Chapter Two #2
She finally looked up then, and something in her face softened the way it always did when she looked at him for more than a passing second, and he felt the full weight of what he was about to lose, or already had lost, or was in the process of losing one small cowardly day at a time.
“You look tired,” she said.
“Long morning.”
“Vance giving you a hard time about the vote again?”
“Something like that.”
She studied him a beat longer than the conversation required, the way she studied a number that did not quite add up, and for one terrible second he thought this was it, this was the moment, she had found something, she knew, and he almost wanted her to, almost wanted the floor to simply give out beneath him so he would not have to be the one to open the trapdoor himself.
But she only reached up, fixed his collar where it had folded wrong, and said, “Eat something today. You get useless when you skip breakfast.”
He kissed the top of her head while she went back to the invoices, and he told her he loved her, and meant it with the kind of fullness that should have made the rest of it impossible, and it did not make it impossible, it just made it worse, and he went back downstairs feeling like a man walking toward a cliff he had already decided he was not going to stop walking toward.
Some men were cowards about violence. Marcus had never been that kind of coward.
He had walked into rooms other men would not walk into, had stood his ground against threats that would have sent smarter men running, and had never once, in fifteen years of club business, flinched from a fight that needed fighting.
He was, apparently, exactly that kind of coward about everything else.
Downstairs, Vance was waiting by his bike, arms crossed, watching him come down the stairs with an expression that said he already knew Marcus had not told her anything, and was not going to say so out loud, because that was not how their shorthand worked.
Some things did not need saying. Some things you just carried together, quietly, until the day they could not be carried quietly anymore.
“Sacramento,” Vance said instead, handing him a folder. “Callie wants site visit dates confirmed by Thursday. Guy named Warren. She didn’t say his title, just said to make sure whoever goes doesn’t ask.”
Marcus took the folder without opening it.
He had learned a long time ago that whatever Callie built with the Warrens of the world, it worked better when nobody asked questions, including him, especially him, and he had never once had a reason to push past that boundary until this exact morning, when he found himself wondering, for the first time in nine years, what exactly it was his wife did with men whose titles she refused to share.
He told himself it was nothing. He told himself a lot of things lately that were not quite lies and not quite the truth either, and he was beginning to suspect that gap was where a man’s whole life could quietly come apart, one reasonable sounding half truth at a time, until one day he looked up and did not recognize the wreckage he was standing in.
He set the folder on his bike’s seat, unopened, and rode out an hour later, alone, which was not something he did often anymore, not since the gavel started feeling close enough to touch and every hour of his day filled itself with someone else’s problem.
He took the old river road instead of the highway, the long way to nowhere in particular, because the sound of the engine had always been the one place his head went quiet, and he needed quiet more than he needed to be anywhere on time.
Twelve miles out, past the last gas station before the county line, he saw the sign for the motel he had not planned on seeing, had told himself he would never see again, and his hands were on the brake before his brain finished deciding anything.
It came back to him whole, the way it always did, unwelcome and complete.
Three weeks before the diner, before Reyes Cardenas ever said Selene’s name across a table to him, he had told Callie he was making a supply run to Sacramento and had driven instead to a room with faded curtains and a window unit that rattled, and when he pushed the door open she was already waiting for him, and he understood, in the half second before he could stop himself from understanding it, that she had planned this down to the smallest detail.
She was standing by the window in red, a slip of nothing that clung to every line of her, lace at the edges catching the low afternoon light, and she had done her hair and her mouth like a woman getting ready for something far more permanent than a stolen hour in a roadside motel.
She was not an accident waiting to happen.
She was a decision, dressed and staged and entirely deliberate, and the worst part, the part he would carry for months afterward, was how little that stopped him.
“You came,” she said, not a question, crossing the room slow, unhurried, the way a woman moves when she already knows how the next hour is going to go.
“I told myself I wasn’t going to.” His own voice came out low, unhurried in a way that matched hers, no urgency in it yet, just the honest, tired admission of a man who had spent the whole drive out arguing with himself and losing.
“I sat in the parking lot for ten minutes telling myself to turn around.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No.” He said it slowly, watching her the whole time, and there was no pretending in it, no performance, just the plain truth sitting between them, heavier each time. “I have been thinking about this since I left here last. I told myself that was the guilt talking. It was not only the guilt.”
“You always tell yourself that.” She reached up, traced one finger along his jaw, down the line of his throat, and he felt his own resolve go the way it always went with her, quiet and total, a door he kept telling himself he had locked finding itself open again anyway.
“And you always come anyway. I stopped questioning it, Marcus. I think you should too.”
“I have questioned it every single day since I left here last.” His hand came up to cover hers where it rested against his throat, not pulling it away, just holding it there, slow and deliberate, and when he spoke again his voice had dropped further still, rough with something he was done pretending was only shame.
“I missed this. I missed you. I am not going to stand here and lie to either of us about that part.”
“Then stop standing there.”