Brooklyn
Here is what nobody tells you about choosing someone with your eyes open: you have to keep doing it. Every single day. It isn’t a door you walk through once.
They let him out of the hospital after eleven days, and I make the first real choice of the rest of my life standing in a parking garage with my whole family at my back.
Dom offers to set me up anywhere, redoing the empty brownstone across from theirs, a place of my own, another country if I want.
Lorik says nothing, because Lorik has decided he doesn’t get a vote anymore, that he forfeited his vote in a hospital bed, and he stands there pale and careful with one arm strapped to his ribs and waits to find out where his wife is going to live without him.
I tell Domenico to have the plane take us back to D.C. To the warm house on the bluff over the Potomac, the one I was carried into unconscious three months ago. And I watch my uncle’s jaw tighten, and I watch my husband try not to let his face do anything at all.
I say it again so everyone hears the shape of it: “I’m taking my husband home.
He’s going to heal, and I’m going to decide what we are.
I’m going to do it on my own ground, at my own speed, with my own family one phone call away.
” I look at Lorik. “You don’t get to come and get me anymore.
So I’m choosing where we stand. Today I’m choosing your home. Tomorrow is tomorrow’s problem.”
It’s the cruelest, kindest thing I could do to him, and we both know it, and that’s the whole point.
So we go home to the house that used to be a cage, but it isn’t one anymore, because the only thing that ever locked it was him and he doesn’t lock anything now.
The doors stay open. Drini nearly weeps when he sees me.
And I spend four weeks watching the most dangerous man on the eastern seaboard learn how to be loved in the daylight, and it is the hardest thing I have ever watched anyone do.
He’s terrible at it.
That’s the part that finally starts to undo me.
He flinches every time I do something kind for no reason, whether it’s bringing him food, sitting on the edge of the bed and reading to him because his ribs make holding a book hurt, or putting my cold feet on him in the night just to hear him complain.
A man who orchestrated eighteen months of my life from behind a mask has absolutely no idea what to do with being cared for to his face, in the light, by someone who knows exactly who he is and stays anyway.
He keeps waiting for the ball to drop. I watch him wait for it every day.
And every day it doesn’t fit the floor, and every day a little more of the thing my mother told me about, the love and the rage that don’t take turns, tips a fraction further toward the part I’m choosing to keep.
It isn’t peace. I want to be clear about that, even to myself.
Underneath the quiet house and the open doors, a war is running.
His mother is still out there somewhere, breathing, and every time I so much as think the word Klaudia, something cold and patient wakes up in me.
Something with my father’s blood in it and my mother’s fight, something that has quietly started to plan.
And in a study down the hall my husband, Cas, Dom are building a box around a smiling senator, pulling apart an operation that buys girls, and Lorik means to burn it to the foundations the second he can stand without help.
The dark isn’t done with us. We’re just choosing each other inside it. Maybe that’s the only place anybody ever really gets to.
We don’t touch like that for six weeks. He doesn’t push, because he has finally, fully understood that pushing is the one thing he can never do again.
And I don’t reach for him, because every time I want to I remember the closet floor and the phone and the photos.
Then the wanting and the wound show up at the exact same time, and I make myself wait until one of them is louder.
Tonight, the wanting is louder.
He’s propped against the headboard in the lamplight, still healing, but finally more himself than he has been.
The bruises gone yellow and faded, the splint is off his fingers, and that terrible beautiful face still his own.
He’s reading something on his tablet and not watching me, giving me the space he’s decided is mine by right, and I look at my husband choosing not to want me out loud, and I make a decision with my whole open eyes.
“Lorik.”
He looks up. And he reads it instantly, the way he reads everything, and I watch him go very still, watch the want flare and then watch him deliberately bank it down because he will not assume, not ever again.
“Brooklyn.” He watches me carefully. “You don’t have to—”
“I know I don’t have to.” I climb onto the bed.
I straddle his lap slowly, careful of the ribs, both hands flat on his chest where I can feel his heart going twice its normal speed.
I watch him not touch me, his hands fisted in the sheets at his sides because he’s waiting for permission like a man defusing a bomb.
“That’s exactly why I’m doing it. Nobody’s making me.
There’s no mask, there’s no plan, you didn’t engineer this, you don’t even get to reach for me until I say so.
” I lean down until my mouth is at his ear.
“I want you. The real you. With my eyes open. Put your hands on me.”
The sound he makes when his hands finally find my hips is not a sound I have words for. It’s relief and disbelief and four months of held breath, and he touches me like I might be a hallucination, like he still can’t believe the woman who knows everything is the one choosing to be in his lap.
“Slow,” I tell him, and it’s not about his ribs. “I want to feel all of it. No ghost. Just us. The first honest time.”
And it is. God, it is.
He undresses me like it’s a sacrament, slow, reverent, his eyes on my face the whole time instead of my body, and when his thumbs brush the piercings he gave me without ever touching me, he makes a broken sound and presses his forehead between my breasts and just breathes.
I let him, because I understand now what they mean to him, and for the first time I let them mean it without it making me feel hunted.
He’s the reason. He’ll always be the reason.
I’ve decided to let that be ours instead of his.
He kisses his way down to them then, slow, asking with his eyes at every inch, and only when I nod does he take one pierced peak into his mouth, rolling the cool metal with his tongue until I gasp and grind down on him.
The difference between this and every other time his mouth has been on my body is that this time I know exactly whose mouth it is.
And I want him anyway. All of him. The whole terrible truth of him.
I take him out of his clothes as carefully as he took me out of mine.
The pierced length of him is the same devastating thing it’s always been, the metal warm.
I rise up over him and hold his eyes and I sink down onto him slow, inch by inch, both of us shaking, until he’s all the way inside me and there is nothing between us anywhere.
No lie, no mask, no needle, no name I don’t know, just my husband, filling me up, looking at me like I rebuilt him from nothing.
“You’re choosing this,” he says, wrecked, his hands spanning my waist, letting me set every pace because his control belongs to me now and we both know it. “Tell me again. I need to hear it while I’m inside you. Tell me you know everything and you’re still here.”
“I know everything.” I roll my hips and watch his eyes nearly roll back. “The stalker. The mask. The hunt. All of it. And I’m here. I’m choosing you. Right now, with nothing hidden.” My voice catches. “I’m choosing you, Lorik.”
He breaks. The man who didn’t break in five days of his mother’s hands breaks under three honest words from mine.
He wraps his arms around me and buries his face in my throat and lets me ride him slow and deep in the lamplight.
He says my name like it’s the only prayer he knows, and somewhere in it the heat and the healing and the grief all become the same thing.
I come around him with my forehead pressed to his and his name in my mouth and tears on both our faces, and it is nothing like the fused desperation of the closet and everything like coming home.
He follows me over with a sound that breaks in the middle, both arms locked around me, and he doesn’t ask me to stay joined to him afterward.
He’s learned, he won’t take, he won’t assume, so I do it without being asked.
I stay. I keep him inside me and wrapped in me, and I hold the back of his head the way he’s held mine a hundred times.
I feel him shaking, this enormous lethal wreck of a man, flayed not by the sex but by the choosing.
“I don’t know how to do this,” he admits into my skin. It’s the most naked thing he’s ever said, more laid bare than the whole confession. “Be loved like this. In the light. I don’t. I never learned. I’m going to be bad at it for a long time.”
“I know.” I tip his face up. He lets me.
His eyes are red and open and completely without armor, and I have never wanted anyone more.
“We both are.” I kiss him, slow, the first kiss I’ve given him that I started, that no version of him stole.
“So we’ll be bad at it together. Eyes open.
Every day. You don’t have to know how. You just have to keep showing up as yourself and let me keep choosing it. ”
“Every day,” he swears, like a vow, like the realest one he’s ever made, because it is. “I’ll show up as myself every day for the rest of my life and let you choose. Even the days you don’t.”
“Even the days I don’t,” I agree, and I mean it, and we both feel the difference between this and everything that came before.
That this is a thing being built in daylight by two people who could leave but don’t.
I fall asleep on top of my husband with the doors of the house standing open all around us, unlocked, unguarded, chosen.
It’s the safest I have ever felt in my life. And not one bit of it was taken. All of it was given.