Chapter Fourteen
ROAM
Creed is talking about the Rock situation.
Memphis, Rock’s man, is due in Jacksonville by the end of the week, concerning logistics, timing, where to put him, how much to bring him into the Vane conversation before he’s earned the full picture.
Creed talks through problems the way he does everything, methodically, no wasted motion, and he expects the men he’s talking to to be present for it.
I’m present for it.
Mostly.
Devil’s truck comes through the gate at half past four, pulls into the lot, and through the passenger window, before the engine cuts, I can see Janie’s profile. She’s turned toward the back seat, saying something to Lucy, and she’s laughing.
Not the careful version. It’s not the laugh she produces when something is mildly amusing, and she’s decided it’s safe to acknowledge it, but a real one, head tipped back, her whole face involved. The afternoon light coming through the glass turns it golden.
Creed stops talking.
I realize I’ve stopped listening.
“The Memphis situation,” Creed says, in the particular tone of a man noting something he intends to revisit.
“End of the week,” I say. “I heard you.”
“Mm…” He looks at the truck, then looks at me. The corner of his mouth doesn’t move, but something in his eyes does, the private version of amusement Creed allows himself in moments he won’t comment on directly. “I’ll send the details to Winchester.”
He walks inside.
The truck doors open. Devil comes around the front, three bags distributed between her hands with the efficiency of a woman who knows how to carry what needs carrying.
Lucy emerges from the back with her own purchases and a commentary on something that has Devil shaking her head. Janie gets out last.
She has three bags.
The bags are not the point. The point is what’s in them, or more specifically, what three bags mean.
Devil went to work on someone today, and Devil’s work tends to produce results.
Janie is looking at the compound gate, automatically checking it, checking the familiar shapes of the yard.
Still does this and probably will for a while.
The checking is part of what the last four years have built in her, and it doesn’t come undone on a schedule.
She walks inside without seeing me.
I wait ten minutes. Enough time for them to get sorted, for Rose to have located Janie and attached herself, for the immediate aftermath of an outing to settle. The compound has its own rhythm, and I’ve learned it over two decades, when to move through a space and when to wait outside it.
In the common room, Reaper and Scout are playing a card game that neither of them is paying full attention to. Scout looks up, reads something in my face, and opens his mouth.
“Don’t,” I say.
He puts a card down.
The hall is quiet, and the door to Janie’s room is most of the way closed. Rose’s voice is audible through the gap, providing a detailed account of her afternoon with Mr. Rabbit, who apparently has strong feelings about something that happened with Nerd and a crayon.
Three knuckles on the door.
The voice stops.
Rose opens it.
She’s in her socks, one pigtail holding and one abandoned, Mr. Rabbit under her arm, and a look on her face that says she was in the middle of something important, and this interruption had better justify itself.
Then she sees me, and the expression upgrades considerably. “Roam.” Full name, serious intonation, the greeting of someone who has decided you’re worth the formal version. “Mama’s wearing a fancy dress.”
“That so.”
“It’s red.” She considers this. “Dark red. Like a…” She looks at the ceiling. “Like a really dark cherry.”
I look past her to Janie who is at the mirror on the back of the bathroom door, profile to me.
The dress is burgundy, deep and warm, the kind of color that has no interest in apologizing for itself.
It wraps at the side, and the cut is right for her in a way I couldn’t have specified in advance but recognize on sight.
She’s looking at her own reflection with an expression I’ve seen before, the internal one, the one that means Craig’s voice is in the room with her even when Craig isn’t.
The expression costs me something I don’t examine right now.
Rose tugs my hand. “Does it look fancy?”
“Yeah,” I say. “It does.”
Janie turns, sees me in the doorway, and color comes into her face that isn’t the dress.
“We were trying it…” she starts.
“Mama got three whole bags,” Rose announces. She holds up three fingers in case the number needs illustration. “Devil said she has good taste. I have good taste too.” She looks at me for confirmation.
“Best taste I’ve seen,” I say.
Rose accepts this as the fact it is.
I crouch down to her level. “You know those cookies Devil keeps in the back of the cupboard?”
Rose goes very still. The particular stillness of a small person receiving information they suspect is significant and don’t want to move in case it evaporates.
“The ones she thinks we don’t know about?” I say.
“I know about those,” Rose says, her voice low and conspiratorial. Mr. Rabbit is gripped with renewed intensity.
“Go ask her. Tell her Roam said it’s a cookie occasion.”
The process of Rose leaving the room takes approximately four seconds and involves no further communication, no retrieval of shoes, and a considerable volume increase as she hits the hall.
The word cookie travels the full length of the compound and probably into the yard.
Somewhere in the building, Devil’s long-suffering laugh answers it.
The door swings most of the way shut behind her.
Quiet.
Janie is still at the mirror. She hasn’t moved back to it. She’s standing in the center of the room, hands at her sides, the dress doing what the dress does in the late afternoon light coming through the window, watching me.
“You didn’t have to send her away,” she says.
“No.”
“But you did.”
“Wanted five minutes without a color-coded analysis of the cherry spectrum.”
The almost-smile. The one she still hasn’t fully committed to but is getting closer to doing so.
I cross the room.
Not fast. Nothing about this is fast. There’s no shortage of time, and she needs to feel that, has needed to feel it since the night I pulled up behind a dead car on a dark highway and watched her put the vehicle between herself and a stranger.
Janie reads the approach. She’s read it her whole life, and for the last four years, she’s been reading it in self-defense, calibrating danger from the angle of a body moving toward her.
What I want her to read now is different.
I stop in front of her, close but not pressed. Enough space that she has room to decide what she wants to do with it.
“Roam—”
“You’re wearing a good color,” I say.
She blinks. Whatever she was expecting, it wasn’t that.
“Devil picked it.”
“Devil picked right.”
Her hands move, not away from me, a small adjustment, smoothing the fabric at her hip in the unconscious gesture of someone who isn’t sure where to put what they’re feeling.
“I don’t really wear things like this.” Her voice is quiet. Not the careful quiet but the honest one. “Haven’t for a long time.”
“I know.”
“It feels—” She stops, then tries again. “It feels like a lot.”
“The dress?”
A beat. “Being looked at.”
Four years of a man who looked at her and found the deficit.
Looked at her body the way a property assessor looks at a building, cataloging the ways it had declined from some imagined original value.
I know the shape of what Craig did without knowing every detail, the way you know the shape of a fire from the damage it leaves behind.
My hand comes up. Slow, the way it was the other night, nothing that can’t be read in advance, nothing she can’t account for. I move the back of my fingers to her face, the line of her jaw, and I watch her eyes. They stay on mine with no flinch or recalibration.
“You want to know what I see?” I say.
She’s very still. “Yeah,” she says, barely a sound.
So I tell her.
Not with speeches. I’m not built for speeches, and she’d hear the construction of one before I got three words in.
The way her coloring takes that dress, the warmth it brings into her face, and the burgundy against her skin makes everything richer, as if the color was waiting for her specifically to justify its existence.
My hand rests against her jaw while my eyes follow the shape of her down through the dress, the way the wrap sits softly against her waist, the way she takes up space in a room and doesn’t even know it.
It’s the way she took up space on the back of my bike twelve minutes after I met her, barely touching, making herself as small as possible, and how the bike knew she was there the whole time, knew it in the way weight distributes and the handling changed.
I adjusted without thought because the adjustment was the only right response to what was behind me.
My thumb slowly moves along her jaw. “Craig’s voice in your head,” I say. “While you were at the mirror.”
Not a question.
Her breath shifts. “How’d you—”
“Your face.”
She looks at me for a long moment. The window light is getting low and amber, the last of the afternoon doing what afternoon does at the end of itself, and in it, her eyes are dark and very clear.
“It went quiet,” she says. “In the fitting room. For the first time in—” She stops. “A long time.”
“Good.”
“It won’t stay quiet.”
“No,” I say. “Not yet.” My hand is still at her jaw. “But it’ll get quieter.”
She breathes.
My other hand comes to her waist. The wrap fabric, the curve of her beneath it, warm, real, and present.
Not pulling her in but holding and giving her something to calibrate against, the way you give a person a fixed point when the ground has been unreliable for long enough that they’ve stopped trusting their own feet.
She doesn’t step back.
What she does is look at my mouth, briefly.
It’s the kind of look a person gives something they’ve decided they want, even as they are still negotiating with themselves about wanting it.
The look itself costs her something, the specific courage of a woman who has been trained out of wanting things and is choosing to want this one anyway.
I wait.
Janie’s hand comes up and finds the front of my shirt. Her fingers close on the fabric the same way they closed on my forearm on the porch yesterday, the anchoring grip, the checking of the ground.
The ground holds.
“Roam…” Her voice is low. “I—” She stops.
“Take your time.”
Her eyes come up to mine. “For four years…” she says, “… I stopped wanting things.” Her fingers press into my shirt. “Things for myself. Things that were…” She finds the word. “Mine. Craig was very good at making wanting things feel dangerous.”
“I know.”
“I know you know.” A breath. “The point is…” Her chin tilts up, the particular angle of a woman choosing her ground. “Standing here right now, in this dress, with you looking at me like—” Janie stops again. Her cheeks are flushed with a warmth she can’t hide. “The way you’re looking at me.”
“How am I looking at you?”
“Like…” She seems to run out of words. Then, quieter, with the precision of someone who has thought about it, “Like you’re grateful.”
The word lands square.
Grateful is right. Grateful is the closest language gets to the thing in my chest that still doesn’t have a full name, standing on a dark highway outside Gainesville at three in the morning and making the decision to turn the bike around without knowing why, without knowing anything except the hazard lights and the woman keeping the car between herself and the road.
The days since. Rose on my tank with her arms out.
Mr. Rabbit in the doorway at four in the morning.
Janie’s hands at my sides, barely touching.
Everything that came after barely touching.
All of it leading here, to this room, to her fingers in my shirt and a word that finally comes close to naming what I’ve been carrying since the night we met.
“Yeah,” I say. “Grateful’s in there.”
Her fingers are still in my shirt.
“For the first time in four years, standing here with you…” a long pause, and I watch her make the decision inside it, “… I want more.”
The words are small, and they carry the weight of everything it cost her to say them. I hear every pound of it.
My hand at her waist pulls her in slowly, a question still, but one with the answer already visible in her face.
My forehead drops to hers. The dress is warm under my hand, her breath is warm against my jaw, and she tips her face up in a way that means she’s done waiting for me to close the remaining distance.
So am I.
The kiss is longer than the one on the porch.
Deeper, but not frantic, the difference between something beginning and something continuing on from where it already started.
Her hand leaves my shirt and finds the back of my neck and stays there, and some last careful fraction of her goes still in the way things go still when they have finally, after a long time, reached the place they were trying to get to.
When she pulls back, she doesn’t go far.
Her forehead is still against mine, her eyes open.
“More,” she says again but quieter this time. She’s not asking but telling me what she’s decided.
“Yeah,” I say. “More.”
In the hall, Rose’s voice is returning from the kitchen, carrying the running commentary of someone who has successfully navigated a cookie situation and wants all relevant parties to know it.
The update includes at minimum three cookies, Devil’s confirmation of their status as earnable, and the precise location of Mr. Rabbit during the negotiation.
Janie laughs against my jaw.
The real one. The kind from the truck window that cost me half a conversation with Creed.
Up close, it’s better.
For the first time all day, I stop thinking about everything else.