“That’s your fault,” I grumble into my toast, which is a mistake, because mumbling into toast has never once in the history of breakfast made a woman look composed.
“I suppose it is.” He doesn’t sound remotely sorry about it. He sounds like a man admiring his own handiwork. “Though I can’t be blamed for the fact that you find me irresistible. That’s entirely your doing.”
I open my mouth to argue, run a quick search for any version of that argument I could possibly win, come up empty, and close it again. He notices that too, because he notices everything, and the corner of his mouth goes up another degree.
Instead of pressing his advantage he picks up the morning’s sports section, snaps it open one-handed, and reads me a line some poor columnist has written about the Waymakers’ defense, drawling it out in that lazy unbothered way he has, like the words are barely worth the breath. Then he takes the man’s whole argument apart in two sentences, quiet and exact and just cruel enough that I actually wince on the columnist’s behalf. Somewhere across the city a stranger has been gutted over my breakfast and will never even know it happened. I laugh anyway, because it’s wickedly clever and because it isn’t pointed at me, and underneath the laugh runs the small private thought I have most mornings, which is a quiet, sheepish gratitude that I have never once been on the wrong end of that tongue. Or that temper.
People warned me about him, before the wedding. Not in words, exactly. In the careful way they said his name, in the articles I wasn’t supposed to read and read anyway, the ones that called my husband brilliant and cold in the very same breath and seemed to think the two came as a set. The ruthless Trey Flint. The man who has never once wanted a thing he didn’t take, and never once kept a thing past the moment he stopped wanting it.
They never met this version of him, though. The one who learned in our first week that I can’t sleep without a particular weight of blanket over me and had four more delivered before I’d even finished saying I was cold. The one who held me through the worst nights after Dad, the ones where I came apart so completely I frightened myself, and never once told me to stop, never once looked at his watch, just stayed, his hand moving slow circles on my back until morning.
That’s the husband I ended up with. I keep waiting for someone official to turn up at the door and tell me there’s been a clerical error, that this one was meant for somebody else.
He pushes back from the table, comes around to my side of it, and bends to press a kiss to my forehead that lasts a beat longer than casual has any business lasting. “I’m heading in,” he says against my hairline. “Take care of yourself today.” A pause, and I feel him smile. “And don’t forget.”
The blush, which had only just retreated, comes flooding straight back. I knew about this part, he warned me early, in that quiet certain voice that doesn’t leave any room on the table for negotiation, but knowing a thing and being braced for it every single morning turn out to be two completely different skills, and I have mastered exactly neither.
“Say the words, Mrs. Flint.”
My face is so hot I could toast more bread on it. “I’m yours, sir?—”
He takes my mouth before I can finish, hard and certain, one hand cradling my jaw, and the kiss is still humming through me long after the front door has closed and the apartment has gone enormous and quiet around me. I sit there with my fingers pressed to my lips like a woman who’s just been clipped, very gently, by a passing car.
I never let myself imagine what this marriage would actually be, back when it was only a clause on a page and a promise made to a dying man. It seemed safer not to picture anything, so that nothing could disappoint me. So the whole of these six months has arrived as one long surprise, the good kind, the kind I have no system for filing. He is more possessive than I ever expected and far, far gentler than I had any right to hope, and somewhere in the territory between those two things lives a man I was never supposed to fall in love with and went and fell in love with anyway.
I was so afraid of what life would look like with my father gone out of it. I’m not honestly sure I’d have made it through that first month if Trey hadn’t been there, quietly making the unsurvivable survivable. Every day it hurts a fraction less. Every day the grief loosens its grip by some small degree I can almost count on my fingers.
Which reminds me. It’s been a week, and I haven’t been to see him.
The cemetery is quiet on a weekday morning, which is the way I like it, the grass still wet enough from the night to darken the toes of my shoes and the air carrying that green, mineral, just-rained smell that always makes my chest ache in a way that isn’t entirely unpleasant. I come up the familiar slope toward my father’s headstone already half talking to him in my head, the way I always do before I’ve even reached him, and then my feet slow on the wet grass, because someone is already there.
I’d know that silhouette anywhere. So would half the city, to be fair.
Troy.
He spent twelve seasons being the single most photographed man in the sport, and the camera never once did him an unkindness. Even now, a year out of the jersey and dressed in nothing more remarkable than a long dark coat against the cold, he has that presence that quietly rearranges a space just by entering it, the way weather rearranges a room when a window’s left open. Tall, built along the kind of clean punishing lines that sold a decade of jerseys, with a face the tabloids spent twelve years calling unfair. Women used to line up outside the arena in February for a thirty-second glimpse of him climbing out of a car. They still slow on the sidewalk when he passes.
I have never once felt the smallest flicker of any of it. To me he is simply Troy, the gangly rookie my father signed and then never stopped being proud of, the boy who taught me to skate badly and then swore me to secrecy about how badly, who sat in our kitchen for twelve straight seasons eating his way methodically through everything in our refrigerator. He’s the nearest thing to a big brother I’ve ever had, which is exactly why he can stand there at my father’s grave looking like the cover of a magazine and the only thing I feel is glad.
“Troy.”
He turns, and something in his face unknots when he sees that it’s me. “Hey, Cam.” Then the warmth cools by a careful degree, the way it always does the moment the conversation comes anywhere near my marriage. “How’s Flint treating you?”
He has never once bothered to hide what he thinks of my husband.
“He treats me very well, thank you,” I say, lifting my chin.
“I didn’t expect any less.” He turns back to the headstone, hands pushed deep in his coat pockets. “He knows how mucheveryone loves you. A man like that doesn’t go damaging an asset the whole city’s watching.”
“You make him sound so calculating.” I hear the earnestness climb right up into my voice and I let it, because I mean every word and I’m tired of pretending I don’t. “He isn’t, Troy. Not with me. I wish you’d let yourself see it.”
“Once a womanizer,” Troy says to the headstone, “always a womanizer.”
“It takes one to know one, is that it?”
That earns me a quick flash of the grin that sold all those jerseys, there and then gone. “Naturally. But here’s where he and I part ways, Cam.” The grin fades out entirely. “I’m not married. He is.”
I shake my head at him, because there’s no point and there never is. We’ve had this exact conversation in a dozen different shapes and it always arrives at the same locked door. “Goodbye, Troy. It was good to see you.”
