Page 44

The booth.

Turgenev.

The way he knew my coffee.

The truck rides.

The way he said one true thing an hour.

His armband.

The whole night at my shoulder glaring at men who flirted with me.

Him.

It had been him.

It had been him the entire time, and I’d been out there in a smaller shirt every week when it was standing at my own door reading Russian literature and waiting for me to turn my head.

So I turned my head. I got a hand on his arm, that thick, solid arm going tense to leave, and I didn’t let him. I spun him back around to face me, with more force than I meant, enough that he came around off-balance with his eyes wide and something raw and unguarded flaring in them.

A question? Fear? Hope?

I didn’t make him wait for the answer the way I’d made us both wait for years. I pulled him into me and kissed him. I kissed him like I meant it, because I did. I kissed him like I was making up for two years of not having a clue. I had one hand fisted in the strap of that ridiculous borrowed harness and the other coming up to the back of his neck. I felt the exact moment he understood I wasn’t pulling away, wasn’t letting go, wasn’t sorry.

He made a sound against my mouth, low and wrecked, a sound I’d have crawled across glass to hear again. Then his arms came around me, both of them, all that guarded strength finally spending itself on holding instead of holding back. He kissed me like a man who’d been thirsty for a long time and had decided to stop pretending he wasn’t.

The bar was still happening around us.

Somewhere there was music and a man in a cock cage and a hundred strangers in leather, but none of it existed. There was only Dante’s mouth and his hands and the bare cold of my own chest going warm where he pulled me against him. The harness creaked. He kept making that low sound. I made it back. I couldn’t help myself.

When we finally broke apart, it was only far enough to breathe. He didn’t let go. I didn’t either. His forehead pressed against mine, and we stood there in the middle of ridiculous, beautiful chaos, both of us shaking a little. I felt him try to find his wall and fail, because I’d gotten in before it could close, and I had no intention of stepping back out.

“Okay,” I said, which was not eloquent, but was all the machine would produce. “Okay. That’s—okay.”

“Mark.” His voice had gone to gravel. My name sounded different than it ever had, raw and unguarded, terrified and unbearably relieved at once. “I need you to say something that isn’t ‘okay.’ I’ve spent this whole night not being able to breathe and if ‘okay’ is all—”

“It was you.” I pulled back just enough to look at him, to make sure he heard it land. My hand went back to his cheek, tenderly. The touch sent another thrill through the whole of me. “That’s what I’m trying to say and doing a garbage job of. All this time, Dante, all these bars, all these guys, me whining to you in a truck about how nobody wants to know my name. You always knew, my name, my coffee order. Hell, you knew everything, and you sat there and let me look everywhere else.” Something thick came up in my throat. “How long?”

He was quiet.

Of course he was quiet.

But he didn’t look away this time, and for Dante, not looking away was a whole confession.

“The truck,” he said finally. “That first drive out for the ice machine. It was probably there long before, but I knew for sure in the truck.”

“The truck.” That was weeks ago, weeks of him carrying this while I paraded my sad little dating life past him like an idiot. “Dante, that’s . . . do you know how long I’ve . . . God, I’ve been so busy deciding I was too old and too much and too done to be wanted by anybody that I never once—” I stopped, then tried to start over, because he deserved the true version, not the wound-up one. “It didn’t even occur to me to want it because I never let myself think I could have it. And it was standing right there. You were standing right there.”

“I was standing right there,” he agreed, low, a hint of a smile playing at the corners of his mouth.

“Reading Russians.”

“Reading Russians.”

“At my own bar.”

“For two years, Mark.”