CHAPTER 27 #3
He sinks into me on one long slow stroke with a sound torn out of the very bottom of him, filling me, the stretch of it bright and good, and he holds there fully seated with his forehead against mine and his whole body trembling and he says, broken, into the half-inch of air between our mouths, the thing he has carried alone since the aisle:
"I love you."
I go still under him. He doesn't stop. He draws back and pushes in again, slow, deep, deliberate as a vow, his eyes locked on mine so I can't look away from the truth of it, and he says it again, faster now, the words tumbling out the way they've been dammed up for two months behind every joke and every filthy clever thing: "I love you.
I've loved you since you came down that aisle in that blood-colored coat with your chin up looking at all three of us like we were people and not the thing the world points at.
I loved you before I knew your middle name.
I love you and I'm not — " his rhythm falters, his voice cracks wide open " — I'm not the spare, malyshka.
Tell me I'm not the spare. Mateo's the wall and Emil's the brain and I'm the edge, the thing you take down off the hook when something has to be cut and forget about between, I've been the spare my whole life, the one a family settles for after every better answer runs out. Tell me. Tell me I'm not the spare."
And there it is, whole, the wound under the charm laid open on his own bed with him buried inside me and breaking apart, and I take his face in both my hands the way you cradle something that will shatter, and I hold his green wet eyes with mine, and I give him the truth like a stitch that holds.
"You're not the spare. " Fierce. I need it to land like steel.
"You were never the spare, Gael Sokolov.
You're not a receipt. You're not a blade somebody keeps in a drawer for the day something has to bleed.
" I drag my thumb across his cheekbone and it comes away wet.
"Listen to me. I came at a grown man with my sewing shears today because I was running for the cove you showed me, on a stair you taught me, and the last sound I wanted to hear in this world before I died was your stupid whistle.
I picked you first. I picked you because I wanted you, with the bargain burned away and only the want left standing.
I'd choose you in a room with no one else in it. Not a weapon. A man."
He breaks.
He drops his face into the warm hollow of my neck and he moves in me then, deep and shaking and overwhelmed, and the filth is gone and the jokes are gone and there is only Gael, only the boy under all the ink saying yeah?
against my throat, wrecked, yeah? first?
and me saying first back into his auburn hair, first, first, my legs wrapped around him and my hips meeting his and the give of all my softness cradling him while he comes undone, while the blade his brothers point comes apart in the arms of a dressmaker who chose him over an empire.
He marks me — a bruise sucked into the soft of my shoulder, his teeth at my collarbone, mine, mine, you're mine and I'm yours, say it, say it — and I give it back, every word, and when I come again it's with both my hands flat to his slamming heart, and he follows me a stroke later with my name in his mouth like a prayer he never learned the words to until tonight.
After, with the snow still falling, the lamp gold, the Sound gone quiet under the dark, he lies half on me, his head pillowed on the soft swell of my belly that he loves, my fingers in his hair, both of us wrecked and breathing.
His switchblade lies closed and forgotten on the floor where he dropped it coming through the door, the old knife catching the lamplight, the deadliest thing in the room set down and abandoned for the softest one.
Somewhere out in the dark Roman bleeds toward Greywater and Lev learns his treasure has teeth, and tomorrow the wall will harden and the war will come on. But here, now, there is only the warm room and the man who thought his whole life he was the thing you keep and never the thing you choose.
I feel him start to laugh against my belly. Soft, disbelieving.
"What," I say, smoothing his hair.
"Nothing. Everything. " He turns his head and presses a kiss to the round of my stomach, and then he does the thing he does, the thing that means his hands are about to do violence — except his hands are splayed gentle on my hips, going nowhere, and there's no one left to hurt.
He whistles. Low, and tuneless, and rising.
The same notes that warned the forecourt of the last sound certain men ever hear come out gentled this time, turned all the way over — just a man in a warm bed in the falling snow, whistling because he hasn't words big enough and his chest is too full to hold quiet, a warning remade into something almost like a song.
"Say I'm not the spare," Gael breathes against my throat, the whole charming armor gone.
"You're not the spare," I say, fierce, holding his face. "You were never the spare. You're the one who catches the knife and the one I'd catch it for. You're chosen, Gael. First, last, always — chosen."
The blade weeps, and is, at last, only a man.