That lands. It lands and it sticks hard enough that I have to take a second before I answer. When I do, my tone has lost the last of its mock severity.
“Maybe it was for this,” I say.
Her eyes lift back to mine.
“Maybe surviving wasn’t so you could die on a vengeance kick in a swamp somewhere. Maybe it was so somebody could finally help you carry the damn thing.”
She goes still. A breeze skates across the truck bed, lifting a strand of her hair. I reach out on instinct and tuck it behind her ear. She lets me.
That, too, feels like a miracle.
“I’m not asking you to forget him,” I say. “Or forgive any of it. I know better than that. I know you’ve got too much spine for easy absolution.” My fingers slide down to the curve of her jaw. “But you have to trust us, Reva. If we say we’ll protect you, we mean it. If we say we’ll handle him, then we will.”
She searches my face in that blunt, unsettling way she has. As if she’s looking for the seam where the lie might be stitched in.
She won’t find one. Because under all the charm and humor and ease, I’m not that different from her. I was in foster care—with Ever, who didn’t fucking talk until he was twelve—until Nash and Deacon decided I might be worth something and took me in.
I know what it means to need justice. I know what it is to be patient.
“What if I don’t like how you handle it?” she asks, bringing me back.
I smile faintly. “Then I suppose you’ll glare at me about it for the next forty years.”
That gets a little laugh out of her. Wet around the edges, but real. “Forty years, huh?”
I turn my hand and lace my fingers with hers. Her skin is cool from the night air.
“There’s not much,” I tell her, “Not much at all that I wouldn’t do for you by this point.”
The words come out simple. Too simple, maybe, for the size of what they mean.
But she hears them.
I can tell by the way her face shifts—by the sudden brightness in her eyes she’ll hate me for noticing. She swallows and looks down at our joined hands like she doesn’t quite know what to do with them.
Then, because she is Reva and can never let a thing remain tender for more than five consecutive seconds without trying to bite it, she glances up through her lashes and says, semi-joking, “Does that mean you love me?”
I expect my usual impulse—to laugh, to deflect, to turn it into something filthy and easy and harmless.
It doesn’t come. Instead I just look at her.
Really look.
This difficult, beautiful girl who arrived in our lives carrying blood and ghosts and fury like holy relics. This girl who ran and came back. This girl who makes me feel thirteen things before breakfast, none of which are particularly dignified.
My thumb strokes over her knuckles.
“I’ve never loved a woman,” I say.
Her expression shifts, the teasing draining out of it.
“I’m not sure,” I go on, “that I know how to do it properly. I’m not sure I know what it’s supposed to look like when it isn’t a mess or a weakness or something to be used against you.”
The honesty of it scrapes my throat on the way out.
I’m not a man who places his heart on blocks. I deal in charm, in sleight of hand, in a careful redirection that keeps everyone looking where I want them to look and never too closely at what’s under the surface.
But with her, none of that works for long. So I twine my fingers more firmly through hers and offer her the truth instead. Sharp edge first.
