"You get me." I say it simply because it's the only answer that matters. "All of me. Every part that I've shown you and every part I haven't. You get a man who will never touch your medication, never question your mind, never make you smaller to make himself feel bigger. You get a man who sat in a chair beside your bed for three days because the alternative was not being in the room when you opened your eyes, and that was unacceptable to me."
She's quiet.
"You also get the violence," I say, because she needs to hear this part, too. "You get the phone calls at night. The weeks where I can't tell you where I've been. The knowledge that the man sleeping beside you has done things that would make you sick if you knew the details. I won't lie about it. I won't dress it up.That's the other side of the coin, and you're entitled to see both sides before you decide."
She turns her head and looks at me fully.
"I decided in the sedan," she says.
I feel her words in my chest, in the base of my throat, in the place where my pulse lives.
"When you grabbed my jaw," she continues. "Something in me knew. I didn't have a word for it then and I barely have one now, but I knew that whatever you were, you were mine to deal with. I felt it the way I feel a low coming on, in my bones, before the numbers confirm it."
I reach for her. I can't help it. My hand finds the back of her neck and I pull her forehead to mine, and we stay there, breathing the same air until she kisses me.
"I'm not saying yes to a proposal you haven't made," she says. "I'm saying yes to the road. I'm saying I'll walk it with you and see where it goes."
I kiss her. It's slow, a physical seal on something neither of us has a name for yet. Her hand comes up to my jaw, and she holds me there with a grip that's gentle and certain.
When she pulls back, her eyes are clear.
"Okay," she says. "I'm in."
I press my mouth to her forehead. I close my eyes. I hold her against me in the bed that's mine, in the house that's mine, in the life that is now, unmistakably, ours.
My father told me to hide her.
I'm not going to hide her. I'm going to put her beside me where every man in my world can see her, and they are going to learn what happens to anyone who threatens what's mine.
