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She shoved both palms against his chest — not hard, he didn’t so much as rock back an inch, but her hands needed a task besides shaking — and took a step back to get real room to look at him.
“You’ve had someone watching me since the second day.” Her voice climbed and she didn’t bother reeling it back in, didn’t even try. “Two weeks, Norden. Two weeks of you knowing exactly where I was every single hour of every single day, and you decided — what, that I didn’t need to know that? That I’d be better off not knowing why a stranger was cataloguing my commute?”
“Yes.”
“Yes isn’t an answer. Yes is a confirmation. I want the actual answer, out loud, right now.” She threw a hand toward the mouth of the alley, toward the empty spot where two men had been trying to drag her. “Was this the plan the whole time? Watch me, wait, see if it happens, be ready to swoop in looking unbothered about it?”
“No. This was the plan going wrong.”
That stopped her for exactly one second before the anger found its footing again and came back louder.
“It’s my life! I get a vote on who’s allowed to know my schedule better than I know it myself!” Her hands were shaking. She noticed that distantly, the same way she’d noticed his breathing — data collected for a version of herself unavailable to process it. She started pacing without deciding to, three steps one way, three steps back, burning off the last of the adrenaline the only way her body seemed to know how. “You made a decision about my safety without my knowledge or my consent, and I don’t care how well it worked out tonight, that doesn’t make it okay, it makes it—”
She ran out of the sentence before she ran out of anger, which had never happened to her before, and stood there in the cooling adrenaline of an alley that ten minutes ago had nearly ended far worse, furious and shaking and — this was the part she truly didn’t know what to do with — completely safe.
Both things were true. Neither one canceled the other out. She hated that most of all.
“You don’t get to make that call for me.” She jabbed a finger at his chest, hard enough this time that his gaze dropped to it, faintly startled, like he wasn’t used to being poked by someone who could make her point without breaking a knuckle on him. “I don’t care if you’re right. Being right doesn’t buy you the right to decide what I get to know about my own life. That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.”
“I know.”
“You know. Great. Fantastic. And yet here we are, two weeks in, and I’ve been living inside a security operation I didn’t sign up for and didn’t consent to and would absolutely have had opinions about, several strongly worded opinions, delivered at volume, exactly like this—”
“I know.” Quieter this time, and he didn’t retreat one inch while she said any of it, didn’t defend himself, didn’t apologize, didn’t do a single thing men usually did when a woman was correctly furious at them. He stood there and took it, absorbed every word which was, if anything, more infuriating than if he’d argued back.
“You’re right,” he said finally, holding her gaze without flinching from it. “About all of it.”
“I know I’m right. That’s not the same as you fixing it.”
“No. It isn’t.” A flicker crossed behind his eyes, brief and unguarded, gone before she could fully pin it down. He closed another six inches of the distance between them, not quite touching, close enough that she had to tip her chin up to keep the eye contact. “I made a decision two weeks ago that I’d rather you be alive and angry at me than informed and vulnerable. I’d make the same decision again tonight, knowing everything I know now, including how furious it makes you. That doesn’t mean I think you’re wrong to be furious. It means I’ve made peace with being the villain of this particular story if it keeps you breathing.”
“That’s not fair. You don’t get to be noble about this. Noble is for people who haven’t spent two weeks lying by omission.”
“I’m not being noble. I’m being honest, which is apparently a rarer commodity between us than either of us would like.”
He didn’t let her get within ten feet of a cab.
She’d pulled her phone out on pure reflex, thumb already finding the app, and he’d taken it clean out of her hand — a fast, decisive motion, no room in it to argue — with a gentleness that made the refusal land harder than a grab would have. He pocketed it without breaking stride, already blocking her path to the curb like the matter had been settled before she’d finished reaching for the phone at all.
“You’re not getting in a cab alone tonight.”
“I am a grown woman who has gotten into approximately four thousand cabs alone in her life without a single incident, not one, ever.”
“Two men tried to put you in a van ten minutes ago, in this exact neighborhood. Tonight isn’t the night to test whether four thousand and one goes the same way.”
“That’s not your call to make.”
“It’s the only call I’m currently interested in making, tonight, given the circumstances.” He said it without room for negotiation, and crossed to stand between her and the street, an actual wall of a man, the kind that didn’t care how hard you hit it. “Be furious with me the entire drive. I’ll take it. You’re not getting in a car I don’t control tonight.”
“You don’t control cars, Norden. You don’t get to control a car. That’s not a thing a person controls.”
“I control this one.”
“That’s not the flex you think it is, for the record.”
“It isn’t a flex. It’s a fact.” He held his hand out for her keys, patient, certain she’d hand them over eventually even as she glared at his open palm like it had personally offended her. “Your car stays here tonight. Someone will bring it to you in the morning. Fully intact.”
“You have a whole system for this. A whole — car retrieval system. For emergencies like this one, apparently, already built and waiting.”
