Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
Mila
Nova's got a curling iron in one hand and a look on her face I don't trust.
"Sit." She points at the chair she's dragged in front of the mirror. "And before you argue, I'm not doing a lot. I'm doing a little. You've got this whole effortless thing happening that I personally find offensive, and I want to give it some shape. Sit."
"I can do my own hair."
"You can. You won't." She points at the chair again. "Sit, Mila."
I sit.
Lashes is on the bed with Hope asleep beside her in a nest of pillows, and she's got the green dress laid across her lap, working a wrinkle out of it with her thumb.
She keeps catching my eye in the mirror and looking away with a grin she won't let all the way out.
"What?"
"Nothing." She smooths the dress flat. "You're nervous."
"I'm not nervous."
"You've retied your boot twice and it's got a zipper," Nova says. "Head still."
I hold still.
The iron's warm near my ear, and Nova's got a piece of my hair wound around it, humming something under her breath.
Plus, there's a woman on the bed guarding my dress, a baby asleep in the pillows, and the whole room smells like whatever Nova keeps misting at my head. I catch myself in the mirror.
I don't look like the woman who walked up to the gate.
There's color in my face now, from the shopping day and getting some decent sleep.
My hair's gone soft around my jaw where Nova's been working it, and my collarbones don't cut out from under my skin the way they did two weeks ago.
I've been eating Ruby's food and keeping it down more often than not.
I'm sitting in a warm room letting two women fuss over me for a man.
None of it is anything I recognize about my own life.
"Hey." Lashes is watching me. "You went somewhere. Come back."
"I'm here." My throat pulls tight, and I push the words through it. "I haven't done this. Gotten ready. For anybody. In—"
I stop.
"Yeah." Lashes reaches over and squeezes my ankle where it's tucked under me. "I know."
Nova sets the iron down and turns my face by the chin, side to side, checking her work, her eyes soft even while her mouth stays all business.
"Okay," she says. "Now the dress."
* * *
He's waiting by the bikes, and there's not a speck of grease on him.
That's the first thing I notice, coming across the courtyard with Nova's borrowed heels hooked on two fingers because I'm not crossing gravel in them.
Dark shirt, sleeves shoved up his forearms, clean jeans, beard trimmed down close, and he's turning something over in his hands.
When he looks up and sees me, his hands go still.
Not the way a man goes still when he's caught looking.
The way a deer goes still in a road with the light already on it.
His mouth opens and nothing comes out.
His eyes go all the way down the dress and back up to my face, slowly, and he swallows, and he still hasn't said one word.
I stand in a cold courtyard in a green dress and let him look, because for the first time in a decade being looked at doesn't make me want to climb out of my own skin.
He's not taking anything. He's looking.
"Say something, Finn."
"Can't." His voice comes out like gravel. "Give me a second here."
"You clean up all right yourself."
"I look like a man who scrubbed under his nails for two hours so he'd be allowed to stand next to you.
" He steps in and holds his arm out, slow, careful, like it might spook me.
I don't take it. He doesn't push, just lowers it and tips his head at the truck instead of the bike.
"It's cold. I'll drive us in. I got you a real dinner, not a burrito off the back of a bike. "
"I happen to like a burrito off the back of a bike."
The corner of his mouth goes. "Later. On the way back. If you want."
I do, but I don't tell him I want it.
The restaurant's downtown and it's nicer than anything I braced for out of a man who's been a prospect for nine years—white cloths on the tables, low gold light, and a whole wall of doors thrown open onto the street because the night's gone mild for once.
"Finn." I look around the room. "You cannot afford this."
"I do all right." He pulls my chair out and I let him have that one.
"I might be a prospect for a long time, but I work.
I fix things. Half that city pays me under the table to fix things for them, and I've got nobody to spend it on, so.
" He sits across from me. "Tonight I'm spending it on you. Sit down before you fight me about it."
I look at the menu and don't understand half the words.
He watches me not understand it and doesn't make it a thing to laugh at.
Just leans over and murmurs what's good, and orders for us both when I ask him to, because I've forgotten how to want food in a whole room full of it.
And it's—
It's nice.
That's the word my body keeps handing me.
I keep turning it over because I don't trust it yet. It's nice.
The bread comes warm, the wine's good, and I stop at half a glass because half a glass is where I stop now.
The candle throws light up under his jaw, and he's telling me about the club—Compass murdering a carburetor, Ruby running the kitchen like a woman who's fired men for less than a dirty spoon—and I'm laughing.
I'm laughing.
I catch it happening and it startles me, the sound of my own laugh, because I couldn't tell you the last time.
Finn hears it and stops dead in the middle of his sentence and looks at me like I set something down in his hands.
"Don't," I say.
"Don't what?"
"Don't look at me like that because I laughed. It's mortifying."
"It's the best thing I've heard in years." No softness on it, no push, just flat and true. "I'm going to look at you like that every time you do it, and you're going to have to make your peace with it."
That's when the dog comes in.
He comes through the open doors at a flat run—a brown street dog, tongue out, no collar, wearing an expression of total joy—and does one full lap of the dining room with a waiter chasing him, cutting between tables while people laugh and lift their wine out of the way, and then he's gone, back out into the dark as fast as he came.
I'm laughing before I know I've started.
"Cricket," Finn says.
And it knocks the wind clean out of me.
"Oh my God." My hand comes up over my mouth. "Cricket."
"You remember him?"
"I remember your mom's rosebushes never came back the same." I can't stop laughing and there's water rising in my eyes right along with it. "He got down in the creek behind our houses—"
"—after it rained—"
"—and came home looking like a swamp creature—"
"—and you let him in the house." Finn's grinning now, all the way, and it's the grin I haven't seen in years. "You opened that back door and you let a dog made out of pure mud into your mother's clean kitchen."
"I was seven!"
"Your mom comes around the corner with the tortillas in her hands and she just—" He throws one hand up in the air, "—?Camila Rosalba Bacani, saca a ese perro de mi cocina ahora mismo!"
And I'm gone.
I'm laughing so hard I have to put my head down, both palms flat on the tablecloth, because he's got her exactly—the pitch of it, the way she'd swing my whole name like a chancla when I was in trouble, the ahora mismo she tacked onto everything to let you know she meant it.
I can hear her. I can actually hear her.
Finn's across the table still doing her hand, and it's the first time in over a year that reaching for my mother doesn't feel like reaching into broken glass.
It feels like she walked into the room.
The laugh tips over into something wet somewhere in the middle, and I let it go there.
I let my eyes spill right at the table.
Finn goes quiet and reaches across and sets his hand on the cloth close to mine, not on it, close to it, so I can cross the last inch or not.
I cross it.
I put my hand over his, and he turns his over underneath and folds it around mine and holds on, and neither of us says a word.
The candle burns down. My mother's voice sinks back to wherever she lives in me now, and for the first time it doesn't take a strip of me with it on the way down.
"I loved that stupid dog," I say.
"I know you did."
"I loved your mom's rosebushes too. I never told her that."
"She knew." His thumb moves slowly over my knuckles. "She talked about you, Mila. All those years. She never once stopped talking about you."
And there it is—the thing I've spent all night not looking at, walking straight up the middle of me while I sit here holding his hand across a white tablecloth.
I never stopped either.
I hated him for years in the dark.
I built whole nights out of hating him, laid brick after brick of it.
And underneath every course of that wall, the whole time, folded up small and hidden where they could never get their hands on it, was this—a boy across the street, a muddy dog, a woman hollering my whole name out a screen door—and the plain fact that I've loved Finn Kincaid since before I had a word for it, and I never stopped, not through any of it, not one single day.
That's what scares me.
Not the men who'll come through the door.
Not the run. This.
His hand folded under mine, the candle, the way my body knew him before I gave it leave to—leaned itself toward him across a table while I wasn't looking—because it's always known him and it always will, and I don't get a vote in it.
I never got a vote in it, and being this close is prying the hinges off the one door I bolted shut to stay alive down there.
"Finn."
"Yeah?"
"Take me home." My voice won't hold level. "With the windows down. I want the cold, and I don't want to talk for a while."
"Well, no windows. The bike's here." He says it carefully, like he's admitting something. "I had Compass run it down before dinner and take the truck back. Figured—" He stops. "Figured you might want it."
He looks at me and reads the rest, the way he's read me since the gate.
"Okay," he says, and lifts a hand for the check.
The night's cold on the back of the bike, and I don't care about the cold.
He gave me his jacket without asking, and I took it without arguing.
It swallows me whole and smells like him, and I've got my arms wrapped around his middle and my cheek against his back between his shoulder blades.
The city streaks past in smears of light, and I hold on.
I hold on, and it's mine, every second of it.
My arms. My grip.
I could let go any time I wanted, and he'd feel it and ease off, and I don't let go, and knowing that I could is the reason I don't need to.
The wind's loud enough that I don't have to talk, and I don't have to watch anything because he's the one watching the road.
For the whole ride back, I let myself have one thing and one thing only—the warm solid weight of him under my cheek, and my own two arms choosing, mile after mile, to stay right where they are.
He cuts the engine in the courtyard and neither of us moves.
I've still got my arms around him and my face against his back.
The quiet after the engine dies is enormous, and I don't want to let go.
I make myself sit up. He turns on the seat to face me. We're close. His face is right there in the dark.
"Mila." Careful. Always so careful with me, and I used to hate it, and tonight I don't. "I'm not going to do anything you don't—"
"I know." I get off the bike so I can stand in front of him. He swings his leg over and comes up too, and there's a foot of cold air between us and one light burning over the garage. "I know you won't. You've spent this whole night not."
"Yeah."
"That's the reason," I say.
And I close the foot.
I lay my hands flat on his chest, the way I did in the sunroom, except tonight I don't pull them back.
I go up on my toes and I kiss him.
It starts soft, because I'm out of practice and because everything in me is braced for it to turn into something I can't steer—and it doesn't.
He lets me have the wheel.
His hands come up slowly and settle light on my waist and stay there, not gripping, not dragging me in, leaving it to me how far this goes.
So I decide.
I lean into him and feel a low sound break out of him against my mouth, and his hands tighten by a fraction.
It's still mine, all of it, still every bit mine, and that's the thing that takes me apart.
I get my arms up around his neck, and he wraps me up then—finally—both arms all the way around me, he pulls me in tight against his chest, and I let him.
I want it. I've wanted it since I came through that damn gate. I just wasn’t admitting it to myself.
Then his hand spreads open across my back.
Right over the worst of it. The scars through the thin green fabric, the ropes and ridges of them, and I feel him feel them.
Feel his palm go still against them, and everything in me seizes and waits for it—the flinch, or the pity, or the careful glass hands.
I pull back far enough to see his face.
"They're ugly." Flat. Getting out ahead of him. "I know what they feel like under a hand. You don't have to—"
"Stop." His hand doesn't move off them. He keeps it right there, warm and open over the worst of me, and he doesn't pretend it isn't there and he doesn't take it away.
"They're not ugly and they're not pretty.
They're a map of every single day you stayed alive when quitting would've been easier.
" His voice has gone rough and clear through.
"I'm not going to lie and tell you I can't feel them.
I can. And I'm holding you anyway, and I'm going to keep holding you, and there isn’t one inch of you I'm scared to put my hand on. "
I can't get a breath.
"You're the only thing I've ever wanted," he says, low, right into my hair. "Every version of you that came up that road. If I had to pick between the ruined one and anybody else in the world walking around whole, I'd take you every time, and it wouldn't be close. You hearing me?"
I press my face into his neck so he can't watch what it does to me, and he holds me in a cold courtyard under one light with his hand still spread flat over the ruin of my back, and I let him.
I don't fly apart, and I don't pull away. I stand there and let a man hold all of me at once for the first time in years.
I want more than this.
He wants it too—I can feel that he wants it—and he's not doing one thing about it, only holding me, and knowing he'd stop right here and hold me all night if this was all I had in me is the exact thing that makes me certain I want the rest of it.
"Not tonight," I say into his neck.
"I know." His mouth presses to the top of my head. "I've got nothing but time, Mila. I'm not going anywhere. Not this time."