Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
Sophie
Waking up being watched should feel like something to flinch from.
It doesn't.
I come up slowly out of the deepest sleep I've had in weeks, and the first thing I know, before I know the light or the hour or my own name, is the weight of his eyes on me and the back of his fingers moving slow down my bare arm.
Njal's propped on one elbow, watching me like I'm a Greek goddess.
His knuckles graze from my shoulder to my wrist and back up, light as anything, like he's got nowhere in the world he'd rather be than tracing the same six inches of my skin over and over.
"Mornin'," he says, his voice low and rough with sleep.
"How long have you been awake?" I turn my head on the pillow.
"A while." His knuckles don't stop their slow track up my arm.
"Watching me?"
"Watching you." He doesn't apologize for it. He turns my arm over and runs his thumb along the soft inside of my wrist, where the skin's thinnest. "You sleep like somebody who hasn't been allowed to in a long time."
I should feel exposed, lying here in the gray morning light with the marks he left on me last night gone tender and visible on my chest.
I press my hand flat over one of them, low on my collarbone, and I wait for the thing I've waited for my whole life to arrive.
The shame. The drop. The certainty that I've done something that's going to cost me with God and everybody.
It doesn't come.
The sky out his window is just the sky, pale and ordinary, holding itself up the way it always has.
"What're you doing?" he asks.
"Waiting for the bad part." My mouth goes soft at the corners without my say-so. "It's still not here."
He catches my hand, the one pressed over the mark, brings it to his mouth, and kisses the knuckles like a man who means it.
"How do you feel about last night?" he asks. "And don't give me the polite version. Give me the truth."
I make myself say it plainly.
"I feel good," I tell him. "I feel—Njal, I don't regret one second of it.
I keep turning it over, looking for the part I'm supposed to be sorry about, and there isn't one.
There's just you, and that you were kind to me, and how I wanted it, and I let myself have it.
" The words come out thick, catching on the way up. "I've never let myself have anything."
"Now you have." He says it like a fact, like the weather. "And you'll do it again, and the sky'll keep right on staying up."
I laugh, wet and surprised, and he pulls me into his chest and holds me there a while.
His hand moves slowly on my back, and I like it.
"I keep waiting to feel different about myself," I say against his collarbone.
"That's the part I can't get over. My whole life, the lesson was that this—what we did—was the thing that ruins a woman.
How you give it away and you come out the other side less than you were.
" I press closer. "And I feel like more.
How is that possible? How did they have it so backwards? "
His hand goes still on my spine.
"Because the people who taught you that weren't trying to keep you whole," he says lowly. "They were trying to keep you theirs. Easier to own a woman who thinks wanting something is a sin."
I let myself be held by a man in the morning light, and nothing falls out of the sky.
And because nothing falls, I let myself ask him things.
Lying against him with my ear over his heart, I ask the questions I've been swallowing for two weeks.
"The club," I say. "In Tallahassee. What is it, really? Because the way people in this town say biker, and the way you are, those aren't the same thing."
"They're not." His chest rises slowly under my cheek. "It's family. It's men who'd put themselves between me and a bullet and not think twice, and I'd do the same. That's the part nobody outside it understands."
"Why do I feel like there’s more?"
A pause. His hand stills on my spine.
"There's things I can't tell you, Soph." He says it gently, but there's no give in it.
"Not because I don't trust you. Because they're not mine to tell.
A man gets to know those things by earning his way in, and the price of knowing is you don't say them outside the walls.
That's not a wall I built between you and me.
It's one that was there before you, and it stays. "
I think about that.
I think I should maybe be afraid of a man with rooms in him I'm not allowed into.
But I was raised in a house full of locked rooms, full of we don't discuss that and that's between your father and the Lord.
Njal's the first person who ever told me a door was closed and told me why, instead of pretending the door wasn't there.
"Okay," I say.
His chin dips against the top of my head. "Okay?"
"Okay. I can live next to a closed door if you tell me it's closed."
He's quiet for a second. Then his arm tightens around me, just once, like my words meant something to him.
He waits until the coffee's poured to tell me he's going to Tallahassee.
We're both in his kitchen, Hoagie thumping his tail against the cabinets, and something in the set of his shoulders tells me it isn't a thing he chose for today.
"Club business," he says. "It's got to do with you. With all of it." He sets his mug down. "I'd tell you more if I could."
"Closed door?"
"Closed door." The corner of his mouth moves. "You learn fast."
He kisses me before he goes, long and unhurried, his hand cradling the back of my skull like I'm something that could spill.
And then his bike's gone down the gravel, and I'm standing in a quiet house that isn't mine, in a borrowed shirt.
For a second, this almost feels normal.
Then my phone rings.
My mother's name is on the screen.
I don't want to answer.
I look at it ringing in my hand, and I feel the hour of peace start to drain out through the soles of my feet because my mother doesn't call to chat.
My mother calls when she's been sent. "Hi, Mama."
"Sophia." She only uses my whole name when my father's in the room with her. "Your daddy and I would like you to come for supper tonight. Six o'clock."
It isn't a question and we both know it.
"Mama—"
"Six o'clock, Sophia. We have things to discuss as a family."
The line goes dead before I can find a reason to get out of it.
I stand in Njal's kitchen with the phone still against my ear, and I already know.
He knows. My father knows, and he's known longer than I have, and tonight's the night he finally says it to my face.
* * *
The house I grew up in smells the way it's always smelled—lemon oil, old hymnals, and my mother's roast.
It turns my stomach for the first time in my life.
I sat in my truck in the driveway for a full minute before I made myself come in, looking at the porch light my father replaces the second it flickers, the welcome mat my mother bleaches twice a year, the whole careful front of a family that has never once let the neighbors see a crack.
That's the thing about this house. Everything in it is arranged to be looked at.
My mother takes my coat at the door, squeezes my arm, and doesn't meet my eyes, and that's how I know it's bad.
My mother is a toucher when she's nervous.
She's got her hands all over me—my arm, my shoulder, smoothing my hair back the way she did when I was small and feverish—and not once does she look at my face.
We get through grace without anything happening.
My father's prayer runs long, the way it does when he's got something underneath it, thanking the Lord for the food and the hands that made it and the family gathered safely.
I keep my eyes open, and watch him over my folded hands, and feel the whole evening coiling like a spring.
We get through the roast and the corn pudding, through my father asking about the buildout at the coffee shop like he doesn't already disapprove of it, through my mother offering seconds nobody wants.
We talk about the weather. We talk about the new banners going up at the church for the fall revival.
I push food around my plate and wait for it.
It comes with the dishes still warm on the table.
"There's been talk, Sophia." My father sets down his fork. He doesn't raise his voice. My father has never once raised his voice; he doesn't need to. "At the church. About you. About things you've done, and things you've said, and pictures that have been going around."
"Daddy, those pictures aren't?—"
"I've seen them."
The fork goes loose in my fingers, and I set it down before it can fall.
"They're not real," I say, and I hear how it sounds even as it leaves me, thin and fast. "Daddy, listen to me.
Somebody made those. There's a thing now, with computers, where you can make a picture of anybody saying anything, doing anything, and it looks real but it isn't, it's—it's called AI, and somebody used it on me, somebody's targeting me?—"
I watch his face so carefully, how anger boils through.
"Listen to yourself," he says quietly.
"Daddy—"
"Listen to how that sounds, Sophia. Computers making pictures.
Somebody targeting you. Forces working against you in secret.
" He folds his hands on the table, the way he does before a prayer.
"Your sister said the very same kinds of things.
When she was at her worst. That everyone was against her.
That there were things happening that only she could see. "
"This is not the same as Hannah."
"Isn't it?"
My mother's looking at her plate. My mother’s spent her whole life looking at her plate while my father builds the cage one quiet board at a time.
"Hannah was sick," I say. "Hannah had an illness, and you all called it sin for years until?—"
"We prayed for your sister."