.
His head comes up.
“You told me she loved that you were a hero. That she didn’t want the reality of it.
” My throat is doing something I cannot control.
“And I’ve been lying awake going, what exactly do you think you’ve been doing, Mandy.
He turned up at your worst hour with a spare room and smile and you have been living inside the best version of him for six weeks.
You don’t know what it costs. You’ve never once had to hold the heavy end. ”
“That’s not, ”
“And then at the gallery,” I say, because if I stop now I will not start again, “I went to find you.”
He goes very still.
“After. I went to find you, and you were at the bar with my father, and I stood behind a pillar like a coward and I listened to the whole thing.”
I watch him understand what I am saying.
“I heard what you said to him,” I say. My voice cracks straight down the middle.
“About the placards. The exit signs.” I have to stop because my throat is closing around the words.
Sterling, I have wanted somebody in my family to say something like that for twenty-six years and when it finally happened it wasn’t anybody in my family.
You sat down next to my father and you made him understand that what I do matters. ”
“Mandy.”
“I told you we were better as a lie.” I am crying now, which is undignified and I do not care.
“I said that to you. And then eleven minutes later you sat down next to the man whose approval has run my entire life and you told him he was wrong about me. And you never said a word. You came home that night and asked me if we were out of the good coffee.”
He is looking at me the way you look at something you have been told not to touch.
“You weren’t supposed to hear that,” he says.
“I know.”
“I meant all of it.”
“I know that too,” I say. “That’s the problem.”
The loft is completely quiet. Somewhere down on the street a car goes past, and the amber bars of light slide across the floor and settle back.
He lifts his hand. It is still shaking. He stops it about an inch from my face and looks at the soot on his own fingers.
“I’m going to get you dirty, Sparkles.”
“It’s just soot,” I say. I take his wrist in both hands and pull it the rest of the way and press his filthy palm flat against my cheek and hold it there. “It washes off. The other thing you’re carrying doesn’t. But you don’t have to do that part on your own anymore.”
Something goes out of him then, not dramatically, no big cinematic break, just a long shudder that runs the whole length of him and leaves him lighter.
He turns into me. His forehead comes down on my shoulder and his arms go around my waist and he holds on like the floor is optional, and I get both hands into his hair, grit and all, and I do not let go.
I do not know how long we sit there. Long enough that my legs go numb under me. Long enough that the tremors in his back slow and stop.
When he pulls back he does not go far. He stays in my space, close enough that I can see the gold in his eyes catching the streetlight, and his forehead rests against mine, and our breathing gets tangled up together in the six inches between us.
“I need you to know I wasn’t going to bring it up unless you did.” His thumb moves along my jaw, tracing a line through the dirt he is leaving on my skin. “You get to decide what it was, Mandy. I’ll take whatever you say it was. Six years of this and I’d rather have you than be right.”
And that, that, more than the bar, more than the four days, more than anything in forty-one browser tabs, is the thing that finishes me.
Because he is sitting on a kitchen floor at one in the morning, covered in the worst day of his year, having just failed to save a thirteen-year-old kid, and he is still, right now, handing me the last piece of ground he has to stand on.
“I don’t know what I want it to be,” I say. “But I don’t want to stop.”
His hand goes still on my face.
“I’ll take it.” He whispers leaning in to kiss me.
I make a sound against his mouth that I would be embarrassed by if I had any capacity left for embarrassment, and his hand slides into my hair and closes, and everything that has been sitting in this loft with us since the black out finally comes off the floor.
He gets up with me. I do not entirely understand the mechanics of it, one second I am on the concrete and the next my legs are around his waist and my back is against the cool industrial brick and his mouth is on my throat, and I have a fleeting, absurd, extremely Mandy thought about the fact that this wall has a two-inch mortar line that has been driving me crazy since I moved in and I am never going to be able to look at it the same way again.
“Tell me to stop,” he says against my collarbone. His voice has gone rough all the way through. “Tell me to stop and I will.”
I get both hands around his jaw and bring his face up to mine and kiss him.
“Don’t,” I say. “Don’t ever.”