Chapter 46 Lance
Lance
It’s been three weeks since the warehouse.
Three weeks since the FBI hauled Art out of a pop-up cage fight in Southie and dismantled an operation that had been running for years.
Three weeks since Art put his hands behind his back and let them take him.
Three weeks since Genevieve ran across a parking lot and slammed into me hard enough to make my cracked ribs scream, and I held her anyway, because pain is temporary and she’s not.
Three weeks, and I still wake up at four a.m. expecting someone to bang on my door and tell me it’s fight night.
But nobody comes. The door stays closed. And Genevieve is beside me, asleep, her hair fanned across the pillow and one arm draped across Cavall, who has claimed the bed with the entitlement of a dog who thinks she’s his and not mine.
I slip from the mattress as quietly as possible, tracing Genevieve’s face with my fingers and pressing a kiss to her cheek.
She rustles, blinking up at me with sleepy eyes. “Nightmare?”
“Yeah. Go back to sleep.”
“Take Cav.”
It’s hard to leave her, because there’s always a fear that I won’t have her when I come back, but I breathe through the panic, and get dressed, to do the only thing that clears my head at four in the morning when the bad thoughts take over.
I run.
The trail through Verona County Park is empty at dawn.
Frost clings to the underbrush and the sky is that bruised purple that comes right before the sun breaks the tree line.
Cavall tears ahead of me, his black fur catching the first light, and I push the pace until my lungs burn and my legs ache and my head goes quiet.
The therapist Paxton arranged, a woman named Dr. Chavez who doesn’t take any of my shit, calls this hypervigilance. She says my body still thinks it’s in danger, and the running is how I process the cortisol that floods my system every morning when I wake up and the world hasn’t ended.
I told her the running was just because I like it.
She said, “That can also be true, Lance.”
I like her. Even when she makes me look at dark parts of myself I’d rather keep buried.
By the time I loop back to the cabin, Genevieve is on the porch with a mug of coffee and one of my sweatshirts swallowing her. It’s my favorite look on her. She watches me come up the path, flushed and dripping with sweat, and she tilts her head.
“Training today?”
“If you can keep up.”
“I could have dropped a man twice my size in a brownstone in Boston if I didn’t think he’d shoot my father. I think I can handle you.”
I grin. I’ve been doing that more lately, grinning, and it still feels foreign on my face, like a muscle I forgot I had. “That was adrenaline making you cocky. This is skill.”
“Same thing.”
“Absolutely not the same thing. Get dressed.”
She disappears inside, and I lean against the porch railing and drink the coffee she left for me.
It’s perfect. She’s been making it for me every morning since we got back, muttering about how bad it is, and every morning I watch her sing off-key in our kitchen and make us fancy breakfast, and I count to seven and slot it away in my memory so she can be the one thing I remember for the rest of my life and after.
Cavall flops at my feet, tongue lolling.
“I know, buddy,” I tell him. “I’m in love with her, too.”
Lovers’ Alcove is different when it’s cold out.
The waterfall still runs, but slower, ice forming at the edges of the rocks like lace.
The pool is dark and still, and the trees are almost bare, their branches reaching overhead like a ceiling.
Mist hangs over everything, turning the clearing into something out of a fairy tale.
Alex’s Lady of the Lake would feel right at home.
I set up on the flat rocks near the water’s edge, and Genevieve stretches beside me, rolling her shoulders, bouncing on her toes. She’s in leggings and a T-shirt under an unzipped jacket, and her hair is in that messy ponytail that’s been making me stupid since the first time I saw it.
Cavall immediately splashes into the shallow water, circles three times, and drops onto a sunny rock like he’s at a spa.
“Priorities,” Genevieve says, watching him. “Wish I had fur so I wasn’t freezing.”
“He’s smarter than both of us.”
“Low bar.”
I snort. “Okay, Half-Pint. Show me what you’ve got.”
We start slow. Footwork first, the same drills I ran her through months ago, except now she moves like she means it. Her stance is wider, her weight centered, and when I throw a slow jab to test her guard, she slips it clean.
“Good.”
“I know.”
“Don’t get cocky. Feet.”
She adjusts without being told twice. I circle her, testing her awareness, and when I feint left and come right, she reads it and pivots, her forearm coming up in the exact block I taught her.
“Better. Again.”
We go back and forth, building speed. She’s faster than she was. Sharper. There’s a confidence in her movement that wasn’t there before, something that lives in her spine now, in the set of her jaw, in the way she watches my hips instead of my hands because I told her that’s where the truth is.
I throw a combination, still controlled, and she blocks the first two but the third grazes her shoulder. She hisses.
“You okay?”
“I’m fine. Again.”
“You don’t need to be a hero, Half-Pint.”
“And you don’t get to stop our couple’s therapy. I said again.”
Couple’s therapy. “Cute.”
I come at her harder, and she meets me. Her hook catches me in the ribs, exactly where Percy landed his hits three weeks ago, and the pain flares bright.
She sees me flinch and stops dead. “Shit. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. That was a clean hit.”
“Your ribs are still healing.”
“Then I should’ve blocked it.” I roll my neck. “My fault, not yours. Never apologize for landing a shot.”
She studies me. Those green eyes that see everything, that have always seen everything, cataloguing the way I’m holding my side, the tension in my jaw.
“We should stop,” she says.
“We’re not stopping.”
“Lance…”
“Come here.”
She steps toward me, still cautious, and I catch her wrist and pull her in. Her body settles against mine, muscle memory from mornings of training that always ended with us too close, breathing too hard, pretending the heat between us was just exertion.
We don’t have to pretend anymore.
“I want to show you something,” I say against her hair.
“If it’s another bruise, I don’t want to see it.”
“Smart-ass.” I nod toward the waterfall. “Behind there.”
Her eyes widen. “The alcove?”
“I told you once ‘not today.’” I brush a strand of hair from her face. “It’s today.”
She looks at me the way she did the first time I brought her here, like she’s memorizing the scene.
“Race you,” she says.
And she takes off.
I watch her for half a second, her legs carrying her across the rocks toward the waterfall, and something in my chest unlocks.
Something that’s been bolted shut since I was eighteen, rusted and corroded and buried beneath six years of blood and concrete and the sound of crowds cheering for my destruction.
Joy.
I chase her.
The waterfall is a curtain of mist and noise, and the path behind it is narrow, just wide enough for one person to slip through if they press against the rock face.
I’ve walked it a hundred times, but never like this.
Never with Genevieve ahead of me, laughing, her hand trailing along the wet stone, water catching in her hair and on her eyelashes.
The alcove opens up behind the falls. It’s smaller than I remembered, maybe ten feet across, the ceiling low enough that I have to duck.
The rock walls are smooth from centuries of water erosion, and the light that comes through the waterfall is diffused and blue, turning everything into an underwater world.
The sound is enormous. A wall of white noise that swallows everything else, and standing here feels like being inside a heartbeat.
Genevieve turns in a slow circle, her mouth open.
“Lance.”
“Yeah.”
“This is…” She trails off, shaking her head. “How did you keep this from me for this long?”
“I was waiting.”
“For what?”
“For when we could have it and keep it.”
She turns to face me. Water mists across her skin, catching in the hollow of her throat, and the blue light makes her look like something that belongs here. Like Alex’s Lady of the Lake, except she’s real, and she’s mine, and she chose me when choosing me could have cost her everything.
She reaches up and traces the fading bruise along my jaw with her fingertips. Her touch is light, and it sets every nerve in my body on fire.
“Does it hurt?” she asks.
“No.” I step closer. “Not anymore.”
“Liar,” she whispers. “Everything still hurts. You’re just better at hiding it.”
“Maybe.” I catch her hand and press my lips to her palm. “But this doesn’t hurt. You never hurt.”
Her breath catches.
I hold her wrist and kiss the inside of it, where her pulse hammers against my mouth. Then higher. The crook of her elbow. The curve of her shoulder where her jacket has slipped down. The base of her throat where the water has gathered in the hollow and her skin is cool and damp.
“Lance.”
“Hmm.”
“We’re behind a waterfall.”
“We are.”
“In the place you told me about months ago.”
“I remember.”
“You said people come here when they want privacy.”
I lift my head and look at her. Her cheeks are flushed, her lips are parted, and her eyes are that dark, liquid green that I’ve only ever seen when she’s looking at me like this.
“That’s what I said.”
She grips the front of my shirt and pulls me down to her mouth.
The kiss is slow at first. Soft. Her lips are cool from the winter air, and she tastes like the coffee she made me this morning, and I cup her face in both hands and tilt her head back and take my time because we have it now. Time. The thing we never had before.
But slow doesn’t last. It never does with us.