38 - SELF DISCOVERY
Lacey
He came back with coffee on a tray.
"Let's move," he said. "More comfortable in the back."
I followed him through the hall. The sitting room had filled with the smell of the fire he'd lit before I arrived. He put the tray on the table between the couch and the armchair, poured for me first, and took the armchair.
"How's the coffee?"
"Good. What is it?"
"Ethiopian. I'll send you home with a bag."
"Now you're showing off," I teased.
"I have access to bags of coffee. It's one of the few perks I use."
I laughed more than I had in a while. The wine and the fire were unraveling my discipline.
"What did you teach them? The women you taught."
He set his cup down. "Mostly awareness. The hardest skill to teach is not being in the bad situation in the first place. After that, how to be the wrong target. After that, how to get out if the first two fail."
"And if you can't get out?"
"You disable. Eyes, throat, knees. Things that don't take strength. Just placement."
"What about punching?"
He almost smiled. "What about it?"
"What if a woman could hit a man hard enough to hurt him?"
"She can't. The female hand isn't built to deliver damage to a face.
It's built to grip and climb. Throw a closed fist at a grown man and you're more likely to break your own hand than his nose.
" He said it like a thing he'd stopped arguing about years ago.
"Pamela took that lecture, disagreed with it, took it again the next week, and disagreed slightly less.
By week six she was disabling men twice her size in drills. "
I looked at the fire. "I think I could hit you."
He looked at me. "You don't."
"I do. I'm not small. I throw kids around my cath lab all day. They're small, obviously, but they're also wiggly, which I think counts as combat training."
The amusement was still in his face. Under it was the small careful door that had closed behind his eyes at the table when I'd asked about the Army. Both were in the same expression.
"No."
"Light contact. If I connect one, I connect one. If I don't, I owe you another presentation."
"You already owe me a presentation."
"I'll owe you two."
He sat with it, then he stood. "Stand up."
I did.
For a second, it occurred to me that I was a pediatrician about to square up with my hospital's board chair. A man who'd just told me I'd lose, in fact. Almost nothing about the evening had gone the way I'd pictured it. But what else in my life had been predictable lately?
He moved the coffee table back with one hand.
"Where am I hitting you?" I asked.
"Anywhere. I won't move."
"You're not going to hit me back?"
"I'm going to catch your wrist before you hit me. That's what's going to happen. I want you to know that going in."
"Understood."
He stood in the middle of the room with his hands at his sides, and his shoulders dropped a notch, and he went loose, the kind of relaxation where the body has emptied itself of preparation.
He looked like a man who could be preparing to take a nap or kill someone and you wouldn't know which until the last second.
Brad used to watch UFC. I knew what it looked like when a man got ready by getting unready. Derek's version was nearly invisible.
"Whenever you're ready."
I threw the punch.
He caught my wrist before my arm finished extending. My wrist sat in his palm, warm, dry. His hand was large enough to close around with room to spare, and he let go almost at once.
I hadn't even seen his hand move.
"That was fast."
"It's supposed to be. Other one."
I tried the other one. He caught it. I tried the right again. He caught it, and now he had both my wrists, one in each hand, at the height of his chest. The grip was firm and entirely without intent.
Something ignited under my belly, and a thrill of fear came with it.
"See?"
"You're using both hands to hold me."
"Yes."
"So, you're open. I could kick you."
He looked at me. "I could put both your wrists in one hand and still have a hand free."
He said it as a fact, not a threat. He was just that strong.
"Prove it."
"Really?"
"Yes, I want to see."
He held my eyes for a moment, then his right hand moved quickly to his left, and just like that, both my wrists in his left hand. His right hand at his side. He could put that hand anywhere. He didn't look bored anymore, he looked predatory.
It detonated in me.
Intense almost painful clenching in my pussy. The arousal spread up and out in waves, and by the time my brain came back, I was already swollen and soaked.
I'd stopped breathing for a few seconds. I started again, and it made a small sound in my throat. He heard it. He'd spent years listening for sounds that small.
I knew what the feeling was now. But it was worse because I couldn't blame it on anything. That feeling had followed me here, and it felt exactly the same. No, it felt stronger.
He had found the same wiring Janice had, but he wasn't using it.
"See," he said, his voice lower than before. "Now I've got a free hand."
The sound I made was a small yes.
"What could you do with it?"
It came out of me even and not innocent at all. The me from weeks ago would have hidden behind not-knowing. But I knew what I was asking now. I also knew I was going to lie awake tonight replaying this exact moment approximately four hundred times.
He went still. The amusement that had run under the lecture left the room. He clenched his jaw lightly, his nostrils flared. My arms had quit holding themselves up.
"I could put my hand on your throat," he growled. The free hand twitched but stayed at his side. "On your jaw. On the back of your neck. I could turn you around." Then a frightening half-smile. "I could do almost anything."
I didn't know if I was in danger or not. Part of me went cold and still, like prey, but the greater part pleaded, Yes, yes, any of it. Just don't stop holding me.
"Lacey," he said, very quiet. "Are you going to do something?"
I was very much doing something, I just wasn't moving.
"Are you afraid?" His eyes gleamed.
"No," I lied, partly.
"In pain?"
"No," I repeated.
He still didn't let go.
"But you could be," he almost whispered.
He took a deep breath, ground his teeth, and his grip opened.
My wrists dropped into the space between us and my arms fell and I almost went with them, stumbling half a step. He stepped back. It looked like it cost him something.
The loss of his hand was a kind of physical bereavement, my wrists going cold the second he let go. He had almost done something.
"Lacey." His voice was gravelly. He cleared his throat. "I pushed that too far. Sit down."
"I don't need to sit down." I felt electrified.
"Sit."
I sat. He hadn't raised his voice.
He brought me water from the carafe Marissa had left. I took it. My hand was steady. I drank. I had no business swallowing anything that smoothly.
"Sorry," he said. "That was rough. I forget what the hold feels like." His eyes unfocused for a split second.
He went to sit too, and halfway down he stopped, and he turned a quarter away from me as he lowered himself carefully, and the color came up at his collar. He looked at the fire and not at me. The fire had gone down to one small flame, and he didn't get up to feed it.
I drank water I didn't want and looked at the floor, keeping my eyes off his hands.
"Derek."
"What?"
"Do it again."
"No." He said it flatly. "You looked terrified."
"I wasn't."
"You stopped breathing."
"I was concentrating." It came out thin, even to me.
He looked at me a long moment, then he looked like a light went on. His eyes widened almost imperceptibly.
"Please," I said. "Do it again."
I put my hands out in front of me, palms down.
He looked at my hands, my face. He tensed, and I remembered Janice's warning. Then he took a deep breath. "No. Drop it. You don't even know what you're asking for." And just like that, dismissed.
He was right, I couldn't argue because I didn't know what I was asking for, I didn't know what he would do. My body knew what it wanted. It wanted the hand back, and it was not going to be talked out of it.
His fingers started moving, like he was counting. As soon as I looked at his hand, he stopped.