LORIK
Ten Months Ago
There’s a man at the bar across from her restaurant table who has looked at her four times too many, and that is the only reason I’m on this street tonight instead of three rooftops away where I belong.
I tell myself that. I’ve gotten very good at telling myself things.
It’s August, hot and wet, the city breathing its garbage and its flowers up off the pavement in equal measure. Brooklyn De Salvo is walking home from a dinner she slipped her detail to attend, young and certain of her own immortality the way only the well-loved and the well-trained ever are.
The man from the bar doesn’t follow her. He’s just a pig with eyes. I clocked him, catalogued him, decided he gets to keep breathing, and now I’m doing what I always do. Keeping to the dark a careful half-block back, a shadow with a heartbeat, telling myself it’s surveillance.
She stops dead in her tracks under a broken streetlight.
She doesn’t turn around. She just stops, and her shoulders square, and every line of her changes from a woman walking home to a fighter who has decided the fight is here.
“You’ve been behind me since Mercer,” she says to the street in front of her, conversationally and smooth, and deadly. “Three blocks. You match my pace and you stop when I stop. You’re not very good at this.” A beat. “Or you want me to know.”
I should melt back into the dark of the night. That’s the right move. I’ve made it a hundred times; she’s felt me a hundred times and talked herself out of it. Because the alternative is admitting how often the back of her neck has been right.
Tonight she doesn’t talk herself out of it. Tonight she turns around.
And here is the thing I have not planned for in almost a year of careful planning: she isn’t afraid.
I’m in black, hooded, a half-mask over the bottom of my face, a man twice her size who has been hunting her down a dark street. And Brooklyn De Salvo looks at me with her chin up and her weight balanced and something in her eyes that is the furthest thing on earth from fear.
“It’s you,” she says. Not a question. Her voice does something on the second word, it drops, it goes private. “The phone. The messages. It’s you.”
I don’t speak. I’ve never spoken to her, not once, not in the long months of three-a.m. confessions typed into a screen. Because the day she hears my voice is the day she has a thread to pull, and I cannot afford a single thread. So I do the only thing I let myself do.
I go still. Completely. The kind of still that is its own confession.
And she reads it, the way she reads everything. Her breath goes ragged, and she takes a step toward the masked man in the dark instead of away from him, and my discipline starts coming apart at a seam I didn’t know it had.
I move before I decide to.
I get a fistful of her jacket and I walk her backward, fast, off the open street and through the wrought-iron gate of the little garden tucked behind somebody’s brownstone, into the wet green lawn where the streetlights can’t reach.
Because if anyone sees the De Salvo girl cornered by a hooded man, her family sends made men, not the police, and I will not be the reason the learns my face too early.
I tell myself I’ve dragged her in here to warn her. To put the fear in her that her own people never have. To frighten her back behind her walls where the rot can’t reach her, where I can’t reach her, because somebody should.
I get her back against the brick. I lean in, looming, every inch the monster meant to teach a girl not to turn around on dark empty street.
She looks up at me, and she smiles.
And then my smart-mouthed, immortal, impossible girl plants both hands flat on my chest. Not to push me away.
To hold me there. To pin me. Then she slides down the brick, down my body, dropping to her knees in the wet earth like it’s a thing she’s already decided, looking up the whole way with those ocean eyes gone hooded and black in the dark.
“Don’t run this time,” she whispers. “I’m so tired of you running.”
Stop her. It’s the same rule it always is.
She’s eighteen. She doesn’t know my face, my name, what I am.
I have a line and I drew it myself in a car eight months ago and the line is twenty-one, the line is never until she can walk away.
Her hands are already at my belt and the line is turning to smoke.
I don’t stop her.
I am not strong enough, it turns out. Over a year of nothing, no other women, no want I’d allow, every appetite I have starved down to a discipline I wore like armor. And it all comes apart under a woman’s clever hands in a stranger’s garden.
She frees me into the warm dark and goes still for a half-second when she finds the metal, her thumb tracing up the ladder of barbells with a curiosity that undoes me worse than anything.
She learns me, mapping me in the black of the night where she’ll never see, and then her mouth is on me like it isn’t her first time putting a cock between her lips.
I have to brace one forearm against the brick over her head and bite down on the inside of my own cheek to keep from making the sound that wants to tear out of me and carry my voice to her forever.
It is over embarrassingly fast. A year collapses to nothing.
I come with my jaw clamped shut and my free hand fisted against the brick instead of in her hair where it wants to be, because her hair is a thing I haven’t earned, and even now, even in pieces with my release on her tongue and down her throat, I hold that one stupid line like it’s the last clean thing left in me.
She rises from the ground, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, looking unbearably pleased with herself.
“There,” she says, soft and fierce. “Now you can’t pretend it isn’t real.”
My beautiful girl, her first blow job and like everything she does, it’s a skill she masters in one go.
I want to tell her everything. I want to take off the mask. I want to put my hands on her face and say you have no idea what you’ve just done, you reckless, perfect girl, you’ve gone and made yourself the one thing I won’t survive.
I don’t. I press one gloved finger to the mask where my mouth is. Quiet, it tells her, and I step back into the dark that somehow feels brighter before my hands can decide for me, and I watch her walk the last two blocks home with a spring in her step like she won something.
She did. She just doesn’t know the size of it yet.
I stand in that garden long after she’s gone, my heart still hammering against a discipline that’s lying in pieces at my feet, and I understand with a cold and total certainty that the line I drew in that car a year ago is gone.
That I am going to fall the rest of the way down. That one day, in some way I can’t yet see, I am going to take this girl entirely—and that whatever’s left of the man I was tonight, standing in his own ruin in a borrowed garden, is the last of him I’ll ever get back.
I keep her safe for three more blocks of shadow.
Then I hope on my private jet and go home and don’t sleep. I don’t touch myself, and I tell no one, not even Cas. That an eighteen-year-old undid me without ever once seeing my face or hearing my voice.