Vi looks at me a long time. “Yeah,” she says. “You are.”
“I know.”
“And me not listening to you?” she asks.
“You were right about that too. I made decisions about your father, about the evidence, about what to do with it, withoutincluding you. I treated you like someone to be managed instead of someone to be heard. That’s on me.”
The words are coming out ugly. Choppy. None of this sounds the way I wanted it to. I’m not eloquent. I’m not smooth. I’m a man standing in a woman’s bedroom saying true things in the worst possible way.
But I’m saying them, finally, saying them.
Vi uncrosses her legs and plants her feet on the floor. She’s sitting on the edge of the bed, looking up at me. Her eyes are wet, and I can see her fighting between the anger she’s earned and the thing underneath it that wants to forgive me.
“That’s not enough,” she says. “You know that, right? Saying you were wrong after all that doesn’t fix it. It’s a start but it’s not enough.”
“You’re right.”
“I need more than words, Sting. I need you to actually change. To include me, talk to me and not just when you’ve run out of options.”
I think about Tommy and about the trap we just set and about the operation running right now that she doesn’t know about. The hypocrisy is right there, sitting on me next to the honesty, and I can feel both of them and they are seriously fucking me up.
“I’m trying,” I say. It’s inadequate. But true.
Vi stands and she’s close now, just a foot away, looking up at me. The anger is still there but so is something else, the thing that keeps her in this building, in this relationship, coming back to a man who keeps failing her over and over.
“You’re trying,” she repeats, testing it.
“Yeah. I’m trying.”
She reaches up, grabs the front of my shirt, pulls me down, and kisses me. It’s not gentle or forgiving, but hard, and angry, her teeth on my lip. A kiss that saysI’m still furious and I stillwant you and it’s fucked up that those things exist at the same time.
“This doesn’t mean you’re forgiven,” she says.
“I know.”
“It means I’m still here. That’s all it means.”
“That’s enough.”
She pulls my shirt over my head, then I pull hers off. Skin to skin. Her legs wrap around me and my mouth goes to her neck, her collarbone, and the hollow of her throat where I can feel her pulse hammering. She’s alive, angry, and underneath me. I said the words. They were ugly, insufficient, and for some reason, she’s still here.
That’s more than I deserve. She knows it. I know it.
Especially since I’m already planning something she knows nothing about.
60
STING
This is different.
I’ve been with Vi enough times to know what our sex usually feels like. The club with its masks, the corridor with its desperation, my room with the three of us taking her apart. There’s always been a structure. A dynamic. Me in control, or trying to be, and her pushing against it, or giving in to it. The tension between dominance and surrender driving everything.
Not tonight.
Tonight, I’m on top of her in her bed with Mara’s blanket shoved to the floor. She’s looking up at me with red eyes and swollen lips from the angry kiss that started this. Her hands are on my chest, not pulling, not pushing, just resting there.
I slow down.
