Stay
Nora
Rose is at my mom’s until the coffee shop opens tomorrow at ten, which means I have the townhouse to myself for the first time in longer than I can remember, and I'm spending it exactly the way a thrilling, spontaneous woman would—folding laundry at the kitchen table with Spotify on low.
I fold Rose's shirts into the small, stupid squares she likes because it makes her feel like a big kid, and I'm halfway through a stack of socks that never seem to pair up right when something outside catches my eye.
A car parked across the street. Not one I recognize. Engine off, nobody getting out, sitting there too long to be anything simple.
I tell myself it's nothing. Somebody waiting on a call. Somebody lost, checking a map.
Then the driver's door opens, and a man gets out and stands there, looking at my end unit townhouse like he's confirming an address he already knows.
My hands go still around a sock I don't remember picking up.
He doesn't come closer. Doesn't do anything I could point to and call threatening if someone asked me to explain it later. He stands beside his car, looking, and every hair on my arms lifts at once.
I back away from the window. Pulse too fast, mouth dry, fear already moving into my chest and settling there.
I grab my phone before I've decided to.
Me: Weird man parked across the street. Staring at my house. Probably nothing.
The reply comes fast.
Fuse: Can you get a picture without him seeing?
My hands shake getting the phone up. I ease the curtain aside an inch, snap it, duck down before I can second-guess myself. Send it before I can talk myself out of that too.
The three dots appear. Disappear. Appear again.
Fuse: Send me your address.
Me: Why?
Fuse: Nora. Address. Now.
The flatness of it scares me more than the man outside does. I send it anyway, fingers clumsy on the screen.
Fuse: Stay inside. Lock everything. I'm ten minutes out.
I lock the front door. I'm reaching for the deadbolt on the back when I hear it—footsteps on the porch, unhurried, deliberate, someone taking their time about it.
I freeze with my hand still on the bolt.
The doorknob turns. Once. Locked, and it holds, but the sound of it turning under someone else's hand is the loudest thing I've ever heard in my own kitchen.
I don't breathe. Don't move. I back against the far wall where the window can't find me and watch the door.
Three knocks. Slow, spaced out, a man who isn't in any hurry.
My phone buzzes in my fist. I can't look away from the door long enough to read it.
Another knock. Then nothing. A long, terrible nothing where I don't know if he's still standing there or already gone, and not knowing is worse than either answer would be.
I finally look down at the phone. I swear to God the man can hear it. He knows I’m inside!
Fuse: WHAT'S HAPPENING? ANSWER ME!
My thumbs struggle to work.
Me: He was on my porch.
Fuse: Is he still there?
I ease toward the front window, curtain lifted a half inch. The porch is empty. His car door slams a second later, engine turning over, and he pulls away from the curb the same unhurried way he arrived, like a man checking a box off a list.
Me: Gone. Car just left.
Fuse: Two minutes out. Don't unlock anything till you hear my voice.
I sit down on the kitchen floor with my back against the cabinets because my legs have stopped being reliable, and I stay there until I hear his truck.
The second the door's unlocked and he's inside, I don't think. I move, crossing the kitchen and throwing myself against him hard enough that he has to catch me to keep us both upright, my face pressed into his chest, both fists twisted into his shirt.
"Hey. I've got you." His arms come around me, solid, checking every piece of me is actually there. "Talk to me. Did he touch anything else? Windows?"
"Just the door." It comes out smaller than I want it to. "He tried it. Knocked. I didn't move."
"Good. That's exactly right." He pulls back only far enough to look at me, hands framing my face. "I'm going to walk the outside. Thirty seconds. Lock this behind me."
He's gone and back in under a minute, methodical, checking the latch on every window from outside before he comes back in and locks the door himself.
"Clear," he says. "He’s gone. But I saw him before. At the dance. Watching us."
My legs finally give out for real, and I end up sitting hard at the kitchen table, hands still shaking around nothing. Fuse pours me a glass of water without asking, sets it down, and sits across from me instead of hovering.
"I didn't even see him at the dance," I say, because it's easier to talk about that than the door handle turning under a stranger's grip. "I never—"
"You weren't looking for it. I've spent years looking for exactly that. Different training, not different toughness."
"I don't scare like this." My hands wrap around the glass, more to have something to hold than to drink. "I haven't scared like this in three years."
"When's the last time?"
I know exactly when, and for a second I decide not to say it. Then I do anyway.
"The night they told me Butch died." The name still costs something to say out loud.
"Two men in cuts showed up at my door at eleven at night. I knew before they said a word, just from the way they were standing. Same way you're sitting right now, actually—careful, like bad news needs handling gently or it'll go off in your hands."
"Tell me about him."
"Why?"
"Because you're sitting across from a man wearing a cut same as the one that killed your husband, and you're letting him in your kitchen anyway. Figure that deserves an explanation, and you deserve to say it out loud to somebody who'll actually listen."
I turn the glass in a slow circle
“When we met, I didn’t know how deep in the life he was.
Left the club for me before we got married.
Then Rose came. He swore he was out clean."
My throat tightens around it, but I keep going. "
His brother pulled him back for one job.
Said it was simple, in and out. It wasn't.
He died in a parking lot two states away, and I buried him a week later.
The Vipers buried him in his colors. I begged Lucas not to—two years Butch spent getting out clean, and his brother patched him back into the club in a casket.
I told myself I'd never let a man in a cut anywhere near my life again."
"And now one's sitting in your kitchen."
"Now one just walked my perimeter and checked every window because a stranger tried my door handle." I look up at him. "That's not nothing, Fuse."
"It's not everything, either." He doesn't reach for my hand, doesn't perform comfort at me. Just sits there, steady, letting the truth of it sit in the room instead of dressing it up. "I'm not him. Not asking you to forget him. Just asking you to let the difference matter."
"What difference?"
"He came back for a job. I came back for you." Plain, the way he says everything. "Man makes a choice about what he shows up for. I know which one I'm making."
I don't have an answer that makes sense out loud, so I don't try to build one. I stand instead, cross the space between us, and kiss him before I can talk myself into one more reason not to.
He goes still half a second, caught off guard.
Then he kisses me back, and whatever restraint either of us was running on burns off at once. He gets both hands on my waist and lifts me onto the counter, and I wrap my legs around him without thinking about it, pull him in until there's no space left between us at all.
"Six months," he says against my throat. "Six months of coffee I didn't drink."
"I noticed."
"Course you did." He pulls back far enough to look at me, eyes dark in a way I haven't seen from him before. "You notice everything. Same as me."
"Fuse—"
"Tell me to stop."
I don't.
My hands find the buttons on his shirt, slow at first, then not slow at all, and he lets me take my time even though I can feel exactly how much it's costing him to hold still for it.
He catches my hands before I get past the third button.
"Hold on."
"What—"
"Not like this. Not on a kitchen counter, twenty minutes after a stranger had his hand on your door."
He presses his forehead to mine, breathing me in like he's fighting every instinct that says take what I'm offering right here.
"Bedroom. I want it slow enough you remember every second of it tomorrow, not the fear that got us here."
I go quiet, staring at him, not expecting something like that from a man who looks like he does, wearing a cut like he wears.
"Okay," I say.
He slides one arm beneath my knees and the other around my back.
"Fuse..."
"Told you," he murmurs. "I'm doing this right."