Chapter Twenty #2
He told her, then, standing on the balcony as the light finally failed around them — not everything, because some things took longer than one evening no matter how ready either of them was, but enough, more than he'd ever given anyone, the words coming slow and unguarded in a way that had nothing composed left in it at all.
He told her about the year after the fire, the year he'd stopped speaking almost entirely, the year Mrs. Voss had been the only person who could get him to eat.
He told her about the first time he'd hurt someone on purpose, at nineteen, and the relief he'd felt afterward that had frightened him considerably more than the violence itself.
He told her about every version of himself he'd folded away behind the mask because he'd decided, somewhere young enough that the decision had felt more like instinct than choice, that being fully seen was the most dangerous thing a person in his position could allow. He told her, too, about the two times his hands had found her harder than they should have — her jaw in a kitchen weeks ago, the half-second on the gallery landing when neither of them could have said for certain which version of him had turned to look for her first — and how those were the moments that frightened him more than anything the fire itself had left behind, because they meant whatever the fire had made of him had never fully learned where she ended and a threat began. He told her, too — quieter than the rest, the one he seemed least able to look at directly — about the phone in the study, about deciding for her without asking and standing behind that decision even when it cost him two days of her reaching for him first. “That one frightens me more than the other two,” he admitted, “because I wasn’t out of control when I did it. I meant it. Some part of me still believes I was right, and I don’t entirely trust that part not to make the same choice again.” He counted the rest of them for her too, quiet and unflinching now that he'd started — the authority he'd handed Mrs. Voss over her own body that morning at the safe house, delivered as settled fact rather than a request; the flight to Lisbon he'd arranged without asking, cut short only because Julian moved first. “I keep finding more of them, the longer I look,” he said.
“I'm not certain I'm finished finding them yet.
I'd rather you know that going in, instead of discovering it new each time.”
She didn't flinch from most of it. She'd promised herself, that first night at the kitchen counter months and a lifetime ago, that she wouldn't, and she found, standing there listening to a man hand her every carefully hidden piece of himself one at a time, that the promise had mostly held.
The confession about the phone was the one exception — she felt her jaw tighten at it, an old, specific coldness reasserting itself for exactly as long as it took him to finish the sentence — and she didn't pretend otherwise, to him or to herself.
Some things got to stay uncomfortable. She was beginning to understand that staying didn't require pretending they didn't.
"I'm still here," she said, when he finally ran out of words, when the balcony had gone fully dark around them and the only light left was what spilled out from the bedroom behind them.
"That's my answer. Not just to tonight. To all of it.
Whatever's still underneath everything you just told me — including the nights your own hands forget, for a second, that I'm not the thing they should be braced against, and including the choice you made standing at that desk with my phone in your hand, sober and certain, that you'd make again — I'm not going to tell you that one stopped mattering just because I decided to stay.
It didn't. I'm staying anyway, with my eyes open about exactly which parts of you I'm staying for.
Whatever you find out about yourself next year, or in ten years, or the next time something breaks that neither of us saw coming — I'm still here.
I plan on staying here. I'd like you to actually believe that, instead of waiting for the day it stops being true. "
Whatever crossed his face then, she'd never seen before — not even in the gallery, not even the night he'd told her he loved her with his rhythm faltering beneath her — something that looked, in the low light spilling from the bedroom, almost like disbelief giving way, slowly, to something steadier underneath it.
"I have something," he said, rough, reaching into his jacket pocket with a hand that wasn't quite steady, "that I've been carrying around for four days trying to find a version of tonight brave enough for.
I find I've run out of better nights to wait for.
" He opened his palm between them, and the small velvet box sitting in it caught what little light remained, and Sienna felt her breath go entirely out of her at once.
"I don't have a rehearsed version of this.
I've discovered, over the last several weeks, that I don't actually want one — that the unrehearsed version of things has turned out, consistently, to be the truest one I have to offer you.
So. Sienna Cole. I would like you to stay.
Not because the house needs managing, or because Calloway or Julian or anyone else made staying complicated enough that leaving stopped feeling possible.
I'd like you to stay because I've spent my whole life certain that being fully known was a danger I couldn't survive, and you've spent the last several months proving, patiently, relentlessly, that you'd rather know all of it and stay anyway.
I don't think I get a better reason than that to ask you to marry me. I don't think I need one."
She was laughing and crying at once by the time he finished, the sound coming out of her unsteady and entirely unguarded, the same way his had been all evening.
"Yes," she said, before he'd even finished sliding the ring free of the box, before either of them had fully caught their breath. "Yes — obviously yes, you enormous, careful, ridiculous man, ask me anything else you've been sitting on for four days, I'll say yes to that too."
He laughed then, a real one, unguarded and startled out of him the way she was coming to realize very few things in his life had ever managed to do, and pulled her against him with both arms locked tight, his face pressed into her hair the way it had been that first terrible morning in the garden, except nothing about this moment was terrible at all.
"I love you," he said into her hair, quieter now, none of the raw desperation of the last time he'd said it, just steady certainty, worn smooth by weeks of mornings that had let it become simply true instead of something urgently confessed under pressure.
"I intend to spend considerably longer than twelve years proving that wasn't a mistake either. "
Below them, past the terrace, the restored flower beds sat dark and quiet under the first stars, waiting for morning to finish what the day's work had started.
Somewhere inside the house, Mrs. Voss was almost certainly still awake, and would pretend, tomorrow, not to have noticed the light burning late on the balcony, and would fail, as she always did, to keep the pleasure entirely off her face when they told her.
Sienna didn't know yet what the next year would look like, whether Thomas would ever become something as simple as family, whether the scars — hers or his — would ever stop aching on the particular grey mornings that seemed to invite it.
She knew only this: a man who had spent twelve years certain that safety meant staying hidden was standing on a balcony with his whole face bare to the dark and the stars and her, holding on like he never intended to let go again, and that after everything the last year had cost her, she had finally, fully arrived somewhere worth all of it.
"Ask me again tomorrow," she said, laughing, pressing her palm flat against his scarred cheek the way she had that very first reckless night. "And the day after that. I want to keep saying yes for a while."
"Tomorrow," he agreed, low, certain, drawing her back inside toward the warm light and the rest of a life neither of them had to hide from anymore. "And every day after it, for as long as you'll let me keep asking."