53 - BATTER MY HEART
Lacey
I told him I should go before Jessica woke up.
He didn't move. "Aaron'll be up at five. He can run you home long before she's up." He said it into the dark with his eyes half closed, a man with nowhere he had to be.
"How many hours a day does Aaron work? He was up late last night, and now he's up at five?"
Derek chuckled. "Aaron doesn't work for me. None of my old crew do. They don't have to work another day in their lives."
I told him that made no sense. "If they don't work for you—"
He sat up a little. "Aaron and a few of the others on the compound were with me overseas.
Aaron especially. We've been brothers twenty-five years.
" He said it plainly, the way you'd state a fact of your own body.
"Josie, his wife, takes care of the horses.
They're really hers. Aaron does what he wants.
What he wants is usually to help out, however he can.
Terry's the same. Quieter than Aaron. Everybody's quieter than Aaron. "
The man had a whole small country out here, and the people in it stayed because they loved him, not because he paid them. Not a rich man with staff. A man who'd brought his people home.
But I couldn't lie still. I was still wired from the whole night, humming, and I couldn't make it quit. I got up and wandered around his room, sore all over, sore in places I hadn't been sore in years, one specific ache low in my side that I'd feel every time I turned for a week.
Everything in the room was perfect. Not neat the way rich people's rooms are neat because someone else cleans them.
Perfect. Squared. Every edge of every object set true to the edge of what was under it.
The books on the long shelf ran in an unbroken line, and it took me a second to see they weren't alphabetical or grouped by anything I'd expect.
They were by height. Tallest at one end, stepping down, exact.
I looked back at him. "If I moved something. Would you notice?"
He smiled without opening his eyes all the way.
"Yeah. Everything has to be lined up. Books by height.
" He said it easily, like you hand someone a fact about yourself you've made peace with.
And he was right, I did know. I'd seen him at it in the kitchen when I came down.
Not cleaning. Setting things right. I didn't say anything.
I started looking at the books instead. Dozens of them, a whole long row. Hardbacks, paperbacks, spines cracked on a lot of them. I pulled one out.
A woman in a torn dress, on the cover, being carried off by—what was that? A minotaur. I put it back and pulled the next one. Vampires. The one after that had a man with black wings and a sword.
"Romantasy, Derek?"
"Oh." He waved a hand at the ceiling. "That's all Pamela's stuff. She loved that kind of thing."
I pulled one from the end of the row. Dog-eared to hell, the spine white with creases, read and reread. I opened the front. "Derek. This one was published two years ago."
A beat. "That's odd. Really?"
I checked another. And another. "Derek. These are all from the last four years." I turned around with the book still in my hand. "These aren't Pamela's, are they?"
He put a hand over his eyes. "I should've put those fucking books somewhere else. I should've known better."
"Derek Harrington." I was grinning now; I couldn't help it. "Are you a romantasy fan?"
I half thought I was joking until he went red. Actually red, the man who'd held me against a wall an hour ago and not lost a degree of his composure, pink to the ears over a stack of paperbacks.
"Ugh," he said. "My wife got me hooked on the damn things. And now you're going to question my masculinity."
I laughed. "If there's one thing I would never question, Derek, it's that."
He let that go, and went quiet and a little sad under the embarrassment, and I understood without him saying it that he'd kept buying them.
That she'd started it and then she was gone and he'd just kept reading them.
Four years of them. I put the book back exactly where it had been, spine flush with the rest, and he watched me do it and didn't say anything about that either.
I came and sat on the edge of the bed. I wanted to talk. I didn't want to leave yet, and I didn't want to sleep, and there was a thing I'd been carrying since the cafeteria that I finally had the nerve for.
"Can I ask you something? I only found out a couple days ago that you own the Second Circle. My friend told me. She—" I said it lightly, because it was ridiculous, because he'd been nothing but careful with me all night. "She told me you were dangerous."
He didn't laugh it off. His face remained unreadable.
"I am dangerous," he said. Flat. Not a warning. Just true. Then: "Who told you?"
"Janice. Janice Patel-Campbell."
"The shrink?"
I felt myself get defensive, and then felt ridiculous for it, defending Janice at one in the morning in the bed of the man she'd warned me about. "The psychiatrist. Yes."
"Ah." He turned his head on the pillow. "That's unfortunate."
So he knew her. "What do you mean, unfortunate? What happened?"
He was quiet long enough that I thought he might not tell me. Then he did, in the same even voice he used for everything that cost him.
"A few years ago, one of the guests at the club had too much to drink.
We asked him to leave. I was there with Pamela.
And Pamela was—she was good at that, at smoothing things, she could get anybody out the door feeling like it was their idea.
She went to walk him out. Gently. And he turned around and went after her. "
He stopped.
"Derek."
"She was three months pregnant." He said it to the ceiling. "I stopped him."
The room had gone very quiet. "How badly?"
"Very badly." He didn't soften it. "If somebody hadn't pulled me off him, I'd have been up for manslaughter. As it was, I came close to attempted murder charges. It went away the way I can usually make things go away." He said that last part with no pride in it at all.
A little cold went through me, sitting there naked in his sheets, still wearing the marks of how careful those same hands had been.
"Janice was a regular back then," he said. "One of the originals, like us. She was in the room. She knew the guy, might’ve been involved with him.” He shrugged, one shoulder against the pillow.
"She never came back as far as I knew. I didn't know she'd started coming again after I left. But I understand it. Janice is about as anti-violence as a person gets.” He let it go.
"She watched me nearly beat a man to death.
I'd think less of her if she hadn't warned you. "
"Are you dangerous, Derek?"
He reached over and moved the glass on the nightstand a half inch to the left, set it true to the edge, and I don't think he knew he'd done it.
"I've been trained to be dangerous, Lacey. But only to my enemies." He looked at me. "To answer you, yes. Very, very dangerous."
Then he let it go, the weight came off his face. "Especially if anyone messes with my romantasy organization."
He reached out and pulled me back down to him and kissed me again, slow.
"But in your case, Bonds," he said against my mouth, "I'll allow it."
Derek was right about Aaron. He must have texted him, because later he walked me out and handed me off to Aaron. He wasn't ashamed of it, or awkward about it, seeing me off to his oldest friend at five in the morning. The look on his face was too complicated for me to read, and I gave up trying.
Aaron was grinning when I got in the car.
I was still raw enough to be a little acerbic about it. "What, Aaron. Go ahead and say it."
I was braced for something male and rude. He faltered instead.
"Sorry. Dr.— um. Lacey." He pulled out onto the road. "I'm just really happy for him. I can't help it."
That wasn't what I'd braced for. "Happy."
"Yeah. He hasn't been relaxed like this since Pam." Aaron kept his eyes on the dark road. "He's even cracking his dumb jokes again. I forgot he had them." He caught himself. "Sorry. Not my business."
I looked out the window at the trees going by. "No. You're a family. I get it. I'm glad he's happy."
I said it and meant it, and then it sat there getting heavier the longer the road ran under us.
Because I'd walked in the door of that house tonight thinking I knew what this was.
A want I'd finally said out loud, a man who knew what to do with it.
I'd come for his hands. And now Aaron, who'd known him twenty-five years, was this careful and this glad in the dark of a car at five in the morning, over me.
Not because he thought Derek was getting laid.
Aaron wouldn't drive across the countryside smiling about that.
Whatever had changed in Derek that his oldest friend could see from across a room, it was bigger than the night I thought I'd had.
I'd gotten exactly what I asked for, and somehow I had gotten more back. I wasn't sure I was ready to think about that.
I looked at my phone. I had to be at work in four hours, but for some reason, I still felt wired. And this weekend, I was driving to see Dad, and maybe blow up our relationship.
I felt suddenly overwhelmed. I didn't like change, and it felt like everything in my life was changing all at once. But one little warm spot kept the panic at bay. Whatever was happening with Derek felt increasingly good.