3. Darcie
DARCIE
By the third morning I’ve stopped pretending I slept.
I wake up at five and lie in the dark listening to the silence on the other side of the wall, and I know without checking that he’s already up.
He’s always up before me. Every morning I walk out of my bedroom and there he is — at the kitchen counter, coffee made, hair still wet from the shower I somehow don’t hear him taking, reading something on his phone like this is his apartment and I’m the guest.
He’s wearing a black t-shirt this morning. The sleeves sit high on his arms because his muscular arms don’t really fit into sleeves. Ink from wrist to shoulder, detailed work that disappears up under the fabric and reappears at his collar. I’ve had three days to stop staring and I still can’t.
“Morning,” he says without looking up.
“Morning.”
He slides a mug across the counter. Black, one sugar, the way I take it. I don’t remember telling him.
“You want toast?”
“I’ll do it.”
“Sit down.”
This is how it’s been. Three days of him running my apartment like a quiet, efficient operation I didn’t know I was signing up for. He’s there when I leave for the clinic and he’s there when I get home.
And I am losing my mind.
I caught him looking on day two.
I’m in the kitchen, up on my toes reaching for a mug on the top shelf, my top riding up. When I turn around, his eyes are on the bare strip of skin above my waistband, and they don’t move fast enough.
I see him see it. I see him decide not to look away the second he should have. And then a beat later he does, but the beat was there.
I take my mug down and make my tea, and my hands are trembling so badly I slop water onto the counter.
Nothing is happening. That’s what I keep telling myself.
He’s here because Kate asked him to be here.
He’s here because someone’s threatening me.
He’s here because he’s a good man doing his sister a favour, and the looking means nothing because it’s been ten years of him making a point of not looking and nothing has changed and I am thirty seconds from walking into the living room and asking him to leave before I embarrass myself by doing something I can’t take back.
I don’t. Obviously. I never do.
Greg knocks on the second evening.
I hear it from the bathroom — three quick, one slow — and I freeze with my toothbrush halfway to my mouth. Shoulders up. Stomach tight. Already rehearsing the smile.
I rinse fast and come out into the living room. Razor is on the couch. He hasn’t moved, but he’s watching the door.
“It’s my landlord,” I say quietly. “I’ll handle it.”
He doesn’t say anything. Just watches me.
I open the door six inches. Not more.
“Hey, Greg.”
“Hey, Darcie!” He’s all teeth, holding nothing — no clipboard, no tools, no excuse, but he’s about to make one up. “Just thought I’d swing by, see if everything’s okay with the radiator? I know it was making that noise—”
“It’s fine, Greg, thanks. I’d let you know if it wasn’t.”
“You sure? Because I can pop in and—”
“Honestly. All good.”
I’m smiling. My voice is light. I am performing for him exactly the way I have always performed for him.
He opens his mouth to say something else, and his eyes flick past me into the apartment and catch on Razor.
I watch him do the math. I watch his smile go thin.
“Right. Yeah. I’ll— let you get on with your evening.”
“Thanks, Greg.”
I close the door. Lock it. Lean against the wood for half a second longer than I should and pull myself together.
When I turn round, Razor’s looking at me.
“How long has he been doing that?”
“Doing what?”
“Knocking on your door for nothing.”
I lift one shoulder. “Since I moved in. He’s harmless enough…mostly.”
“Has he been inside before? When you didn’t want him to be.”
“Yeah, he creeps me out. But he’s also my landlord, so I have to be nice.”
He nods. Once. Slow. Goes back to his phone.
But something in his face has changed, and I know — I know — that the next time Greg knocks on this door, I am not the one who’s going to be opening it.
He knocks again the next afternoon.
I’m in the kitchen. Razor is on the couch. I know that knock — three quick, one slow — and my body goes stiff before my brain’s caught up.
Razor’s already standing.
“Stay in the kitchen,” he says.
He crosses to the door before I can say anything else.
Greg’s face is already in his customer-service smile — hey, Darcie, just need to pop in — and it stays there for about a second and a half before his brain catches up with what’s standing in front of him.
Six feet two inches of tattooed biker in a black t-shirt. No smile. Hands loose at his sides.
Greg’s face drops.
“Oh — I— sorry, I think I’ve got the wrong—”
“You don’t.”
Razor doesn’t move. Doesn’t raise his voice. The two words land heavy enough that Greg physically leans back.
“I was just checking the smoke detector—”
“You weren’t.”
“I—”
“You like knocking on her door.” Razor’s voice is flat. The kind of flat that isn’t calm. “You like making a nuisance of yourself. You like her being too polite to tell you to get the fuck out when you stay to long for no reason at all.”
Greg’s gone gray. He’s four inches shorter than Razor and about half as wide, and he’s got nowhere to go because the hallway’s narrow and Razor is filling the doorway.
“Here’s how it’s going to go,” Razor says.
“You fix what she asks you to fix in this building. You do it fast. You don’t come up here unless she calls you.
You don’t speak to her unless it’s about the lease.
You don’t look at her. And if I hear you’ve made her uncomfortable even one more time, I’m going to find you. And I won’t knock first.”
Greg’s mouth opens, before quickly closing again.
“Understood?” Razor says.
“Yes.”
“Say it.”
“I — understand. Yeah. Understood.”
“Good.”
Razor closes the door in his face.
I’m standing in the middle of the kitchen with my fingers wrapped around the edge of the counter and my stomach doing something I don’t have a word for.
Nobody’s ever done that for me before. No one has ever stared a man down and told them to back the fuck off and meant every single word of it.
Razor walks back past me into the living room without looking at my face.
“He won’t bother you again,” he says.
“Okay,” I manage.
It comes out smaller than I meant.
He stops. He looks at me then. Really looks — the way he did in the hallway that time when I was eighteen and he’s never done since — and something in his jaw moves.
Then he sits down on the couch and picks up his phone, and the moment’s gone.
I go to the sink and run cold water over my wrists and try to remember how to breathe.
There is another note for me at the front desk of the clinic when I come back from lunch the next day.
Not on my car this time. Inside. Past the main door, onto the counter where Marissa doesn’t remember anyone leaving anything. Folded once. My name on the outside.
Last warning.
My hands started shaking before I’ve even put it down.
I go into the back office and I locked the door, and I call Razor.
“Where are you?” he says before I can speak.
“Clinic. I’m fine. I got another note.”
There’s a pause. Then his voice comes through the line and it’s not his normal voice. It’s lower. Slower. Colder.
“I’m coming to get you.”
“I can drive—”
“I’m coming to get you. Sit tight. Don’t leave that office. Ten minutes.”
He hangs up.
I sit on the floor with my back against the door and I hold my phone against my chest and I try to slow my breathing, and some awful part of me is registering — right now, in the middle of this — that his voice going like that did something to me.
Something I should not be feeling while I’m locked in an office with a last warning sitting on my desk.
I am not okay.
He drives me home on his bike because I’m too shaky to trust behind a wheel.
I’ve been on the back of a bike exactly twice in my life, and now I’m pressed against the back of a man I’ve wanted since I was sixteen with my arms around his stomach and my cheek against the leather of his cut and his hand coming back once to cover mine and squeeze.
It’s a ten-minute ride. I don’t breathe for any of it.
When we get to my building he kills the engine in the car park and swings off. Takes the helmet off my head, because my fingers aren’t working. Doesn’t look at me. Takes my elbow and walks me up the stairs like I’m made of glass.
I let myself into the apartment.
I drop my bag.
I stand in the middle of the living room and my face starts to crumple because I’ve been holding it together for six hours and I can’t anymore, and I don’t want him to see it but there’s nowhere to go in this tiny apartment and I’m already making a sound I can’t stop.
“Hey,” his voice. Close.
“Sorry. Sorry, I—”
“Darcie.”
“I’m okay, I just—”
“Look at me.”
I look at him.
He’s already crossing the room.
Three steps. That’s all it takes. Three steps and he’s in front of me, and his hands come up and he takes my face between them, and his palms are warm and rough and so careful I almost break apart right there.
“You’re okay,” he says. “You’re okay.”
His thumbs move along my cheekbones. Once, twice. Like he’s wiping away a tear that hasn’t fallen yet.
And then he’s looking at my mouth.
I see him see it. I’ve spent a decade watching for this and I know his face better than I should, and the thing that flickers across it now is the thing that was there when I was sixteen.
He kisses me.
It’s not gentle. It’s ten years of a man clamping down on something that was never going to stay clamped, and when he lets go, he lets go all the way — his mouth opens mine, his tongue strokes in against mine, one of his hands slides into my hair and tilts my head exactly where he wants it, and I make a sound against his mouth that I have literally never made in my life.
I grab the front of his shirt. Two fistfuls. I haul him closer.
He makes a low sound in his throat — something torn out of him that I don’t think he meant to make — and his other hand comes down to the small of my back and splays there, and he pulls me against him like he’s been dying to and the whole long hot length of him is pressed against me and I can feel how much he wants this.
My body goes boneless. He holds me up.
He kisses me like a man who’s been starving. He kisses me like the ten years were a mistake. His teeth catch my bottom lip and drag and I gasp and he swallows the gasp like it belongs to him now. His hand in my hair tightens. The fingers at my back press into me through my jumper,
He walks me backward into the wall.
My back hits the plasterboard, and he’s right there with me, caging me, one forearm braced next to my head and the other hand still at the small of my back, and his thigh slides between mine because there’s nowhere else for it to go, and I feel him there, hard against my hip, and I make another one of those sounds I didn’t know I could make.
He groans. Quiet. Right against my mouth.
“Darcie.”
My name, in his voice, said like that. I don’t think I’ll ever recover.
He kisses me again. Deeper. Slower now, like he’s decided something, and he’s taking his time about it. His thumb strokes along my jaw. My fingers are still knotted in the front of his shirt, and I don’t think I could let go if you paid me.
And then he stops.
His hands drop. He steps back.
He’s breathing hard. I’ve never seen his chest move like that. Once. Twice. Three times, his shoulders rising.
His eyes are black.
“That can’t happen again,” he says.
My lips are tingling. My legs are shaking. His taste is still in my mouth.
“What?” I whisper.
“I shouldn’t have done that.”
“Razor—”
“I mean it. It can’t happen again. I’m sorry.”
He turns away. He walks to the couch. He sits down and puts his elbows on his knees, and drops his head into his hands.
I stand in the middle of the living room. My whole body is lit up. My pulse is in places it shouldn’t be.
He kissed me.
He kissed me like that, after ten years of pretending he didn’t want to, and then he took it back before I’d even caught my breath.
I go into the bedroom and I close the door. I lean against it and slide down until I’m sitting on the floor.
My mouth is still warm.
I don’t know what I’m more furious about. That he stopped. Or that when he stopped, I wanted to drag him back by his shirt and tell him he didn’t get to decide that on his own.
I sat there for a long time.
Through the wall, I don’t hear him move once.