Chapter 27
TWENTY-SEVEN
NADIA
I found him outside.
He was standing on the far side of the parking lot, away from the light spilling out of the community hall windows, hands back in his pockets. The same way he'd been standing at the end of the meeting. He was like a man who had said his piece and was awaiting the outcome.
I crossed the parking lot toward him.
He heard me coming and turned. In the half-dark, with the noise of the meeting still audible through the hall's thin walls, he looked exactly like himself. Tired as he was, there was no hiding what was on his face when he looked at me.
"That was the bravest thing I've ever seen," I said.
He let out a breath. "It was the least I could do."
"No. The least you could do was nothing. You stood up in front of sixty people and owned every part of your history and then pointed it directly at the people trying to use it against me." I stopped a few feet away. "That wasn't nothing, Daemon."
He reached out and ran his hand down my arm, then pulled back as if scared to touch me. "I meant what I said in there. About you fighting this on your own because I was too scared to stand beside you. That's the part I'm not okay with. That's the part I need you to know I understand."
"In my kitchen, I asked you a question," I said. "You didn't answer it. Answer it now."
He didn't look away, and he didn't reach for me again. He stood in the half-dark and took it the way he'd taken the room's silence an hour ago.
"My mother told me once that I wreck the things I'm afraid of losing, so at least I'm the one holding the box of matches. She said it three days before they arrested me, and I spent six years calling it honesty."
His voice stayed level, but I could see what the effort was costing him.
"Then I sat in a bar in Millbrook and listened to a stranger describe a man who decided his losses in advance and called it protecting people.
And I finally heard her. That's what it was, Nadia.
I told myself I was protecting you from myself.
What I was doing was getting the loss over with early, while I could still pick the terms. You were the best thing I ever had, and I burned my own house down so the fire couldn't surprise me. "
"Yes," I said.
"You did."
"I know."
"I love you." He said it simply, the way he'd talked about his record in there. Like something he'd carried long enough to know its exact weight, and had decided he was done pretending otherwise.
"I've known it for a while, Nadia, and I've been terrified of it because the last time I loved someone that much, I failed her. I couldn't figure out how to be sure I wouldn't fail you too."
The parking lot was quiet around us.
"I'm more terrified of losing you," he said. "That's what I finally figured out. The math only works one way."
"Terrified together," I said. It came out before I'd decided. The deal I'd offered him in the dark weeks ago, asking for nothing back. "That offer never expired."
"I know," he said. "I'm taking it."
I'd been holding myself together for weeks. Dealing with the complaints and the legal fees, and the spreadsheets that didn't balance. Then, at the meeting tonight, in that room, he'd said things I hadn't known I needed to hear until I heard them.
I was done holding myself together.
"I don't need you to be perfect," I said. "I never did. I need you to stay. That's what reliability actually means. Not getting everything right. Not leaving when things get hard."
"I'm not going anywhere." His voice was rough. "Ever."
I closed the distance between us.
The kiss wasn't quiet or careful. It was the sort that happened when two people had been holding something back for too long and finally stopped.
His hands came up to my face and mine went to his jacket, and somewhere behind us the community hall door opened and I heard voices and I genuinely did not care.
When we finally broke apart, there were people in the parking lot. Kelly. Skye. Bill Kowalski. A handful of others who had the good grace to pretend they’d seen nothing, except for Kelly, who was smiling wide enough to be visible in the dark from twenty feet away.
"We should go," I said against his mouth.
"Yeah," he agreed, not moving.
"Daemon."
"I know. I know." He pulled back far enough to look at me. "Your place or mine?"
I thought about my parents' garage apartment, with its temporary furniture and its view of the street and the feeling I'd had every night of living somewhere provisional.
"Yours," I said.
His expression became rueful. "Sofia's going to hear us pull up."
"I know."
"She's going to be insufferable about it."
"I know that, too." I took his hand. "Let's go."
DAEMON
Sofia's porch light was on when we pulled up, Nadia's van having been abandoned in the hall parking lot. The porch light was on. No surprise there.
My in-house culinary mafioso left it on every night because she said a dark porch was an unwelcoming porch, and Sofia had strong views about hospitality.
But tonight it felt deliberate. Like she'd known we were coming.
I wouldn't have put it past her.
I got Nadia through the gate and the garden, and finally around to the back of the house and into the apartment without incident.
Something of a miracle, given that Sofia's kitchen light was on and the curtain twitched when we passed the window. It also left me feeling like a thirteen-year-old smuggling his girlfriend into the house after lights out.
Inside, the lamp cast its usual hideous pink glow across my room. The doilies, the ceramic cats, the needlepoint samplers. All of it exactly as it had always been. Nadia looked around the room and something softened in her face.
"I missed this place," she said.
"Nobody has ever said that before."
"I missed it." She turned to look at me. "I missed you."
That was the end of the conversation.
She came to me, or I went to her. I wasn't sure which, and it didn't matter. What mattered was that she was in my arms and I had my face in her hair, and for the first time in weeks, everything that had been wound tight in my chest simply let go.
I kissed her slowly. Like I had time, like there was nowhere else either of us needed to be. She made a sound against my mouth, and her hands slid under my jacket, pushing it off my shoulders, and I walked her backward toward the bedroom without breaking the kiss.
The pink striped curtains were doing their usual thing with the streetlight outside, turning the room soft and rose-colored.
Nadia sat on the edge of the bed and looked up at me with her hair loose around her shoulders.
I thought about the morning she'd laughed at the doilies and felt something I'd been holding for a long time let go.
I reached for her and she reached back, and we took our time with it. No urgency, no edge. Just the ease of being with someone you'd almost lost and hadn't. Her hands were on my face. My mouth at her throat. The soft sounds she made when I touched her in the way she loved.
When I finally covered her, she wrapped herself around me and pressed her forehead to mine, and we stayed like that, breathing slowly.
"Still here," I said.
"Still here," she agreed, pulling back far enough to look at me. Whatever she found on my face, she sucked in a sharp breath. I reached up and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, slower than I needed to, because I wasn't in a hurry anymore. We'd wasted enough time.
"I've got you," I whispered. "I'm not going anywhere."
She answered me by reaching for the buttons on my shirt.
I let her work through them while I pressed my lips to her forehead, her temple, the curve of her jaw.
By the time she pushed the shirt off my shoulders, I'd worked the zipper at the back of her dress, and she shivered as the fabric slid away.
This was less from the cool air than from the way I was looking at her.
"Still the most beautiful thing I've ever seen," I said.
"You're biased."
"Completely." I laid her back against the pillows and took my time.
Her curves, her freckles, the places I'd been memorizing since the beginning and had been afraid I'd never get back.
I relearned all of it with my hands and my mouth until she was breathing in short, unsteady bursts and her fingers were twisted in my hair.
"Daemon." My name on her lips, low and urgent.
"I know." I kissed her throat, her collarbone, the soft curve of her breast. "I know."
My hand slid lower, finding her warm and ready, and she arched into me with a soft gasp that undid something in my chest. I stroked her slowly, watching her face in the pink lamplight, committing it to memory the way you committed things to memory when you understood what it meant to almost lose them.
She came apart quietly, the way she always did, her body trembling and her lips pressed to my shoulder, her hands gripping my arms like she needed something to hold on to.
I gave her time, but she was having none of it.
She pulled me down to her, and I pressed into her slowly, feeling her exhale beneath me as I settled deep, both of us going still.
"Still here," she whispered.
"Still here." I kissed her, soft and long. "Always."
When I moved, it was unhurried and deliberate, each stroke measured, like I had something to prove that couldn't be rushed. She matched my rhythm with an ease that felt like muscle memory, her hips rising to meet mine, her hands tracing slow paths across my back.
She whispered my name twice more before the end. The second time broke me.
I followed her over the edge with my face buried in her hair, her name in my mouth, and relief at no longer having to fight for the only thing I'd ever wanted.
Afterward, we lay in the pink lamplight with her head on my chest and the ceramic cats on the shelves, their unblinking eyes making me feel as though I were still under interrogation.
"We have an audience," she said.
"They're not judgmental. They're supportive."
She laughed, and I felt it against my ribs, and it was the best thing I'd felt in weeks.