In the bathroom of that bar in that first nothing town she stopped in, I learned it with a kind of violence I did not enjoy confessing to myself. That little interlude had not been planned. I had no intention of stepping out of the shadows for her then, no intention of touching the perimeter I have spent years drawing around her life.
And then I saw her. Saw her dancing with Shiloh. Saw Shiloh’s intent written all over him in that slick, smiling way the boy mistakes for subtlety.
Saw her ready—willing—to throw herself at him like she was trying to burn down the remains of her own restraint.
And something had come over me.
Territorial.
Immediate.
Primitive enough to shame a better man, if I had ever been one.
Oh no you fucking don’t.That was the thought.It was nothing strategic or noble or even coherent. All I could think was…mine.
Reva was mine.
Some part of me had known it for years, though I wouldn’t have said it that plainly, not even in the privacyof my own head where all the worst truths live. Maybe I had simply been waiting for her to grow up.
Is that sick? Maybe it’s a little twisted. But there you fucking go.
I never touched her as a child—never even really talked or wrote to her. Never crossed a line. Never fed her little promises or poisoned her mind with fantasies meant to bind her to me. I never groomed, never manipulated, never told her a word about my place in her past or the shadow I cast over her present.
I was simply there.
Watching. I simply wanted to watch over her and make sure she had a chance to grow up. To be safe.
Keeping her safe was all I needed.
Until I saw her with him.
Reva was mine.
It is a dangerous thing to love someone in secret.
More dangerous still when what you love is a woman who should hate you, and eventually will, because the shape of your devotion is all wrong. It does not look like clean hands or righteous choices. It looks like blood under the nails. It looks like compromise that she doesn’t want to make. It looks like sacrificing every decent thing in your life to preserve one living piece of what was lost.
I did not arrive at her by accident. I did not obsess over her by accident. None of it was fate.
I have been writing her letters for years.
Not love letters. Nothing so obvious. Nothing that would have tipped my hand or led her by the nose toward me. Just fragments. I’ve been a figure in the margins of her life. A mentor where I could be one, a quiet hand on the scale when I could manage it without drawing notice.
Safer that way.
Safer for her.
I became something similar for Delia, too, though more directly. More openly. Reva’s sister needed someone she could trust in this world, and God knows that world did not offer her much worth trusting. So I became useful. Steady. A dark shape in the background who could make a door open, a problem disappear, a danger retreat one step.
Mentor, protector, liar. The closest thing to a friend she’d ever truly had.
Whatever name best suits a man who builds his own church out of sin and then kneels in it nightly.
I have been watching Reva for so long I no longer know where duty ended and hunger began.
Probably they were never separate things.
I watched her in foster placements. In schools. In borrowed little apartments. In grief. In fury. In the ugly, awkward years when her bones lengthened and her eyes sharpened and the child fell away piece bypiece, leaving behind this fierce, starving creature who was always going to come clawing at my door eventually.
