Chapter Twenty-Five #2
Later after dinner, I keep her hand in mine. “I don’t want property. I want a woman who can leave and keeps choosing my ugly ass anyway.”
Her lips part.
Then her eyes fill.
“Derby.”
“You want a patch one day, we talk about what it means. You don’t, we don’t. You want my name, you ask. You want me at your place, you invite me. You want me gone, you say it.”
“That sounds too easy.”
“It won’t be.” I lift her hand and press my mouth to her knuckles. “I’m an asshole. I’ll get protective and stupid. I’ll want to check roads and break hands and install seventeen locks. You’ll have to tell me when I’m acting like a cage with tattoos.”
She laughs through the shine in her eyes.
“I can do that.”
“I know. You’re getting meaner.”
“Healthier.”
“Sure.”
She bumps my shoulder with hers. “Meaner sounds like a compliment from you.”
“It is.”
Her smile softens.
I lean closer. “You choose me tonight?”
She doesn’t answer immediately.
Good.
I want her thinking.
I want every yes from her to stand on its own legs.
Finally, she says, “Yes.”
I kiss her, the Fire Pit cake forgotten. Her mouth opens under mine, soft and warm and certain enough to make the ground shift. I touch her face first, then her waist, then wait when my hand finds the curve of her hip.
She smiles against my mouth. “Yes.”
“Just checking.”
“I know.”
The kiss turns deep.
Not desperate like the night she left.
I pull back before we get thrown out for PDA.
“Trailer?” I ask, voice rough.
Her eyes darken.
Then she looks toward Widowmaker.
“Trailer,” she says.
The ride back is short and too damn long.
When we reach her trailer, Janie gives me one look and announces August is asleep and she suddenly remembered she has somewhere to be.
“Subtle,” Amelia says.
Janie kisses her cheek. “I’m a romantic.”
“You threatened my gas tank,” I say.
“I’m flexable.”
She leaves laughing.
Inside, the trailer is dim and quiet. August’s door is cracked. His little snores drift out with the soft glow of the dinosaur night-light Sophie brought over.
Amelia looks at me.
I look at the door.
“You want to check him?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“Go.”
She disappears down the hall, and I stay by the front door because this is her home and I’m still learning how to stand inside it without acting like I own the air. She comes back a minute later, eyes soft.
“He’s out.”
“Good.”
She walks toward me.
Slow.
No running from the moment. No rushing to keep from thinking. She stops in front of me and takes my cut between her fingers.
“You can put this on the chair,” she says.
That is an invitation.
Small.
Huge.
I take off my cut and place it over the chair by the door.
Then I wait.
She notices.
Her eyes shine.
“Come here,” she whispers.
I do.
Her bedroom is small. Bare walls. One lamp. A quilt folded at the foot of the bed. A box still unpacked in the corner. It ain’t my room. Not the room where she said goodbye with her body and left before dawn.
This is hers.
Her bed.
Her choice.
Her door.
She turns to me in the low light and lifts her hair, exposing the little crown behind her ear. The skin has healed enough that the black ink looks sharp and permanent.
“I’m scared of this,” she says.
“The tattoo?”
“What it means.”
“Me too.”
“I don’t want to hide it from you.”
“Then don’t.”
She lets her hair fall.
“I don’t want to hide anything from you.”
That hits harder.
I step close. “Then start with what you want.”
Her hands go to my shirt. “You.”
The word never gets old.
Might never.
I kiss her slowly this time.
At first.
Then not slowly at all.
She pulls my shirt over my head and laughs when it catches on my nose. I curse under my breath. She tells me not to wake August.
Clothes come off in pieces.
Not frantic, but not careful in the old way either. Care is still there. Consent is still there. But the fear has less room now. It has to share space with trust, and trust is starting to stretch out like it belongs.
She touches my chest, my ribs, the old scar she saw before. I let her. She presses her mouth there, and something in me opens too fast.
“Amelia.”
“I know,” she whispers.
I lay her down on her bed like the place is sacred because, for her, maybe it is. Not pure. Not untouched. Something better. We’ve been here a dozen times in the last month.
Chosen.
I ask because I will always ask.
She answers because she knows I will listen.
And when I move over her, when she opens beneath me with a soft sound that nearly ruins me, when I slide home and her hands grip my back, there is no goodbye in her eyes.
Only staying.
Not forever promised.
Not marriage.
Not property.
Not a patch.
Staying for tonight because she can leave tomorrow if she wants.
That makes every second worth more.
She bites my shoulder again when she gets too loud, and I laugh into her neck because apparently that is our thing now.
She laughs too, breathless, then gasps when I move deeper, and the sound of her pleasure inside her own home is enough to make me believe in every dirty miracle Kentucky ever tried to hide.
I love her.
The thought hits in the middle of it.
Hard as a fist and twice as dangerous.
I don’t say it.
Not yet.
Not because I’m a coward, though I’m plenty of that. When she comes apart under me, she says my name like she ain’t afraid of who hears it inside herself anymore.
I follow her down, face buried against her shoulder, one hand braced beside her head, the other tangled in hers.
After, we lie in the quiet.
Her head on my chest.
My fingers moving through her hair, careful near the tattoo.
This is the part where old me would make a joke and get out of the bed before feeling started demanding rent.
New me stays.
Terrible development.
“Derby?” she whispers.
“Yeah.”
“You still awake?”
“No. I answer questions in my sleep now.”
She pinches my side.
I grunt. “Ouch.”
She smiles against my chest. Then, quieter, “Thank you for not asking me to move back in.”
My hand stills for half a second.
That one hurts.
Not because I was going to ask.
Because part of me wanted to.
“I thought about it,” I admit.
“I know.”
“Thought about moving my couch in here too, just to be annoying.”
“Your couch has trauma.”
“My couch has history.”
“It has tape.”
“It survived you, me, and August. Show respect.”
She laughs softly.
Then my voice drops. “I want you close.”
“I know.”
“But you need this place.”
“Yes.”
“So I’m trying not to be a selfish prick about it.”
Her fingers trace the edge of a tattoo on my chest. “You’re doing pretty good.”
“Don’t tell anyone.”
“Never.”
I take a breath.
This feels more dangerous than sex.
“Can I keep a toothbrush here?”
She goes still.
“That’s what you want?”
“I want a lot more than that.”
Her breath catches.
“But toothbrush is a start.”
She lifts her head and looks at me.
The lamp puts gold in her eyes. The crown is hidden under her hair, but I know it’s there. I know the debt is there too.
I know this happiness ain’t simple.
Good.
Simple never lasts in our world.
“A toothbrush,” she says.
“And Sunday breakfast.”
Her mouth curves. “You cook?”
“Absolutely not. I supervise.”
“That means you drink coffee and insult the cook.”
“Exactly.”
“August will want pancakes.”
I kiss her forehead because if I kiss her mouth, Sunday may start early.
For a while, we just lie there.
Happy for now.
A sex sated woman asleep almost, against me. A kid down the hall. My Harley in the drive. A trailer that ain’t mine with a door I was invited through.
For now, that is enough.
Then her phone buzzes.
Not the old one.
The burner.
The one she brought back from Oregon and keeps in the drawer beside her bed like a loaded gun she doesn’t want to admit she owns.
Her whole body goes stiff.
I feel it before the second buzz.
“Amelia.”
She sits up, pulling the sheet around herself.
I do too.
The drawer buzzes again.
Neither of us moves.
The room that was warm a second ago turns cold as ice.
She opens the drawer and takes out the phone.
No caller ID.
Just a message.
Her face changes as she reads it.
“What?” I ask.
She doesn’t answer.
I reach for my jeans and pull them on because whatever this is, I don’t want to face it naked. Not because I’m modest. Because trouble deserves pants.
Amelia hands me the phone.
The message is short.
Crown’s straight. Time to use it.
Below it, another line appears while I’m looking.
Need a favor, Diva. Bring your pretty backbone.
My jaw tightens.
Hot Mama.
Or one of hers.
The hook I smelled in Oregon has come home.
I look at Amelia.
Her hand has gone to the tattoo behind her ear.
Fear is there.
But not only fear.
Something else too.
Duty maybe.
Curiosity.
The dangerous beginning of a woman realizing she has power and debts in the same pocket.
“No,” I say.
Her eyes snap to mine.
I close my mouth.
Wrong first word.
Old habit.
Cage with tattoos.
I breathe through it.
“Not sorry.”
She watches me.
I try again.
“What kind of favor?”
Her phone buzzes one more time.
She reads it.
Her face drains, then hardens.
From down the hall, August snorts in his sleep, then goes quiet again. A dinosaur falls off his bed with a soft thump.
Amelia looks toward his door.
Then back at me.
“Can you watch August?”
The question lands like a vow and a warning.
It says she trusts me.
It says she is going.
It says the Queens’ favor is already stepping through her door.
I look at the phone.
Then at her hair hiding the tattoo.
Then down the hall where August sleeps with toy dinosaurs on the floor and no idea that his mother’s freedom just sent a bill.
“What kind of job?” I ask.
Her eyes meet mine.
She is scared.
She is steady.
“The kind Hot Mama doesn’t ask for twice.”
The Queens handed her a road, and God help me, I was going to have to watch her choose that too.