Chapter 8 #2
All of them. Every patched man in the Iron Thorn, in full cuts, filling the gallery of that courtroom from wall to wall — Knox, Silas, Maverick, Diesel, Hawk, men who two years ago had checked their wallets when I walked by, a wall of leather and loyalty assembled for the man they'd doubted longest, and they sat there silent and immovable through the whole proceeding, and the message they sent without a word spoken was unmistakable: this man is ours.
I sat at the front beside my wife and I felt them at my back, the whole brotherhood I'd spent two years certain I only half-belonged to, arrayed behind me like a thing you'd brace a barn against, and somewhere in that hearing I stopped being a man who walked the edges.
They'd shown up for the family for the Delgados.
They showed up for me for this. The difference was the whole world.
The motion was dismissed. The judge — not Pruitt, a different one, a careful woman named Reyes — read Ivy's counter-motion and looked at the wall of leather in her gallery and looked at the affidavits and dismissed Vance's motion with prejudice, and then she did the thing I hadn't dared hope for: she noted on the record that the source of Vance's information appeared to be a coordinated attempt to interfere with an officer of the court through the leak of a former member's history, and she referred the matter — Stokes's matter, the whole channel of it — to federal authorities for investigation.
Stokes had reached for my handhold and Ivy had taken his hand off at the wrist and handed it to the FBI.
We didn't speak much, walking out. The brothers clapped my shoulder, one by one, a wall of hands now instead of a wall of leather, and Knox just looked at me and nodded, earned, the way he had the night they patched me, except this time the word didn't sink past everything into the dark. This time it landed somewhere solid.
That evening I came home and found Ivy in the kitchen, still in her courtroom blazer, shoes kicked off in the middle of the floor where she'd stepped out of them, pouring herself a glass of wine with hands that were shaking — not from fear, from the comedown, the adrenaline of three days of war leaving her all at once the way it had left her on the courthouse steps weeks ago.
She'd just saved my life. Not my body. The other thing.
The life I'd been too much of a coward to fight for myself.
And she stood there in her kitchen with her hands shaking, having done it, and I crossed the room and took the glass out of her hand and set it down on the counter.
She looked up at me. There was wine on the rim of the glass and legal briefs scattered across the counter behind her, the wreckage of the war she'd just won, and her eyes were huge and her hands were still shaking and I took her face in both of mine and I kissed her with everything I had ever held back in my entire life.
There was nothing careful in it. That was the difference between this and the bedroom, between this night and that one.
The bedroom had been reverent, slow, a man worshipping a thing he couldn't believe he was let near.
This was a man who'd nearly lost it all and a woman who'd refused to let him throw it away, and it was raw, and it was urgent, and it came up out of both of us at once like something breaking the surface after too long under.
She made a sound against my mouth and fisted both hands in my shirt and pulled me into her, and I lifted her — God, I lifted her up onto the kitchen counter, into the scattered briefs, the paper sliding everywhere, neither of us caring, the wine forgotten, and she wrapped her legs around me and pulled me in between them, hard, her hands gripping my shirt like she was afraid I'd still try to leave.
"You're mine," she said against my mouth, fierce, her forehead pressed hard to mine, her breath ragged. "Do you hear me. You're mine, and you don't get to leave, you don't get to disappear, you don't get to decide you're not worth it. Stop trying to leave."
"I'm not," I said, and I meant it down to the floor of myself, the last reservation gone, the move I'd been turning over for weeks finally, completely abandoned. "I'm not leaving. I'm done leaving. I'm yours."
And then there was no more talking.
It was deep, not fast. That's the thing I want to hold onto about that night, because it would have been so easy for it to be fast, for the adrenaline and the fury and the relief to make it frantic — but it wasn't, it slowed almost the moment it started, the urgency turning into something heavier and surer, two people choosing each other against everything that said they shouldn't, and meaning it, all the way down.
Her blazer slid off one shoulder and I pushed it the rest of the way down her arms and put my mouth to the bared skin there, the warm slope of her shoulder, the line of her throat, and felt her pulse going wild under my lips.
She pulled my shirt over my head and her hands spread flat across my chest, my ribs, my back, learning me the way she learned everything, thorough and certain, her short nails pressing crescents into my shoulders when I drew her flush against me.
The briefs scattered and slid off the counter and fell across the floor and neither of us cared.
I worked the rest of her clothes away between kisses, slow even now, my hands moving over the cool of the counter and the heat of her, and she shivered every time my fingers traced a new inch of her, gooseflesh rising under my touch though the night was warm.
The kitchen window was open and the spring dark came in over both of us, honeysuckle and the cool air against bare skin, and I drew her to the very edge of the counter and stepped in close, and she gripped my shoulders and the breath went ragged in us both.
I held her there with one arm low across her back and the other hand buried in her hair, and I pressed my forehead to hers and I didn't close my eyes, and she didn't close hers, and we looked at each other the whole time, two people who'd nearly lost it, choosing, choosing, on a kitchen counter in a too-small apartment with the briefs of the war she'd won scattered on the floor around us.
Every movement was deliberate, deep, drawn out, the opposite of frantic — I set a slow sure rhythm and held it, held her, drank in every catch of her breath and every soft broken sound she made against my mouth, every place her body answered mine.
She wound her legs tighter and pulled me closer and I felt her come apart by degrees, felt the lawyer and the fighter and the frightened girl all let go at once in my arms, and I gave her every bit of myself in return, slow and complete, until there was nothing held back anywhere in either of us.
She was trembling and I was trembling, both of us, and it wasn't fear and it wasn't even the adrenaline anymore, it was the size of it, the size of choosing someone with your whole life when you've spent that life sure you'd never get to, the size of being chosen back.
Her arms wound tight around my shoulders and her face pressed into my neck and I felt her breath catch and break against my skin, and I held her through it, held all of her, deep and slow and sure, until the trembling crested and broke and became something else, until we'd remade ourselves a second time, here, in the kitchen this time instead of the bed, in the place where I'd fed her at midnight all those weeks ago without knowing I was already falling, the place where it had really started — she was right, she'd always been right, it started the first time she ate my cooking at the sink at two in the morning, and now here we were in the same kitchen, choosing each other against the whole world, the briefs of our enemies on the floor and the honeysuckle pouring in.
Afterward she stayed on the counter, my arms still around her, her legs still loose around me, her forehead resting against mine, both of us breathing hard and slow. The wine sat forgotten where I'd set it. Out the window the town was settling into the dark.
"For the record," she said, finally, against my mouth, her voice wrecked and amused and certain all at once, "our marriage is extremely real."
I laughed. The second time. It came easier now, the laughing — she'd unlocked something that first night in the bedroom and it wasn't going back.
I pressed my lips to her forehead, to the woman who'd refused to let me disappear, who'd fought for me when I'd been too much of a coward to fight for myself, who'd taken a man like Stokes apart in a courtroom and then come home and pulled me between her legs and told me to stop trying to leave.
"For the record," I said, "I know."