Lorik
Last December, Brooklyn’s birthday
She baits me into it. She knows exactly what she’s doing, and it works, and I am furious at both of us.
Two weeks ago she stood on a rooftop in a red dress and told me her whole soul belonged to me whenever I wanted it. When you’re ready, it’s yours. Don’t take too long, ghost.
And I held my line, because she was eighteen and I made myself a promise in a car a year ago. Twenty-one, grown, free to walk away with her eyes open, and a man who can’t keep one promise to a girl can’t be trusted to keep any of them.
So she changed tactics. My girl doesn’t lose fights the same way her father has never lost a match.
The texts started three days ago and got worse as her birthday closed in.
brOOKLYN
You won’t, so I will. I’m nineteen tomorrow. There’s a party. There’s a boy.
Last chance, ghost. After midnight I stop waiting on a man who won’t even let me see his face.
I’d rather it was you. But I’m done being the only one of us brave enough to want it.
I told myself she was bluffing. I’m very good at lying to other people.
I’m getting worse at lying to myself where she’s concerned, and at eleven o’clock the night before her birthday I’m boarding my jet to take me to New York, because the truth I cannot get around is this: I drew a line at twenty-one to protect her from me, but there is no version of this world where I let her hand her firsts to some forgettable boy at a party to spite a man in a mask.
She is mine.
I decided it in a grappling gym that feels like a lifetime ago. And mine does not give what’s mine to anyone else, not even to make a point to me.
So I’ll break one promise to keep a bigger one.
I won’t take her virginity tonight. That line holds, that line is the whole architecture of the man I’m trying to be for her.
But I will make absolutely certain that when she wakes up on her nineteenth birthday, there is not a single cell in her body that wants anyone but me.
Getting into the most feared family in New York City’s home is supposed to be impossible. That’s the joke of it. They’ve built their whole lives on the certainty that no one on earth would dare.
Who breaks into a house full of killers?
The certainty is the flaw, because certainty makes men lazy, and I have never in my life been lazy about her.
I know their patterns the way I know her allergies.
At one in the morning I am a shadow on a windowsill, and then I am inside her room turning the lock on her door with a soft click, because what’s about to happen between us is no one’s but ours.
She’s asleep. Dark hair fanned across the pillow, one hand tucked under her cheek, my impossible woman who thinks she’s brave enough to give herself away out of spite.
I cross the room without a sound and I sit on the edge of her bed and I lay my gloved hand gently over her mouth.
Her eyes snap open.
I watch terror flash and die in the space of a single heartbeat.
I watch it turn into something else entirely the second she registers the mask, the shape of me, the smell of cedar and cold.
I watch my girl go, in one breath, from a fighter about to scream the house down to a woman arching toward the very thing that should frighten her.
Her breath goes hot and fast against my leather-covered palm.
Her eyes, even in the dark, are pure want.
I lean down, my masked mouth at her ear, and I shake my head once. Quiet, the gesture says.
Then I take my hand off her mouth only long enough to drag the blanket down her body. I find her already bare beneath the sheets, and the sound she makes when I push her thighs apart is the most dangerous thing I have ever heard.
In the dark, where I know she can’t see my face, I slide the mask down, and I put my mouth on her for the first time, and the rest of my self-control nearly goes with it.
She tastes like every night I’ve spent not doing this.
I am rough and reverent at once, furious and worshipful, my hands pinning her hips to her own mattress because she bucks up into me hard enough to wake the dead.
I have to take my mouth off her and press my face to the inside of her thigh, quiet, doll, quiet, until she gets it, until she stuffs her own fist against her mouth to keep the house from hearing what her stalker is doing to the princess in the locked room.
She is right at the edge, shaking apart under my tongue, when there’s a knock at the door.
We both freeze.
“Brooklyn?” Her stepmother’s voice, low, careful, the voice of a woman who has survived enough to trust the back of her own neck. “You okay in there? I thought I heard—”
My hand is over her mouth before I’ve decided to move it. I lift the mask back over my face and move from between her thighs and I find her eyes in the dark to give her a single look the says, Your call, but make it good, and then I ease my palm off her lips just enough.
“I’m fine, Mom.” Her voice comes out miraculously level for a girl with a man’s mouth two inches from where it was. “Bad dream. Go back to bed.”
A pause. A long one. Sienna Caputo’s instincts are better than her family will ever know, and for one suspended second I am absolutely certain she’s going to open that door and the whole world is going to come apart before I’m ready for it.
“Okay, baby. Happy birthday. I love you.”
“Love you too.”
Then her stepmother’s footsteps recede, because no sane person breaks into the home of the most feared family in city, because the locked door and the sleeping killers down the hall are armor enough.
Because the one thing it never occurs to anyone in this house to fear is that the danger is already inside it, in the dark, with its hand over their girl’s mouth.
I should be ashamed of what that hubris lets me get away with. I am not. I have never wanted anything the way I want the woman shaking apart beneath me, covering for me, choosing me over the people who’d kill me for being in this room.
I lower the mask and I put my mouth back to her. And I finish what I started, slow and merciless and silent, and when she comes it’s into her own fist, her whole body bowing off the bed, my name, the only name she has for me, ghost, soundless on her lips.
I don’t take more than that. I want to. I want to so completely with a need I do not understand.
But twenty-one holds, even tonight, even ruined, because the difference between me and every other man whose hands have ever been on a woman in the dark is that I will not take the thing she hasn’t truly, freely chosen, and spite is not choosing.
I draw the blanket back up over her. I press my masked mouth once to her forehead. And before I go out the window the way I came, I press a single gloved finger to where my lips are. Ours.
My phone buzzes hers on the nightstand as I drop into the alley.
ME
Happy birthday. Now you have something to compare the boy to.
Her reply comes before I reach the car.
brOOKLYN
I was never going to. I just wanted to make you come and get me.
ME
Brat
I mean it like the most tender word in any language, then I get back on my plane already counting down to the day I get to stop being a stalker in her window and become the man in her bed.
Two years, I tell myself. I can make it two more years, when she’s twenty-one and she’ll be mine for real.