4. Razor
RAZOR
Itry sleeping, but it just isn’t happening.
I lie on her couch and listen to the small sounds of her also not sleeping on the other side of the wall — a creak when she turns over, a breath she lets out too sharply — and I think about her mouth.
The taste of it. The sound she made when I had her against the wall.
I think about the way her hands fisted in my shirt and the way her body went liquid against mine, and I think about the look on her face when I stepped back and told her it couldn’t happen again. That’s the worst part.
She didn’t look hurt. She looked furious.
That’s what’s keeping me awake. She wasn’t crushed. She wasn’t ashamed. She was angry — at me, for stopping, for taking it back, for deciding on my own that something we both wanted wasn’t allowed. She wanted to drag me back by the shirt. I could see it on her.
I close my eyes. I open them again.
I’m a man who’s spent ten years controlling himself around her, and I broke in a single afternoon, and I told myself I’d put it back.
Be professional. Do the job, hand her back to her life, disappear into mine.
She’s younger than me, she’s my sister’s best friend, and she isn’t part of my world.
I don’t want her tainted by the dark shit I have to do.
The problem is, I don’t think I can pretend I don’t want her.
The problem is, I don’t think I want to.
I drive her to the clinic in the morning because there’s no version of this where she’s getting on the road alone.
She didn’t speak the whole ride. She sits behind me on the bike with her arms wrapped around me — careful, this time, not pressed against my back the way she was yesterday — and when I park she swings off and hands me the helmet without meeting my eyes.
“What time should I be back?”
“Five.”
“I’ll be here at four-forty-five.”
She walks into the clinic. I watch her go. Then I ride to the clubhouse.
King’s in his office. I knock once and walk in.
He looks up from whatever he’s reading and his face goes through about three different things before it settles on the one he wants me to see. I sit down across from him without being asked.
“Talk to me,” he says.
“Lock and Diesel get anywhere?”
“They got everywhere.” He pushes a folder across the desk. “Your girl walked into the middle of something.”
I don’t correct the ‘your girl’. I open the folder instead.
It’s all there. The plate she partially got — they ran it, ran the man, ran his associates.
Mike, the dog handler is small. Above him there’s a guy called Carlin who runs operations across the south side, and above Carlin there’s a chain of payments to the Road Kings’ bookkeeper going back eighteen months.
“Protection,” King says. “Road Kings take a flat monthly to make sure no other crew touches Carlin’s setup. Dogs, card rooms, some other shit we haven’t fully figured out. The fighting brings in the most reliable cash.”
“And Mike?”
“Panicked when a vet’s assistant started asking questions. Reported it up. Carlin sent a warning. He thinks she’ll back off.”
“She’s not going to back off.”
“I know. That’s why we’re handling it.”
I close the folder.
“Road Kings know we’re looking?”
“Not yet. They will. We were going to deal with Carlin’s lot regardless — dog fighting in our city, we don’t tolerate it. But the Road Kings’ angle changes the shape. Their protection meant nothing. We make sure everyone knows that.”
I nod.
“Razor.”
“Yeah.”
“You good?”
“I’m fine.”
He looks at me for a long second. Then he nods once and goes back to his reading. King doesn’t ask twice, but he knows me well enough that I’ve clearly got shit going on in my head and that I’m not fine.
I pick her up at five.
She walks out of the clinic with her bag clutched against her chest and her face set in the careful way she has when she’s holding something down. Marissa is watching her from the front desk with an expression I don’t like.
She doesn’t tell me what happened until we’re back at the apartment.
She doesn’t tell me then either, actually. She unlocks the door, drops her bag, and walks straight to the kitchen sink. She stands there with her hands on the edge of the counter, breathing.
I close the door. I lock it.
“What happened?”
“Nothing.”
“Darcie.”
“It’s nothing. Marissa just—” Her voice cracks and she presses her mouth shut.
“Marissa what?”
She doesn’t turn around.
“Someone called the clinic. Asking about me. What time I work, what days, whether I drive home or walk. Marissa told them she couldn’t give that out.
We called the police — finally, because that’s a thing now, that’s actually a thing they can write down—” Her voice keeps cracking.
“And they said they’d file it, but there’s nothing they can do unless something happens.
And then I looked in the car park and there was a man just standing there, probably just waiting for his wife, but I nearly screamed. I just don’t know who to trust.”
She finally turns around.
Her eyes are red. She wrapped her arms around herself as if she were holding herself together with them.
“I don’t know how to do this,” she says. “I’m so tired, and I’m so scared. I don’t know how to keep doing this.”
She’s looking at me like she’s bracing for me to push her back. To tell her she’s overreacting, or to say something professional and distant, or to do what I did yesterday — touch her and then take it back.
I’m done.
I’m so fucking done.
“Come here.”
She doesn’t move. She just looks at me.
I cross to her. Slowly, this time. Deliberate.
I stop in front of her and I lift my hand and cup her face, and her breath catches and I feel her whole body still under that one small touch.
“I’ve been telling myself no for ten years,” I say. “I’m done.”
Her eyes go wide.
“I’m not stopping now. You want me to, I will — say the word and I’ll sleep on the couch and we never talk about it again. But if you don’t say it—”
“I’m not saying it.”
I lean down and I kiss her.
It’s not like yesterday.
Yesterday was ten years cracking open. This is what happens after the crack. This is slow. This is me deciding, with every motion, that I am going to do this properly, that I have one chance to show this woman that the wait was worth something.
I kiss her like I’ve got all night. I kiss her until she sags against me and her hands are in my hair and her mouth is open under mine and she’s making the small sounds I’ve been hearing in my head since yesterday afternoon.
I lift her.
She gasps against my mouth. Her legs come around my waist on instinct — and then she goes still, like she’s surprised at herself.
“Okay?” I ask.
She nods against my throat.
I carry her to her bedroom because the couch is wrong for this. Her bedroom is small and tidy and it smells like her, and I lay her down on the bed and brace myself over her and look at her face for a long second before I do anything else.
“Tell me what you like.”
“I—” She swallows. “I don’t really know.”
I file that. I don’t say anything about it. I lean down and I kiss the corner of her mouth, then the line of her jaw, then the soft place under her ear, and I feel her shiver against me.
I take my time with her jumper.
I push it up slowly, watching her face. She lifts her arms when I get there and I pull it off and drop it on the floor, and then I’m looking at her — bare from the waist up except for a plain bra she clearly didn’t pick out for this, and she’s flushing pink because of it, like she’s apologizing for not being prepared.
“Don’t,” I say.
“Don’t what?”
“You know what. There’s nothing about you I’m not glad to be looking at.”
She makes a sound that might be a laugh. Her hand comes up as if she wants to cover herself. I catch her wrist and put it back down.
“Let me look at you.”
I undress her slowly. I pay attention to everything.
The way she sucks her breath in when I trace the curve of her hip with my thumb.
The way her stomach trembles when my mouth finds the soft skin under her ribs.
The way she watches my hands like she’s trying to memorize them, and the way her lips part when I bend down and put my mouth on her breast for the first time.
She makes a sound I’ve never heard before.
It’s not performed. It’s not for me. It’s the sound of a woman who didn’t know her body could feel like that, and she’s surprised by it, and I file that too.
I lift my head and look at her. Her eyes are half closed, and her chest is rising and falling fast, and her bottom lip is caught between her teeth, and there’s something stunned in her expression that I want to put there again and again until I die.
“What do you like, baby. Tell me.”
“I don’t— that. What you just did. Do that.”
I do it again.
I do it slower this time, watching her face the whole way, and her hand comes up and grabs a fistful of my hair and her hips lift to meet me and she gasps something that isn’t a word.
I’ve been with women. I’m thirty-four and I’m not a monk.
I know what experience looks like and I know what its absence looks like, and what I’m seeing, the careful way she watches me, the slight unfamiliarity in the way she touches me back — is a woman who hasn’t done much of this. Not nothing. But not much.
I don’t say anything. I don’t make it a thing.
I just slow down even more.
I learn what makes her arch off the mattress — the soft spot at the hollow of her throat, the inside of her thigh, the place at the small of her back that makes her gasp.
I watch her face when I slide my hand between her legs and find her ready for me, and when she comes apart for me with my name on her mouth I think I might die from how good it is to hear.
“You okay?” I ask.
“I didn’t—” She swallows. “I didn’t know it could feel like that.”
I close my eyes for a second. I have to.
When I open them, she’s still looking at me. Pink-cheeked, half undone. She looks like every fantasy I never let myself finish having.
“It can feel like a lot of things,” I say. “We’ve got time.”
I take my own clothes off. She watches me. Her eyes go wide when she sees the rest of the ink, and wider still at the rest of me, and she swallows once, and then she reaches for me, and I let her pull me down to her.
I settle between her thighs, and her breath catches the second she feels me there, hot and hard against her. I’m not in yet and I’m just letting her feel me.
“Look at me,” I say.
She does.
I push in slowly. An inch, then another. I’m watching her face the whole time, and her mouth falls open and her eyes go wide, and I feel her stretch around me, and the sound she makes — half gasp, half something deeper — goes straight through me.
“Fuck,” I breathe. I can’t help it. She’s tight and hot and trembling, and the way she’s looking at me right now—
“More,” she whispers.
“Slow, baby.”
“More. Please.”
I push in further. Her hips lift to meet me, instinctive, and I have to grit my teeth and stop for a second because she’s going to undo me before I’ve even started. Her hands are on my shoulders, fingers digging in, and her breathing’s gone shaky.
“You okay?”
“Yes.” Almost a sob. “Yes.”
I bottom out and she makes a sound I’ve never heard before — high and broken and stunned — and her whole body shudders under mine and I have to drop my head into the crook of her neck and breathe for a second before I trust myself to move.
She’s so warm. I press my mouth to her throat. I feel her pulse hammering against my lip.
“Razor, I really want you right now.”
The first stroke is slow. So slow. I want her to feel every inch of it — feel me drag out, feel me push back in, feel the way I’m fighting myself to keep this gentle when every instinct in me wants to take her apart.
She gasps. Her nails scrape down my back and I feel each one like a separate point of fire.
“Yes,” she breathes. “Yes.”
I do it again. And again. Building it, watching her, learning what she likes — the small twist of my hips that makes her arch, the angle that makes her grab fistfuls of the sheet, the long deep stroke that makes her gasp my name like she’s never said it before.
Her bedroom is small and quiet and the only sounds are her breathing and mine and the soft wet sounds of what we’re doing, and the slap of skin every time I bottom out, and her — God, her — making little noises against my mouth that she clearly doesn’t know she’s making.
“That’s it,” I murmur. “That’s it, baby.”
“It’s so—”
“I know.”
“I can’t—”
“You can. Stay with me.”
I shift my weight to one elbow and slide my other hand down between us, finding her where she’s slick and swollen, and the second I touch her she cries out and bucks against me. I work her with my thumb in time with my hips. Her whole body’s trembling now. She’s right there.
“Razor—”
“Look at me. I want you to look at me when you come.”
Her eyes meet mine.
She comes apart for me with her eyes on my face — gasping, shaking, her body clenching around me in waves, and I watch every second of it and I will never in my life see anything more beautiful than this. Her mouth is open, and she gasps my name.
“Christ,” I groan.
I’m not going to last. Not with her clenching around me like that, not with her looking at me like that, not with her hands on my back and her hips lifting to meet mine and the small gasping sounds she’s making as her body keeps going.
I move faster. Harder. Her hands move to my shoulders and grip, and she lifts her hips into mine and gasps something that might be yes and might be my name, and I feel myself break.
I drop my head down beside hers. I feel her mouth at my ear. I feel her hand at the back of my neck, holding me to her.
I come hard, with her name in my throat and her body still trembling around mine.
After, I don’t move.
I stay over her for a long minute with my face buried somewhere in her hair and her hands flat on my back, both of us breathing hard, and then I roll us so she’s tucked against my chest and I wrap an arm around her and I hold on.
She’s quiet. Her hand is on my chest, over my heart.
I stare at the ceiling of her bedroom for a long time.
Ten years. Ten years of being sure I was doing the right thing by staying away from her. Ten years of telling myself she was better off without me.
I was wrong about all of it.
I’m not going to be wrong about it any more.
I tighten my arm around her. She makes a soft sound in her sleep and turns her face into my chest, and I close my eyes and I don’t sleep, but for the first time in ten years I’m not fighting anything either.