12. Tristan
TRISTAN
I wonder what it’s like to sleep soundly. Peacefully. The way a person sleeps when they’ve never done a bad thing in their life.
I’m sure there was a time, years ago, when I could pass out the way Stella does, curled up on her side like she is now. Nothing gets through to her, though I’m doing my best to make sure there’s no reason for her to wake up. I wouldn’t disturb her for anything.
For now, it’s enough to watch her. Her hand is tucked under her cheek, and her hair is everywhere—spilled across the pillow, stark red against white. Her breathing is slow and even, and there’s something close to a smile tipping the corners of her mouth. What is she dreaming about?
Socks is on his cushion in the corner, asleep in a ball with one ear folded under his head.
He’s allowed to sleep in here with her so long as we keep the door closed, since I’m not trying to run another extraction mission anytime soon.
Early morning light is coming through the window, pale and gray.
The house is quiet enough that I hear the birds in the trees outside and the slow tick of a clock in the kitchen.
I’ve never noticed that sound before, probably because I’m rarely still long enough to notice.
The thought of the clock makes me look to the digital clock on the nightstand. I’ve been up for two hours.
The pain in my jaw has settled into a dull ache. I feel it when I clench my teeth, which I try not to do but can’t help. My knuckles have fresh bruises and swelling. There’s a scratch across my forearm from the dumpster—I didn’t notice it until I showered last night and the water hit it.
None of that is what’s keeping me up.
She shot a man for me. This girl who won’t step outside unless she knows exactly how hard the wind is blowing.
She picked a gun up off the ground and put a bullet in a man’s thigh because someone had his hands on me.
She then climbed into my lap behind a pharmacy and kissed me like she wanted something. She did a lot more than that.
I can’t stop replaying it. Not the fight. I’ve been in enough fights that they blur together: fists and elbows and the sound of a body hitting a surface. What keeps running through my mind is the look on her face when she pulled the trigger. Shock. Fear.
Then, underneath it, something bright and fierce I had never seen before. It was something that looked a lot like the part of her that’s been locked behind all those phobias finally kicking the door down.
I did that to her. I put her in a situation where she had to pick up a gun.
Yet instead of destroying her, it woke something up. That should feel good.
It doesn’t. It feels more like I cracked open something that was supposed to stay closed. Now there’s no putting things back together.
It’s hard to remember a time when I didn’t understand her fear.
When she told me about the straws and the wind and all of it, part of me—the part that’s been hit and shot at and worse—couldn’t make sense of it.
How can someone be afraid of everything and still function?
How do you get through a day when the world is made of triggers?
I understand it now, because I’m lying next to her with my jaw aching and knuckles raw, and I am afraid.
Not of Castellano. Not of what comes next in that mess, which I’m sure will be considerable.
I’m afraid of her. Of what she’s become to me.
Of the fact that she is now a name that men will say to other men in rooms I’ll never be in, and those men will calculate her value not as a person but as a pressure point.
A way to get to me, and through me to Dorian.
I’m afraid of being the reason something happens to her.
The thought sits in my chest, heavy and cold.
I’ve spent my entire career making sure the people Dorian loves stay safe, and I’ve done it well.
But those people live behind gates and guards.
An entire system I built and maintain from day to day.
Stella isn’t a part of that system. She’s a girl who walks around with paint on her at all times.
She talks to her rabbit. She doesn’t know that the world I brought her into has teeth.
She showed up and the noise in her head went quiet. That’s what she told me. What happens when the noise in my head won’t stop?
I know what I have to do. I’ve known since four a.m. I’ve been lying here for two hours waiting for the courage to do it, which is ironic, because courage is never something I lack. Yet here I am, afraid to wake up this small woman with paint dried under her fingernails.
But I have to. The sooner, the better. I want to soak in these last moments before setting her free.
I want to commit her to memory. Never, if I live to be a hundred, will I ever know anyone like her.
The sort of person who is terrified but pushes through anyway.
That’s the sort of courage I didn’t know existed until now, and I have no choice but to push it away.
“Stella.” At first, she doesn’t move. I have to nudge her shoulder. “Stella.”
This time she stirs and makes a small sound before pulling the blanket over her head. “No, thank you,” she mumbles.
“I have to talk to you.”
“Is the house on fire?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Then we can talk at a human hour.” Her voice is muffled by sleep and the blanket when she asks, “What time is it?”
“Six-fifteen.”
“Come back at nine.”
“It can’t wait.”
Something in my voice gets through the blanket, then through her skull.
She pulls the blanket down, squinting at me in the thin light.
There’s a crease on her cheek from the pillowcase, and her hair conceals the other half of her face when she turns her head to look at me.
Whatever she sees changes her sleepy squint into something sharper. Something alert.
“What’s wrong?” She sits up, pushing her hair back from her face with one hand while holding the blanket to her chest with the other. “Is it the Castellano thing? Did something—”
“Nothing happened.” I sit up too. My hands are on my knees, and I’m gripping them because if I don’t grip something, I’m going to reach for her. I can’t reach for her while I’m saying this. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. You need to find your own place.”
All right. I could’ve been gentler, but I’m doing all of this on the fly. Still, I hear the way it sounds, and I wince and wish it had come out better.
“What?” she whispers.
“I’ll help you find something. A good neighborhood with good locks, whatever you need. I’ll cover the deposit and even the first few months. Whatever it takes.”
She’s staring at me as all the color drains from her face. I see the exact moment it lands. The way she flinches. The small contraction around her eyes, like something just hit her in a place where there’s no armor.
“What did I do?” she asks. Her voice is smaller than I’ve ever heard it.
“You didn’t do anything.”
“Why are you saying all of this?” She pulls the blanket further up to her shoulders, like she’s trying to put something between us. “Is this about yesterday? About the gun? Did I embarrass you? Was it the Godfather quotes? Because I know those were bad… I knew it while I was saying them, but…”
“This isn’t about the quotes.”
“Then what is it about?” There are tears welling, and she’s fighting them. I watch as she grits her teeth and blinks rapidly, like she’s trying to maintain her dignity. I don’t think I’ve ever hated myself the way I do now.
“It’s about me.” I force myself to look at her, to witness her pain.
I deserve it. “I brought you into this. My life, my world. It’s the sort of world where men follow you into stores and carry guns.
Yesterday, you picked up a weapon and shot someone.
You shouldn’t have had to do that. You never should’ve been in that alley.
The fact that you were is because of me. ”
“That’s not fair.”
“I’m not finished.” My jaw is tight enough to crack a molar.
“You came to me afraid of everything. Instead of keeping you safe, I put you in more danger than you’ve ever been in.
I took a girl who was scared of the wind, and I dropped her in the middle of something that could get her killed. I ruined—”
“Stop.” Her voice snaps like a rubber band. The tears are still there, but something else is happening behind them now. Something harder. I recognize it because I’ve seen it in men who are about to stop backing down. “You ruined what, exactly?”
“Your life was quiet. It was safe.”
“My life was a prison.” She says it sharply enough that my head snaps back like she slapped me.
“My life was a one-bedroom apartment where I checked the wind velocity before I checked the time. I almost ate a sandwich made out of pickles because I was too scared to go to the grocery store. The day I met you was the first time I’d been outside in days.
I didn’t have a single friend I’d ever met in person.
I spoke to my rabbit more than I spoke to any human being, and he can’t talk back.
I think we both know his communication skills top out at a judgmental nose twitch. ”
There’s color back in her face now. Instead of being shiny and watery with tears, her eyes are blazing, and they’re focused straight at me. She’s furious. She’s also magnificent, which is not a word I use lightly.
“You didn’t ruin me,” she insists. “You woke me up. You’re the first person in my whole life who didn’t look at my fears and try to manage them or fix me or any of that.
You just... got rid of the straws. You threw the turtle out the window when I started to freak out.
Not once, not a single time, did you make me feel crazy for needing you to do any of those things. ”
Her voice breaks on the last part, and she stops, then swallows.
I watch her put herself back together the way she always does: fast and messy.
“And you want me to leave? You want me to go find a nice apartment and go back to being alone? I’m supposed to go back to sitting on the floor with Socks at three a.m. because the walls are closing in and there’s nobody to call? ” She shakes her head firmly. “No.”
“That’s not—”
“No,” she insists, fierce this time. “You don’t get to decide this for me.
You don’t get to look at me and decide I’m too fragile for your life.
I shot a guy in the leg yesterday, Tristan, while there was a solid twelve-mile-an-hour breeze going through that alley.
Did you know that? Twelve! I didn’t even check the app.
I just stood there in the wind, and I shot a guy.
If I can handle that, you can handle being scared of loving me. ”
The word hangs in the air between us. She hears herself say it. I hear her say it. Even Socks hears her say it.
She doesn’t take it back. It’s a word I’ve been tiptoeing around in my own mind, but she was brave enough to say it out loud. There are different kinds of strength and courage. She’s taught me that. She’s teaching me now as she lifts her chin and looks me dead in the eyes, red-faced and furious.
“I love you too much already,” she says.
“That’s the truth. I know it’s fast. I know it’s crazy.
I know I met you in an alley because I was running from a guy with a mullet, and none of this is how normal relationships work.
But I’m never going to be normal, and you’re never going to be normal.
I would rather be not-normal with you than be alone in an apartment eating pickle bread and being afraid of everything. ”
She runs a hand over her face. “So you can get over it,” she concludes. “Because I’m not leaving.”
For a long time, I don’t say anything. I can’t say anything. What is there to say in response to all of that? How can I match what she just threw at me?
“The breeze was closer to fifteen mph,” I tell her.
“What?” she asks with a breathless laugh.
“In the alley. It was gusting. Probably closer to fifteen.”
Her brows draw together over her wrinkled nose. If I could paint, that’s the expression I would want to capture, but then she’s the artist. “Is that really what you’re focusing on right now?”
“You’re missing my point. You stood in fifteen-mile-an-hour wind and didn’t blink.” I reach for her, and my hands find her face. Gently, carefully. I’ll always touch her that way, because she deserves nothing less. “That’s not nothing, Stella.”
“It’s because of you.” Her hands cover mine. They’re cold and might be trembling a little, but she pushed through her anxiety and laid everything out on the table anyway. It might be the bravest thing I’ve ever witnessed. “The fear goes quiet when you’re there. I’ve told you that.”
“I know.” I touch my forehead to hers and close my eyes, letting the cold weight in my chest begin to dissolve. Some things take longer than a morning to fix, but this is a start. “I love you.”
She lets out a breath that sounds like it’s been trapped for days. Maybe longer than that. “Say it again?”
“I love you.”
“Again?”
“Stella.”
“I could hear it all day, I really could.” She giggles. “Just one more time. For me?”
Opening my eyes, I pull my head back far enough to stare into hers. “I love you.” I speak slowly, enunciating every word. “And you’re not leaving.”
There’s no time to wonder why she’s frowning before she lets me know. “I know I’m not leaving,” she murmurs, tipping her head to the side. “I told you I’m not leaving. Are you just now getting that? Because I’m pretty sure I was clear about it.”
All I can do is kiss her. Her lips are salty from the tears she couldn’t blink back. For a few minutes, the only sound in the house is us and Socks, sighing on his cushion like he saw this coming from the beginning and is getting tired of being right all the time.