Page 74 of You, Only You

"You were in bar fights?" Her voice carried genuine surprise, which I found oddly flattering. Apparently the tailored suits had done their job.

"I was angry. After Mom died. Before I figured out how to..." I searched for the word. "Channel it."

"So you hit people."

"Mostly. Anyone who provided a reason. Or didn't." I lifted my hand, examining the scars in the dim light. They looked like what they were: evidence of a person who'd once let his damage run the show. "Nicole used to beg me to stop. Said I was going to end up dead or in prison. I didn't particularly care about either option at the time."

"What changed?"

"Law school. I figured out that words could do more damage than fists, which was appealing to the part of me that wanted to hurt things." I paused. "And then Nicole. What happened to her. And suddenly there were better things to hit."

She was quiet for a moment, her finger still tracing.

"I'm still scared," she said. The words arrived without preamble, the way she delivered things she'd been thinking about for a while: all at once, no warm-up.

"Of what?"

"That I'll wake up and this will be different. That you'll be behind the mask again and I'll be on the outside trying to figure out what went wrong." She didn't look up. Just kept tracing, like the scar was a path she needed to follow. "I know you've changed. I know the balcony was real and the eggs were real and this is real. My brain knows all of that. The other part, the part that grew up watching someone perform love while stealing everything underneath it..." She swallowed. "That part doesn't always listen to my brain."

I tightened my arm around her. Not the desperate, constricting hold from the hallway. This one was different. Measured. The hold of someone who was learning that strength and gentleness weren't opposites.

"I can't promise I won't fall back," I said. The honesty was uncomfortable, which was probably a good sign. Comfortable honesty wasn't really honesty. It was just saying what the otherperson expected. "The walls will go up before I realize I'm building them. That's how it works. It's not a switch I can flip."

"I know."

"But I can promise to let you tell me when it's happening. And to listen instead of defending. And to stay in the room even when the room feels like the last place I want to be."

"Even when you want to install a tracking app?"

"Even then. Especially then."

She lifted her head and looked at me, and in the low light her eyes were dark and searching and very close. "Say something that isn't strategic."

"What?"

"Something you haven't planned or rehearsed or run through a cost-benefit analysis. Just say something that's true."

I looked at her. The bruises were gone. The scar on her temple was a thin line, fading. She looked tired and beautiful and completely herself, and the thing that came out of my mouth had been sitting in my chest for weeks, waiting for an exit.

"I'd rather be terrified with you than comfortable without you."

It came out rough, unpolished, nothing like the clean sentences I usually constructed. She stared at me for a moment, and then her face did something complicated, crumpling and brightening at the same time, and she kissed me again, soft this time, a seal pressed against something we were both too cautious to name.

"We should sleep," she murmured against my mouth. "The trial prep starts next week."

"I know."

"Reeves will have better lawyers than the ones at the preliminary hearing."

"Probably."

"They'll come after both of us. You know that."

"Let them." I pulled her back against my chest, her head settling into the hollow of my shoulder. "We'll deal with it."

"Together?"

"That seems to be our thing."