Chapter 23
SASHA
We didn't sleep much.
That was the plain fact of the night—we came together on the rug and then in the bed and then, somewhere in the smallest hours, standing in my kitchen again with the whole harbor gone black outside and the city lights laid out across the water like something spilled.
We talked in the gaps. We laughed more than a woman my age has any business laughing at three in the morning.
We wore each other out and then found we weren't worn out, and did it again, greedy, both of us, like two people who had each spent a private lifetime not letting themselves have a thing and had finally set the rule down at the same time.
I fell asleep on him near dawn with his heart doing its slow, absurd thing under my ear. I slept hard, and I didn’t dream.
When I woke, the light was high and gold and he was still there.
That was the thing I kept catching on, all through the early part of that morning.
He was still there. I'd spent the whole of my life waking up alone in that condo, in that big bed I'd bought so I wouldn't have to feel the emptiness of a small one, and now there was a man in it, warm and awake, watching me come up out of sleep like it was a thing worth watching.
"Morning," he said.
"Morning."
"You slept."
"I slept like the dead." I stretched against him and felt every honest ache of the night. "I never sleep like that."
"I know."
He always knew. It should have annoyed me more than it did.
I reached over him for my phone, out of habit, the old reflex, and I typed the message before I was even properly awake. This time, it didn't cost me a thing.
Taking today, too. I know. I've got the time, Izzy, God knows, I've got the time. Don't worry.
She wrote back a single row of hearts, and then, a beat later: I'm not worried. take a month.
I put the phone down.
"Work?" Clint asked.
"I'm not going in."
He didn't say anything, but his hand came up and moved slow through my hair.
I lay there in the gold light and did the calculations I'd never let myself do.
The banked weeks. The years of them, sitting in a spreadsheet like a receipt for a life I'd disappeared out of.
I had told myself for so long that I couldn't take the time.
It turned out the time had been there the whole while, stacked up and waiting. All it had ever needed was a reason.
I had a reason now. He was lying in my bed.
"I have so much time saved up," I said, mostly to the ceiling.
"Do you know that? I could not go to work for—months.
Literal months. I've been standing at that desk telling myself I was indispensable, and the truth is I've been indispensable the way a person is indispensable when they've arranged their whole life so nobody ever has to learn to do without them. "
"That's a hard thing to say about yourself before coffee."
"I'm feeling brave."
He smiled and kissed the top of my head. For a while, we lay there in the wreck of the bed and were simply happy. It was the kind of happy that has no plot in it, no want, no next thing. Just two people and a morning.
Then, he got up to make the coffee wrong, and I let him. I lay there and listened to him moving around my kitchen like he belonged in it.
And that was when it started.
There was no single moment, no thing I saw, no word he said.
It came up the way everything comes up in me, from underneath, through the floor, slow.
One second I was warm and loose and listening to a big man hunt for the coffee filters in a drawer he'd already been shown.
The next second, there was a cold thing sitting in my chest, and it had been sitting there a while before I noticed it, the way you don't hear the vacuum until you do.
I got up. I put on his shirt—he let me have that one now, on a body he'd already looked at every inch of—and I went and stood in the doorway of my kitchen and watched him.
Watched the way he stood. Watched him set the coffee pot down and, without seeming to, glance at the window. Watched his eyes go, once, fast, to the door, to the locks, cataloguing the exits in this home the way I catalogue a lobby.
Watched a man who could not stop being ready.
What have you done? I thought.
It came in his voice, almost—flat, level, no heat. What have you done, Sasha?
Because I knew what I was looking at. I had always known.
And I had let it into my bed. I had said I love you to it. I had agreed to walk into Dominion Hall—the one place on this earth I had told him, to his face, that I did not trust—and stand at a table full of those men, as his.
The coffee finished. He poured two. He turned around and saw my face, and he set both cups down.
"Hey," he said. "Where'd you go?”
"I'm right here."
"No, you're not. I watched you leave." He came around the counter and stopped in front of me, inside the three feet now, because the three feet were gone—but he read me and gave a little of it back, anyway, a half step, the old courtesy. "Talk to me."
And I almost didn't. I almost reached for the built voice, the smooth one, the one with no seam in it. Nothing, I'm fine, I just need coffee. It was right there. It's always right there. It has never once failed me.
But he'd told me I had two voices and one of them was fake, and he'd know. He'd read it coming off me.
"I'm scared," I said.
He went still.
"Not of you." I said it fast, because his face had done a thing, and I couldn’t stand the thing.
"Never of you. Of—" I stopped. Made myself find the true words instead of the smooth ones.
"Of what you are. Of what you're in. Clint, this morning I woke up happier than I have been in my whole adult life.
It took me about an hour to remember that the reason I'm this happy is a man who walked out my door with a gun and wouldn't promise me he was coming back.
And now, the coffee's made and the sun's out and it feels like a normal morning, and it isn't. It isn't a normal morning.
There is nothing normal about any of this and I've been letting myself pretend there is, because pretending felt so good. "
He didn't argue. That was the worst part. He didn't tell me I was wrong.
"There was a woman in a red convertible outside my building last night," I said.
"When you came. I saw her out my window this morning, too—a different car, but I'd bet my condo it's the same person.
I've read strangers for a living for fifteen years, Clint.
That woman is not reading a paperback. She is watching my door. "
Something crossed his face. He didn't confirm it. He didn't deny it either, and I have met the whole family of not-denying-it.
"That's my family," he said, finally. Careful. "They're there to keep you safe."
And there it was. The cold thing in my chest turned all the way over.
"Keep me safe from what, Clint?"
He didn't answer.
"See, that—" my voice cracked and I let it crack, "—that is the thing.
That right there. Nobody asked me if I wanted a woman outside my home, and nobody's going to tell me what she's keeping me safe from, and I am supposed to just—be good about it.
Aren't I? I'm supposed to smile and say thank you and not ask, because asking is dangerous, because the knowing is the dangerous part, and God forbid, I actually get to decide anything about my own life. "
I heard myself. I heard where it was coming from, the old, deep place, the wound with two names on it—my mother's and mine—and I couldn’t stop it, and I didn’t entirely want to.
"I have spent my whole life," I said, "being the one who handles it.
Whatever it is. Blood in a room, a badge at my counter, a folio that needs to disappear.
I handle it, and I don't ask, and I'm good about it, and nobody ever once asked me if I wanted to be in the middle of any of it.
And I swore—Clint, I swore—that I would never let one of you all the way in, because I have watched what comes in behind you.
And I did it, anyway. I let you all the way in.
And now there's a woman watching outside my building and I don't even get to know why. "
The kitchen was very quiet.
He stood there and took every word of it, and he did not flinch, and he did not go smooth, and he did not reach for me.
He let me stand in the middle of my fear with nothing in my hands, the way he'd taught me to stand with nothing on—and that made it worse, somehow, that he wouldn't even give me the comfort of being handled.
"You're right," he said.
I hadn't expected that. I'd braced for the reassurance, the it's under control, the smooth. I got you're right, flat and plain, and it took the legs out from under my anger and left just the fear standing there naked.
"About all of it," he said. "Nobody asked you.
That's true, and it's not right, and I'm not going to stand here and tell you it is.
You got pulled into something because of me.
You didn't choose it. And there's a person outside your door you didn't ask for.
All of that's true." He turned his cup a quarter turn on the counter, and I watched him decide to give me the one thing he had, which was the truth.
"And I can't tell you everything, because some of it isn't mine to tell and some of it would put more on you than you're already carrying.
That's the same thing you've been handed your whole life, and I hate that I'm the one handing it to you now.
But I won't lie to you. You're not imagining it.
It's real. There's a man out there who's dangerous, and my family is in his way, and now, so are you, a little, because you're near me. "
I stood there with my arms wrapped around myself in his shirt.
"How much danger?” I asked. "For me. Real number."
"I don't know."
"That's not—"