Chapter 7 #3
"Dominic let everybody talk first," he says.
"Theo made his case. It was a good case.
He's not wrong, Freya, that's the thing nobody wants to say — I did cross his line, I did lie.
Theo wasn't being cruel. He was being right.
" He scrubs his face. "And then Dominic shut it down.
He stood up and he said —" Kieran's voice catches.
"He said, 'We don't control who our families love.
We control how we handle it.' And then he said the prospect question and the personal question are two different questions, and the table only gets to vote on one of them.
He said my patch is about whether I'm worth the leather — the work, the merit, the man.
Not about whose sister I'm sleeping with.
He said if we start taking patches over family grudges, we're not a club anymore, we're a feud with motorcycles. "
"And?"
"And he put it to a vote. My status. On merit alone.
" Kieran looks up at me, and there's something in his face I've never seen there — disbelief, the specific disbelief of a man who's never once had a vote go his way.
"It passed. Not by everybody. Theo voted against. A couple of his guys voted against. But it passed.
I'm still a prospect. I earn my patch on my own merits, clean, when I've earned it.
Dominic looked right at Theo when he said the last part.
'On his own merits. Same as every man at this table. '"
I sit down beside him and take his hand, the one with charcoal under the nails, the one I've promised to make beautiful.
"You're still in," I say.
"I'm still in." He laughs, short and disbelieving.
"On my own merits. Which means I have to actually earn it now.
No more hiding behind Theo's sponsorship — that's gone.
I stand or fall on my own." He turns his hand over and laces his fingers through mine.
"Which is fair. It's the fairest thing anybody's ever offered me.
I just have to be good enough on my own.
" A pause. "I've never had to be good enough on my own.
There's always been a wall to hide behind or a crew to disappear into. "
"So now there isn't," I say. "Now it's just you."
"Now it's just me."
I bring his knuckles to my lips. "Then they're about to find out what you're made of," I tell him. "I already know. I figured it out the day I saw the drawings."
He looks at me, the old eyes in the young face, the kid off the cell wall and the man he's becoming both at once, and outside the cracked window the salt air comes in cold and the dark water moves, going somewhere, the way it always does.
"I'm going to earn it," he says. "Clean. On my own. And then I'm going to come find you, and there's not going to be a single thing left for anybody to take."
"I'll be here," I say. "I've never brought anyone up here but you. I'm not about to start."
He's quiet a moment, his thumb moving over the back of my hand, and then he says the thing I think he's been holding since the kitchen.
"I keep waiting for you to do the math and back out.
Every morning since Theo found us. I wake up and I think, today's the day she runs the numbers and folds, because the smart move is to fold, the smart move was always to fold.
" He looks at me. "You keep not folding.
I don't understand it. Nobody's ever not-folded on me before.
The second I cost somebody something, they're gone.
That's the whole pattern of my life. And you just — keep staying.
Through the worst of it. While I'm un-sponsored and half the club won't look at me and your brother left a bag of pastries on your table like a tombstone. "
"I'm not the math," I tell him, the same thing I said this morning, because he needs to hear it more than once, because a lesson that took twenty-four years to teach takes more than one morning to unteach.
"I keep telling you. You can run the numbers on the patch, on the club, on all of it.
You don't get to run them on me. I'm not a risk you're weighing.
I'm a decision I already made. The folding stopped being possible the night I walked you up these stairs, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise just to give you something familiar to brace against." I squeeze his hand.
"You're allowed to have one thing that stays, Kieran.
I'm volunteering to be it. Stop waiting for me to leave.
It's insulting, frankly. I'm extremely stubborn. Ask anyone."
He laughs, low and wet, and presses his forehead to mine, and for a long moment we just stay like that, breathing the same air in the lamplight, and I feel the bracing go out of him by degrees, the way the tremor went out of his hand the day he held mine in the shop, slow, pass after pass, until what's left isn't a man waiting to lose something but a man, just for tonight, letting himself believe he gets to keep it.
And we sit in the honest room with our hands laced together and the door downstairs locked and the whole town not yet knowing, and somewhere across that town my brother is sitting alone with a bag of cardamom rolls going stale on a table, and I love him, and I'm furious with him, and I have chosen, finally, completely, with my whole stubborn Katsaros heart, and there's no taking it back.
You don't get to take back permanent ink.
Reversibility was never really our thing.