Chapter 8 #2
The rain hammered the roof. Lightning lit the open door white, and the thunder came a beat behind it, closer now.
"I read your column," he said. "The whole coast read it.
You saved the harbor. You torched Calder.
You did it without me, with your name on it, exactly like you said.
" His voice roughened. "You didn't need me to steer you.
You never did. You were always going to get to the truth on your own.
The only thing I ever actually did was almost wreck it at the end.
" He picked the rag back up just to have something for his hands.
"So I'm not here to ask you for anything.
I lost the right to ask. I just needed you to hear, from the man and not the road, that you didn't play me, Mila.
I played myself. The same play I've run my whole life.
And I'm sorry. That's it. That's the whole speech. It's not a good one."
It was the best one I'd ever heard, precisely because it was so bad.
I crossed the garage to him through the gold light and the noise of the rain, and his eyes went wide — the charmer, caught flat-footed, with no idea what came next, which I don't think had happened to him in fifteen years.
"You said on the terrace you'd ask me again," I said.
"When it was done. When there was no report between us.
Well — it's done. The report's filed, the harbor's saved, Calder's finished, the leak's a weapon I aimed back at him.
There's nothing between us now but the stupid thing you did and the stupider thing I did before I knew you.
" I took the ruined rag out of his hands and dropped it.
"So I'm not going to wait for you to ask, because you've decided you lost the right, and you're too stubborn to be talked out of it.
I'm going to do the asking." I looked up at him.
"Ask me anyway. With my eyes open. After the math. Ask me, Rafael."
He looked at me for one long second, the rain coming down, the lightning, the whole broken heatwave dying outside.
"Stay," he said. Just that. The plainest word he had. "Don't write me down and leave. Stay, and fight with me, and let me earn back the thing I almost threw away. I want you. Not the report. Not the win. You. Cold and warm and right about everything. I want the whole infuriating —"
I kissed him before he could finish, because I'd waited two weeks and three terrible days and I was done waiting, and he made a sound against my mouth like a man who'd braced for the door to slam and felt it open instead.
The garage was warm and the rain was cool and his hands were still black with grease and neither of us cared.
This time was nothing like the rooftop. The rooftop had been the heatwave — frantic, breathless, two people losing an argument they were glad to lose.
This was the storm after. Slow. Certain.
The frenzy gone out of it and something steadier underneath, the thing we'd both finally stopped running from.
He kissed me like he was apologizing with his whole body for the words he'd used, deep and unhurried and thorough, and I kissed him back like I'd already forgiven him and just hadn't told him yet.
He walked me back against the workbench, careful, his hands sliding under the soaked fabric clinging to my skin, peeling it away from me where it stuck, and the cool of the rain-washed air met the heat coming off both of us, and I shivered, and he stopped.
"You're freezing."
"I'm soaked through. There's a difference." I pulled him back, fisting my hands in his shirt. "Don't stop. You're always trying to stop. It's infuriating."
"I'm trying to do it right." He said it against my throat, slow, learning me all over again in the gold light, his mouth moving down to the wet collar of my shirt and lower, warm through the cold cloth until I felt it everywhere.
"I did everything else wrong. I'm going to do this right if it kills me. "
He stripped the wet clothes off me, gentle, patient, unhurried even now, his mouth following his hands down — my throat, my shoulder, the cold-damp skin of my breast where he lingered until my head went back and a sound came out of me that the rain almost covered — warming every chilled inch of me with that slow attention until I forgot the storm entirely, forgot the cold, forgot everything but the heat of his mouth and the rasp of his grease-rough hands and the way he said my name low against my skin like it was the only word he had left.
The workbench was hard at my back and then it wasn't, because he'd lifted me onto it without effort, settling me at its edge and stepping between my knees, and he just looked at me for a moment in the low light, soaked and undone and open all the way down, like the looking was a thing he'd nearly lost the right to and meant never to take for granted again.
"Two stubborn people," I said, my voice not steady, my hands pulling him in by the back of his neck. "Nothing left to win."
"Nothing left to win," he agreed against my mouth, and there was something rough in it, something close to undone. "Just everything to keep."
And then there was nothing left between us and no more careful distance and no cold anywhere in me at all.
It was slow. It was so slow it became its own kind of argument again, the only argument we knew how to have, me pulling him closer and him refusing, holding the pace, drawing it out until I was the one coming apart at the edges and saying please into the curve of his shoulder — me, who had never said please to anyone — and both of us refusing to let the other have the last word, except the words were gone now, replaced with something that didn't need them.
The rain on the roof. The lightning at the open door.
His forehead dropped against mine, our breath ragged and shared, his hands gripping my hips and mine raking down his back, the unhurried certain rhythm of him building and building until the slowness finally broke for both of us at once.
I held onto his shoulders and let the whole defended fortress of my life come down for the last time, all the way, for good, his name breaking apart on my mouth, his answering sound buried in my hair, the two of us shaking together on the workbench of a garage while the storm that had been three weeks coming finally spent itself on the roof above us.
After, he wrapped me in a clean shop blanket that smelled of engine oil and held me against his chest on the floor of the garage with our backs against the workbench, the rain finally easing off the roof, the storm rolling away up the coast, the heatwave well and truly dead at last.
"I have to tell you something," he said, into my wet hair. "And I'm only going to be brave enough to say it once, so listen."
"I'm listening."
"I didn't want to win you. From the first morning at the harbor wall, when you saw through me in under a minute — I wanted to win you, the way I've won everyone, the door and the lever and the lock turning over.
" His arms tightened. "And then somewhere in the blackout it stopped being that.
I stopped wanting to win you and started wanting you to win.
Your report. Your argument. Your father, even — I wanted you to get free of him.
I laid down every lever I had because I didn't want a version of you that I'd charmed.
I wanted the real one, with her eyes open.
" A pause. "That's not a play, Mila. I don't have a name for it.
It's the first thing in my life I've ever wanted that didn't have a play under it. "
I knew the name for it. I'd known it on the rooftop and been too afraid to say it.
"I do," I said. "Have a name for it."
He went still.
"You don't have to say it," he said. "I broke it three days ago. I haven't earned —"
"You carried Tonino's wife up the hill in the rain and never told anyone," I said.
"You put me on a boat to save a man's life and then told me you were steering me, when you could've let me think it was an accident.
You stood on a roof with nothing under it.
You came down to a garage with the worst speech I've ever heard because it was the truest." I tipped my head back to look at him.
"I came here to bury this town and you. I lost everything I came with.
And it's the truest thing I've ever done.
" I held his eyes. "I love you, Rafael. There's the name.
I figured a man with no pretty words shouldn't have to find that one alone. "
He kissed me, in the garage, in the rain-cooled dark, the storm dying up the coast and the harbor we'd saved riding easy at its moorings below, and when he pulled back his face had the thing in it I'd seen on the rooftop and finally let myself name.
"I love you," he said. "God help us both. The cold woman and the charmer. We never stood a chance."
"No," I agreed. "We didn't."
He laughed, low, the sound of it rumbling under my ear, and pulled the blanket tighter around the both of us, and we sat there on the floor of his garage in the cooling dark for a long time, not talking, not needing to, while the last of the storm muttered away over the water.
Outside, the rain stopped, and the air came in off the sea washed clean and cool, and somewhere up the hill the lights of Cala Sirena burned steady in a town that got to keep being itself.
I'd come to win.
I'd lost everything.
It was, without contest, the best work I'd ever done.