Chapter 17
CALLEN
FOUR IN THE morning has a color, and it isn’t black. Black is midnight, black is straightforward. Four a.m. is an interim of beginnings and endings, running together.
Sylvie and I sit in the car, gazes forward at the streetlights, burnt orange against a sky that was black but now its pigment is lifting to dark blue. Every parked car on the block is currently gray and anonymous. The world at this hour is a moody photograph.
I’ve been awake for it every day for two and a half weeks. It has stopped being an inconvenience and started being my favorite time of day.
We’re parked a block down from Cricket and Lance’s building, engine off, windows cracked, same as always.
There’s a bakery three doors up that fires its ovens at three thirty, and when the wind comes the right way, the whole street smells like scorched sugar.
There’s a man who wears a hat and walks a dog the size of a shoe at four fifteen, without fail.
He skipped a day once, and I missed him.
Backwards-hat guy has become a comforting constant in my world.
And there’s Sylvie, in my passenger seat, with her shoes in the footwell and her bare feet up on my dash, and she has not said a word in four minutes.
She’s looking out the window at nothing. The glass has gone soft with our breathing. Her reflection floats out there on the fog, doubled and dim, and she’s looking straight through it.
I let it go for a fifth minute. Then I don’t.
“What’s wrong, baby?”
“What do you mean?” Her answer is automatic and she doesn’t turn her head.
“I mean we’re at the part of the relationship where I notice things.
” I take my hands off the wheel, not sure why I was even holding it.
“You didn’t want to have sex last night.
Which is fine. My dick needs a break, honestly.
” Nothing. Not even a small breath of laughter from her side of the vehicle.
“But you were also whimpering in your sleep last night. That made me nervous.”
That gets her. She turns to face me. “Why?” The eyebrow goes up, the mouth curls, the whole apparatus deploys. “Afraid I was killing someone behind closed lids?”
I tilt my head at her.
That’s all. Just the tilt, and I hold it, and I let her sit in it, and I watch the smirk die in stages, the way it always does when I don’t match her playfulness.
“I was worried you were sad.”
She looks down at her hands in her lap. Turns them over. She’s got a nick on the meat of her right palm, a fresh one, red and scabbed. It’s the third fresh one in a week, and I have decided not to ask about those either. I’m building quite the collection of things I’m not asking about.
“I’m not sad.”
“Okay. Well, a good boyfriend knows how to see straight through that. And a good boyfriend would want to cheer you up.”
Somewhere behind us, a garbage truck downshifts, and the whole street shudders with it. But we’re so used to the sounds of four a.m. by now, neither of us moves.
Two weeks with this woman, and now I have a taxonomy of when she’s lying, shifting the truth, or feeling vulnerable.
There’s a shade for each. The eyes go a hue darker when she’s steering.
She gets funnier when she’s cornered, meaner when she’s frightened, and when a question gets too close to something uncomfortable, she reaches for her own hands, always her hands, like she’s checking they’re still empty.
I know all of this, and I have used none of it…
yet. I’m realizing that a man who builds a catalogue this careful and never once opens it is not being patient.
He’s being complicit in her pain. But I have to meet Sylvie where she is, not drag her to where I am.
I’m not trying to break her; I’m trying to know her.
And what I know at the moment is her body language is screaming she can’t handle anything heavier.
“So.” I stretch, casual, arm going along the back of her seat. “What if we went away this weekend? Abuse some of the perks of PALADIN. We could snag a jet, go somewhere sunny. Put you in a thong bikini on a private beach so I can enjoy that lopsided ass of yours all day.”
“You jerk.” But it’s got no teeth in it, and she’s not fighting a smile. Her snark is hollow which is even worse than when her sassiness is cruel.
“Are you my boyfriend?”
The question lands between us like something dropped from a great height. She asks it to the windshield, not to me, and she asks it in a tone I’m not quite familiar enough with to name.
“I think it would be safest for every other woman on this planet if we were committed.” I keep my eyes forward. “You know. Given your possessiveness and stabby hands.”
Now she smiles. “This is fact.”
“But that’s not the point.” I stare at her, silently begging her to look at me too. She doesn’t. “The point is that I want to be with you, Sylvie. We’ve got a lot of hurdles in front of us. I’m not blind to that. But every day I feel like we get closer to something permanent. But that’s just me.”
She nods. Mute.
“I just need to know one thing first,” I continue.
“What?”
Here it is. The vulnerability I’ve been carrying around for the better part of a week, rubbing this question between my fingers like a spec of sand I’m trying to press into glass.
“You’re not going to run out on me. Right?” My voice echoes around us and I hear the words twice: once in my head, another time bouncing back at me off the windshield. “Because you’ve got flight risk stamped in red across your forehead, baby.”
She doesn’t deny it. She rarely bothers denying the true ones.
Outside, the man with the backwards hat and shoe-sized dog goes by, right on schedule, and neither of us comments about our familiar friend. With her silence still a crutch, I feel compelled to fill the space. So I continue, with my heart right on my damn sleeve.
“Don’t make me fall for you this deep if you’re planning to leave me behind. I don’t want to be a story in one of your past lives. I want a future,” I admit.
Fuck, she’s normally a chatterbox. But right now, the silence goes on long enough that I start to hear my own pulse.
“I’m a bad person,” Sylvie finally says. Except she says it to the window. “But I’m trying to be better. Is that good enough for you? A bad person who wants to be better?”
I’m taken off guard by her blatant truth.
The thing is, I can’t disagree. But I hold the same truth.
We all are good in some eras, bad in the others.
I want us both to stop holding ourselves accountable for the things we did to survive and endure.
It’s human nature, and I’m done apologizing for being human.
I nod at her bare feet up on my dash, then glance toward the floorboard by her red high heels. “You want to be better, but those sexy little pumps are new. And I’m going to guess you don’t have a receipt.”
She looks at the ceiling of my car for a long moment.
“It’s an instinct I can’t shake.” She flexes her foot, and her shiny red toenail polish catches the streetlight. “Maybe, I steal to prove to myself I can still do it.”
I have questions, but I hold my tongue and wait for her to finish.
“Once upon a time, thievery was the only value I had. A skillset. And I am incredible at it.” Her chin comes up, and she’s not bragging, that’s the terrible part.
“I had to be.” She lifts her foot a little higher, noticing how the glow outside changes the color of her polish.
Turns it bright orange underneath the light.
“Every trinket is a reminder that I can still be valuable to someone.”
The bakery smell comes in through the cracked windows. Burnt sugar and yeast, the whole street warm with it. I put my hand on Sylvie’s thigh and hope she can feel all the affection I have for her with the simple press of my palm against her bare thigh.
“You are very valuable to me.” I say it slow, because I want her to have every word. “And it has nothing to do with your abilities. It has everything to do with your heart.”
She scoffs. Immediate, reflexive. So very armored. “What heart?”
“Stop.” It comes out hard enough for her gaze to snap to mine. “Stop with the self-deprecation. I mean it.” I don’t let her look away. “You have a heart, Syl. I know it for a fact. Because I don’t personally believe it’s possible to fall in love with someone who doesn’t have one.”
The L-word dwells there in the dark between us like a living thing.
“Love?”
“We’re getting closer.” I shrug, which is a lie of mitigation and we both know it. “Don’t you think?”
She sniffs, once, sharp, and turns back to the fogged window, and doesn’t answer me.
Another Sylvie fact I’ve learned as of five seconds ago: quick to lust, slow to love.
Given what I know about who raised her, that math checks out.
She gave me her body in a hotel room in about four hours.
Her heart is going to take longer, and it’s going to be harder, and I am not in any hurry. I can wait.
I can wait a long time.
“I think a beach sounds nice,” she says eventually.
“Yeah?”
“But maybe a more modest swimsuit. Something that covers the cheeks.”
“It was a joke, baby.” I squeeze her thigh. “Your ass is perfectly symmetrical. I’ve conducted extensive research—”
“No, I mean—” She stops. Starts over. “I’ve spent so long wanting attention. Baring skin in flashy clothes is the fastest way to get it. It’s cheap and it works and I’ve been doing it since I can remember.”
She finally looks at me.
“But lately I’m feeling like every desirable thing about me, I want to keep private. For you. So maybe we save the thongs for our bedroom.”
Our bedroom. She doesn’t hear herself say it. I hear it. Like a blaring alarm.
“I’m happy if you’re happy,” I manage. Then, before I can lose the nerve: “Speaking of our bedroom. Maybe it’s time.”
“Time for what?”