I kissed her temple, still inside her, unwilling to let go. "Guess we're better at this when we take our time."
She gave a shaky laugh, brushing her lips against mine. "Guess we are."
Later, much later, we lay tangled in Sofia's rose-patterned sheets, both of us breathing hard and grinning like idiots.
"So," said Nadia, tracing patterns on my chest. "That wasn't a fluke."
"Nope. Not a fluke."
"Good to know." She propped herself up on one elbow, looking down at me with an expression I couldn't read. "Because I'm pretty sure I'm in trouble here."
"What kind of trouble?"
"The kind where I'm going to want to do this again." She smiled as if she couldn't help it. "And again. Probably at inconvenient times."
I caught her hand and brought it to my lips. "I'm okay with that kind of trouble."
"I mean it, Daemon." Her voice settled into something more serious. "I don't do this. Sleep with someone this many times in twenty-four hours. Check my schedule on the drive home to see when I can do it again. I'm the responsible one. The one who has her life together."
"And I'm the screwup with a criminal record who lives in an old lady's apartment."
"That's not what I meant." There was no mistaking the second she registered exactly what I'd said. "You have a criminal record?"
Damn it. This was not how I'd wanted to tell her. Not here, not now, not when I could feel her pulse still slowing against me and the room smelled like both of us and everything felt more exposed than I knew how to manage.
But I'd said it out loud, and there was no taking it back.
"Yeah," I said. "I do."
She didn't move. Her hand rested on my chest, her fingers quiet. She was looking at the ceiling rather than at me, which I suspected was a deliberate act of mercy. Giving me somewhere to be that wasn't under her direct attention while I found the words.
I found them, but it took a minute.
Raised by a single mom on the north side of Stockton. My father was gone before I was walking. My mother worked two jobs and cooked bad chicken and believed in me with a specificity I'd spent years trying to be worth and a few more trying to outrun.
The diagnosis came in my senior year. Stage three pancreatic cancer. The medical debt started before the treatment did, and it grew faster than anything I could manage legally.
I'd started with construction work, which was honest. Then added bar security. Then, when the bills outpaced both, I found the underground fighting circuit operating out of a warehouse that should have been condemned, one that paid four times in a night what I made in a week on a site.
I told Nadia about the fights without dressing them up. The early ones I won. The latter ones I threw because throwing fights to order paid better than winning them.
I'd stopped thinking too hard about the difference between legal risk and moral risk somewhere around the fourth month of watching my mother lose weight faster than the treatments could account for.
I was twenty-two when they arrested me. The doctors had given my mother eight months. I served eighteen in county. Not so much for the fighting as for the betting operation behind it.
The part I didn't say out loud, but couldn't keep out of my voice, was that I'd told my mom I'd be back Thursday. I hadn't made it back on Thursday. By the time I got out, she was gone.
I stopped talking.
The room was quiet except for Sofia's cat clock on the wall and the garden sounds through the window screen.
Nadia hadn't moved. Her hand was still on my chest. I could feel my own heartbeat under her palm, which seemed like unnecessary information for both of us.
Then she turned her head and looked at me.
Not with the wavering expression I'd braced for. Not pity, not the horror of realizing she'd made a mistake. Instead, she looked at me the way she'd scrutinize a delivery invoice. Directly, without flinching, taking in what was actually there rather than what she'd expected to find.
"How old were you when she was diagnosed?"
