DARIO
TWENTY-EIGHT
“Yes. Obviously yes.”
Something in my chest releases that I didn’t know was that tight.
Not the surface tension—I’ve been managing that all night—but something deeper, meaningful.
The last time I felt anything like it was in a hospital corridor when I was twenty-three, a doctor coming out to tell us my father’s bloodwork had improved, and we had more time.
I remember exactly what I felt in that moment—the thing loosening, the breath that came out of nowhere.
I didn’t know until now that I’d accumulated that kind of weight again in the same spot. In the same part of my chest, grief and hope share a zip code and always have.
I get up from my knee.
She doesn’t step back to give me room. She steps forward, both hands coming up to my face, and she looks at me. Not quickly. She takes the full measure of me. Then she kisses me.
Not the way we’ve kissed before, in the dark, rushed and desperate. This is different. This is slow and certain, the kiss of a woman who has just said obviously yes and means it.
My hands find her waist. She makes a sound low in her throat that goes straight through me. The word obviously keeps ringing in my chest like a bell that doesn’t know it should have stopped.
We’re still there—her hands on my face, mine at her waist—when a small voice from the doorway says, “Dario.”
We separate in a hurry.
Opal stands in the doorway in her pajamas, her blanket wrapped around her shoulders like a queen’s cape, hair pressed flat on one side from sleep. She looks at her mother. She looks at me. “Are you getting married?”
“Yes,” Lena says.
Opal nods. She considers this for a moment—seriously, giving it its actual weight. “Can I be the flower girl?”
I nod. “To borrow a phrase, obviously yes.”
Lena snorts and smacks my chest.
“Okay.” Opal holds for one more beat, apparently satisfied that the situation is as she thought, and turns and pads back down the hallway. Her door closes softly.
Lena laughs, a little surprised by the sound. I look at her, and she has both hands pressed over her mouth, her eyes bright with something that’s partly laughter and partly something else entirely.
“She really takes everything in stride, doesn’t she?”
“When she has the option, she does.”
I think about what just happened. “How did she know?”
“She was probably listening just outside the door. Have you never noticed that she does that?”
“Not once, actually.”
Lena nods. “She’s a bit of a sneak. When I called her on it, she said that’s the only way she’d ever learn anything, since we don’t tell her anything.”
“She will have to learn to be okay with us not telling her everything. Right? Am I… Are we supposed to tell her everything? I’m not sure how to do this.”
She steps toward me. Takes my hand in both of hers and turns it, the way she does when she’s thinking—looking at my knuckles. Then at my face. “You’re going to be good at this. Being a dad. You already are.”
Something wells in me. I don’t like it. It feels unfamiliar, like danger coming from inside.
“I don’t know that, Lena. What if I fuck up?
What if I’m not good at this? I didn’t think about that part of things before, and I should have, and what if that means I’ll be a lousy dad, because I didn’t take that into account before I proposed?
I’m a sociopath—what if she ends up on a stripper pole because of me? What if—”
“You’re already a good dad. You have the right instincts, Dario.
You’ve been determined to get to know Opal since we got here.
You’re the first to jump in and help her with her homework.
When you tuck her in, you always look so happy when you come out of her room, like you were just lucky to be there.
” She cups my face in her hands. “I have watched you with Opal every step of the way. Sociopath or not, you are amazing with my daughter. You get her. She gets you. That’s all I care about. ”
I take a quick breath. “Are you sure that’s enough?”
She smiles sweetly. “Absolutely not. If you haven’t noticed, she’s my first kid.”
I laugh. “Yeah, okay. Not exactly an expert.”
“No. But we’ll figure it out as we go along. That’s what I’ve been doing since before she was born, and now I have help.”
This time, I can actually breathe. “It’s my honor to help.”
She kisses me. A simple thing. When she pulls back, I don’t know who moves first. One moment, there are inches between us, and the next, there are none. Her hands are in my hair, and mine are flat against her back, pulling her in. This kiss has nothing slow about it.
She makes a sound against my mouth that I feel everywhere, and we’re moving—her toward the wall or me walking her there, I genuinely can’t say—and when her back meets the bookshelf, something falls off the second shelf, and neither of us looks.
“Dario,” she says against my mouth.
“Yeah.”
She pulls back just enough to look at me. Her hair has come loose. Her mouth is red. “Office floor,” she says, and pulls me back down by the collar.
Thank fuck I put a thick rug down after I cleaned up.
Her hands are certain. No hesitation in them, no negotiating with herself in real time. Just her hands and my shirt and the rug coming up to meet us, and the very clear sense that this is something she wants without any of the complicated machinery she usually has running underneath what she does.
I’m aware, somewhere at the back of my mind, that we are two adults on our office floor at six in the morning after the longest night of my life, and this is objectively an absurd place to be. I find I don’t care at all.
There’s nothing available in my brain. Nothing is being managed or held at a careful distance. No part of me is somewhere else.
I’m here with the woman I’m going to marry beneath me.
Her warm hands tear at my clothes, and I shove her nightgown up and out of my way. When I touch her, her entire body arches beneath me. It’s like all the fear, the tension, and the pain is coiled up inside of her, and it’s screaming to be released.
I know the feeling.
I press my palm against her there, finding nothing but slick heat when I make her moan. “Fuck, baby—”
“Now. I need you now,” she gasps.
Forgot I didn’t put on boxers before I left. Convenient.
I kiss her mouth as I thrust inside, and in that moment, I’m complete. Don’t even need to come. Just need to connect. Need to feast on her body with every part of me.
The way the early morning light casts on her face is breathtaking. She’s stunning—as in I am stunned between every blink. Each time I close my eyes, I picture her face, and when I open them again, she’s prettier. Closer to her orgasm, lips parted, eyes shining.
I slow down and brush my fingers on her cheek. “I love you, Lena. I didn’t know I could do that.”
She half smiles and pulls me down for another kiss. “I’m happy to surprise you.”
I kiss her again, and this time I don’t let up. Our bodies take over, one collision after another. I hoist her thigh up, splitting her soft body wide open, and dive deeper, twisting for more depth. More pleasure. More of her.
Her body shudders, going tight. She’s near the point of—
“Oh, fuck!” she cries out. Her pussy grips me rhythmically, and I tumble through that one with her. She murmurs my name like a prayer, and only then do I realize I was doing the same with hers.
Afterward, I lie on the floor with her head on my chest, and I feel the weight of everything settle into something new.
Lena shifts against my chest. Her breathing is evening out. “Hey.”
“Hey, yourself.”
“Good.” Nothing else.
I don’t know if it means something specific or everything in general. Both, probably.
Then, she snores.
If she sleeps on this floor, even with the plush rug beneath us, she will ache for days. Can’t let that happen. I gentle her off my chest, then attempt to scoop her up from the floor. The term deadlift was made for times like these. “Baby, you gotta sit up for me.”
“Hmm.”
“Come on,” I say, helping her. “Just a little more.”
She does what little she can without fully waking up, and then I have her in my arms. I carry her down the hall to our bedroom, and there I tuck her into our bed. I scoot in and spoon her, and in seconds, I’m out too.
Later, the apartment fills with the sounds of a morning that I’m not awake for yet. Lena must have left the door cracked. Opal’s feet in the hallway, the espresso machine, the sound of crayons being arranged in chromatic order on the counter.
“There’s bagels?” I hear Lena say.
“Yeah. I found the bag by the door,” Opal explains.
“Oh, he got the good ones.”
“Good ones don’t have fish.” Opal goes on about how it’s not fair that we eat fish, and I lie there for a moment before I get up. I listen to her monologue about eating fish, and to be fair, she makes some good points.
Then Lena says, “But fish eat other fish. So are we wrong for eating them, or are the other fish wrong for being cannibals?”
“Cannibals?”
“Animals who eat their own.”
I can almost hear the face Opal must be making. Then she says, “Fish really eat other fish?”
“Have you learned about sharks yet?”
“Yeah, but… oh.”
“That’s how they get so big.”
“Not all sharks are big, Mom. Have you seen epithet sharks?”
Lena laughs. “I don’t think that’s what they’re called. Let’s look them up.”
Turns out, she meant epaulette sharks, and by the time they’re looking at what are apparently the cutest sharks—threshers—I’m clothed and hunting for my own bagel.
This is what I was protecting when I killed Marco. Not the organization.
This. The sounds of a morning that make the world a better place.