36. Luka
LUKA
No alarms. No enemies. Just her, and a whole life I had no idea how to deserve.
She had her arms looped around my neck and her feet off the ground, and the first thing my body told me, very clearly, in the language of cracked bone and a knee that did not want my weight, was that I had made a mistake.
I did not put her down. I refused to put her down.
I had carried heavier loads in worse condition and felt none of it.
This one I felt everywhere, and I would have set the whole night on fire before I let it end early.
"You're shaking," Harper said against my jaw.
"I am holding you."
"You're holding me and shaking. Those are two different things, and one of them means you're about to drop me on the nice floor."
"I never drop anything."
"Mister, you got shot at by half of Brooklyn this week, and your idea of a victory lap is bench-pressing the woman who hacked you back to life.
" She pulled her head back far enough to look at me, and her eyes were doing the thing they did, dry and bright and reading me down to the wiring.
"Put me down before your knee files a complaint. "
I put her down. Slowly, like setting a glass on a table I was not sure of, and the floor took her weight and not mine, and my whole left side thanked me in a long ugly throb.
I let it show on my face. That was the part that was new.
All my life I had built a face that showed nothing, and tonight I let her watch it hurt.
"There it is," she said quietly, and touched the corner of my mouth where the wince lived. "Was that so hard?"
"Yes," I said, and meant all of it, the pain and the letting her see it, and she laughed, and the laugh undid something deep behind my ribs that no surgeon ever could have reached.
The room upstairs was ours for the night and the night had no edges.
I had spent my life measuring rooms by where the threats lived in them.
This one I could not measure that way, because there was nothing in it that wanted anything from us.
The lamp by the bed threw a warm circle.
The window held the city, distant and harmless, a field of lights that for once belonged to other people's troubles.
Somewhere below us Kade was probably eating everything in the kitchen and Dani was asleep and the dead were dead and would stay that way.
"Stop doing it," Harper said.
"Doing what?"
"Casing the room. You looked at that window like it owed you money.
" She stepped into me, careful of my left arm, where the cut along my forearm sat taped and sullen under the gauze she had wrapped an hour ago with hands steadier than mine.
"Nothing's coming through it. Nobody's coming up the stairs.
The only thing on the schedule tonight is you, finally, holding still long enough for me to look at you. "
"That sounds like a threat."
"It's a promise. You should learn the difference. You've made enough of the other kind."
I kissed her then, because she was right there and saying things like that, and because for the first time in my life I had nothing to listen for over the top of it.
No footsteps. No second meaning. Just her mouth, unhurried, warm, opening under mine like she had decided we had all the time that had ever existed and we were going to spend it one breath at a time.
It was a long kiss. It did not lead anywhere it was in a hurry to go. Her fingers found the hem of my shirt and lifted, and I raised my arms, and that was its own small comedy, because raising my arms was a project now, and I got about halfway and made a sound I would deny under torture.
"Okay, okay." She stopped pulling. "New plan. You don't lift anything. I do the lifting. You stand there and be the handsome injured man, which, frankly, is the only job you've ever been good at."
"I am good at several jobs."
"Name one that didn't involve a gun."
I thought about it. She watched me think about it, and her mouth started to curl, and by the time I said "I make excellent coffee," she was already laughing, helping the shirt up over my head one inch at a time, easing it off the bad arm last so the tape would not catch.
Then she stopped laughing, because she was looking at me.
I knew what she saw. I had seen it in the mirror an hour ago and looked away, the way I always looked away from that body, the map of every year I had survived by being harder than the thing trying to end me.
The old scars and the new bruising, the deep wrong color spreading along my side where the bone had gone, the surgeon's neat work and the street's sloppy work all stacked on the same skin.
For a whole life I had let exactly no one look at it in good light without waiting for the flinch.
She did not flinch. She lifted her hand and laid it flat over the worst of it, light as breath, and I held my breath anyway, out of old habit, waiting for the part where she decided it was too much.
"Does this hurt?" she asked.
"Everything hurts."
"That's not what I asked." She pressed, the barest amount, and watched my face. "This?"
"A little."
"Then I'll go around it." And she did. She mapped me with her mouth, the unhurt places, the hollow of my throat and the line of my collarbone and the flat over my heart, going around the ruin like it was a thing to be honored instead of hidden, and I stood there and let her, and the letting was harder and better than anything I had ever done with my hands.
"You're allowed to touch me back," she said into my skin.
"I'm trying to remember how to do it without breaking."
"Then don't." She looked up. "Break for once. I'll catch the pieces. I've gotten good at it."
So I touched her. With the hand that worked, the right one, I traced the line of her, the curve of her waist and the warm dip of her spine, and she made a small sound that was not dry at all, and I learned it like new information, like a thing I had not been allowed to know until tonight.
I took my time, because time was finally a thing we had.
I drew my hand up the inside of her arm and along the line of her throat and watched the breath change in her, watched the dry composure she wore for the whole world come apart by degrees under nothing but my fingers.
I kissed the corner of her jaw, the soft place beneath her ear, the pulse going quick at the base of her neck, and she tipped her head back and let me have all of it, and somewhere in there the wanting stopped being a thing I managed and became a thing I was simply, helplessly in.
She got us out of the rest of our clothes the same patient way, doing the work my body could not, her own coming off without ceremony, and then there was just the lamp and the skin and the long quiet of two people who had run out of reasons to hurry.
I had done this before with her, three times, and every one of those times had a second thing happening under it, a knife under the bed of it even when neither of us touched it.
Tonight there was no knife. There was just her, climbing carefully over me when I lowered myself onto the bed and could not stop the grunt that came out, settling her weight where it would not land on the bad places, learning by feel where I could bear her and where I could not.
"Tell me if I'm hurting you," she said.
"You're not."
"Luka." She set her palm flat on my chest and waited until I looked at her. "I mean it. I'm not going to be brave for both of us tonight by pretending you're made of iron. You're made of about four broken things and a bad attitude. Tell me. That's the deal."
"That's the deal," I agreed, and something about saying it out loud, agreeing to be a man who could be hurt and would say so, loosened the last knot I had been carrying since I was twelve years old in a kitchen that smelled of blood.
She reached between us and guided me to her, and the joining of it pulled the breath clean out of us both.
She lowered herself onto me by inches, careful and unhurried, until there was no space left anywhere between us, and then she stilled, her face dropping close to mine, her breath warm and ragged on my mouth.
For a moment neither of us moved. We just held there, letting it be as enormous as it was.
Her hands were laced through mine on the pillow.
I could feel her heart going where her chest lay against my chest. Nothing in the world was trying to take this from me, and that was almost harder to bear than the wanting had been.
Then she began to move, and we found it, the way of it, slow because we had no other option and slow because for once we wanted none.
She did the moving. I had spent my life being the one who moved, who set the pace, who controlled the room and the bed and every breath in both, and tonight I gave it up the way you set down a weight you have carried so long you forgot it was heavy.
She rose and settled and rose again, watching my face the whole time, going still whenever it crossed into the wrong kind of hurt and easing on when it did not, and I let her have me.
I let her lead me into it like she had led the whole back half of this war, with that steady, infuriating, generous competence, and I lay there under her and felt, for the first time in my memory, completely and unbearably found.
"There you are," she whispered, when whatever was on my face finally stopped guarding. "There's the man."
"You can see me," I said. It came out rough.
It was not a question and it was not quite a sentence.
It was the closest I had to the truth, which was that I had hidden behind screens and walls and a literal piece of cloth pulled down over my face the night this all began, and that I had been hiding for so much longer than that, decades of it, a whole life spent making sure no one ever got a clean look at the wanting underneath.
"I see all of you," she said. "I've seen all of you for a while now. You just kept thinking if you held real still, I'd miss it."
"And now?"
"I don't miss a thing." She framed my face in both hands, slowing us both nearly to nothing, her forehead coming down to mine. "Stop bracing. There's no one here to hide from. There's just me, and I already saw, and I stayed."
And I stopped. I felt myself stop, the way a man steps out from behind the last wall in his life and finds the open ground does not kill him after all.
I let her see me want it. Not just her body, though God, that too, but the whole impossible thing rising up behind it, the warm room and the future in it, the wanting of a good life out loud with the lamp on and my face naked and nothing pulled down over any of it.
I wanted something good out loud, and I did not brace for it to be taken.
After that neither of us steered it. She moved over me and I rose to meet her where my body would allow, the two of us settling into a rhythm that belonged to no one else, deep and gathering, and the heat of it climbed the way the right kind of fire climbs, patient and complete, until patience had burned out of both of us.
Her breath broke around my name. Her grip went tight in mine.
I felt her begin to unravel above me, and I followed the feel of her like the only map that had ever counted.
When it crested it took us both gently, like a tide and not a wave, my name leaving her softer than I had ever heard it, and she folded down over my chest with her mouth at my ear, breathing hard, careful even then of my side, and I held her there with my one good arm and felt the other ache and did not care.
For a while neither of us said anything. The lamp hummed. The city blinked on the far side of the glass, somebody else's problem, and the ache in my body was a clean ache now, the kind that means you are still alive and got to spend it well.
"You're thinking so loud," she said eventually, drawing a lazy shape on my chest with one finger. "I can hear it from down here."
"I'm not thinking. I'm recovering. There's a difference."
"There's really not. You've got the recovering face and the thinking face and they're the same face.
Concerned brick." She propped her chin on her folded hands and looked at me, and her hair was a wreck and her eyes were soft and she was the single most dangerous thing that had ever been allowed in a room with me, and I had let her tape my arm and lead me into bed and watch me come apart, and I had survived all three.
"So tell me. What's the brick concerned about? "
I could have deflected. There was a version of me, the one who had run this whole story from behind a console, who would have made a joke about my knee and let her laugh and let the moment close over the top of the truth.
He was gone. He had died sometime in the last week, somewhere between the warehouse and this bed, and I did not miss him.
"I've spent my whole life arranging things so that nobody could ever take anything from me," I said.
"You do that by never having anything. By being the man who removes himself.
I was very good at it. I thought it was strength.
It was just a long way of being already gone before anyone could leave. "
"I know," she said. "I do the same thing. Foster kid. You learn to pack light. You leave first so it doesn't count as being left."
"And now you're not packing."
"Not anymore." She smiled, slow and certain. "Neither are you. So. Here's the big scary one. What do you want? You're allowed to want things now. That's the part nobody tells you. The war ends and you're just allowed."
And here was the thing I had never once in thirty-eight years said out loud, the want I had kept locked so far down I had convinced myself it was not in me, the one a boy in a Sheepshead Bay kitchen had buried under his parents' blood and never dug up again.
I looked at the ceiling and I looked at her and I dug it up.
I told her I wanted everything, a real life, a future, my face across the breakfast table until we were old. She fell asleep smiling against my chest, and I lay there terrified and grateful in equal measure.