Page 24 of Reluctant Bride

When?

Tomorrow. A pause, then: Tonight I just want to lie here and think about that photo like the disaster I apparently am.

That makes two of us.

Good. A beat. Goodnight, husband.

The word sits strange and warm in me, a term I’ve heard a handful of times today and felt nothing about until right now, past midnight, from a woman across the hall who just handed me a lifetime of catching up to do in the space of one very long text train.

Goodnight, Blackwater.

It’s Sullivan now. Legally.

Goodnight, Sullivan.

I set the phone face down on the nightstand, and I lie in the dark a long time after, staring at a ceiling I haven’t gotten used to yet, listening for a floorboard creak through the wall that never quite comes again. I thought I already knew the worst and the best of wanting this woman. She’s just proven me wrong on both counts in under an hour, with nothing but a phone and the length of a hallway between us.

Somewhere past the fence line, whoever stood there less than an hour ago is still out there, patient enough to wait for a gap in the cameras and smart enough to leave nothing behind but two boot prints. No new message needed tonight, not when the old one is still sitting in my phone from the same night my father handed down the house.

She’ll like it there again.

Whoever wrote that already knows how this ends.

I thought I was ready for this. The marriage, the war, the weight of two names stitched together under one roof and one target. I wasn’t ready for how heavy it would actually feel, married for less than a day and already exhausted down to the bone, carrying a wife I can’t protect from a threat I can’t see, on top of a family name that’s been on trial in this county since a truck stopped running with a dead man inside it.

I lie there running the photographs back one at a time, deliberate, patient, the tattoo and the piercing and the curve of her hand against her own stomach, memorizing every new inch of her, relearning a body I used to know by heart. Down the hall a door is shut that I have a key to and will never use without her asking first. I said vows today in a room the size of my mudroom, meant every word of them, and I still don’t get to walk twenty feet and prove it. Some men would call that a technicality. I call it the bill finally coming due for something I broke a long time before either of us knew what a contract was.

I don’t know yet that somewhere in the dark, on the other side of a fence line I trust and a name I’ve known my whole life, patience with a familiar face is already awake, and I haven’t found a way to see it coming.

I fall asleep anyway, phone charging on the nightstand, alarm still set to Paranoid, too tired to check the feed one last time before I go under.

NINE

SAGE

Dawson asks if I slept well, and I consider murder before coffee.

He’s leaning against the kitchen doorframe in a grey t-shirt gone dark with sweat, hair damp at the temples, shirt clinging to the broad line of his chest. Every muscle in his arms looks carved from lifting something heavy enough to hate him for it, and I know exactly what those arms feel like wrapped around me. I spend one full, traitorous second wanting them there again before I remember I’m supposed to be irritated with him.

I heard the mudroom door click shut at five fifteen, quiet, careful, a man trying not to wake a wife who wasn’t asleep to begin with. I’ve been a light sleeper my whole life. I’ve been a worse one since we moved into this house, replaying a photograph I have no business still thinking about at six in the morning. Dark hair trailing low, and I’d caught myself smirking into my own pillow before I caught myself doing it, wondering what my mouth would feel like wrapped around his thick, hard cock.

That was an hour ago, upstairs, alone. Standing here now with the real thing propped in my doorway, sweaty and smug and entirely too pleased with himself, is a different kind of problem altogether.

“Fine,” I say. “Perfect. Never better.”

“You didn’t sleep.”

“I slept great. I always sleep great after telling a man about a piercing I got in Nashville and then refusing to explain it.”

“You could still explain it.”

“I could also join the circus. Neither is happening today.”

He almost smiles, that maddening not-quite thing he does where one corner of his mouth commits and the rest of his face stays locked down like the smile has to clear security first. I turn my back on it and go straight for my espresso machine, the one piece of my old house I refused to leave behind, six hundred dollars of Italian steel that took me four months of a barista job at Cornell to save up for and several years of practice to actually deserve.

I pull the portafilter, tamp the grounds level and firm, twist it into the group head with a click that feels like the only competent thing I’ve done since I woke up. Steam wand hisses. Milk spins into velvet under my hand without a single bubble, because some skills don’t leave you even when your dignity does.

“That’s a serious machine for a woman who claims she doesn’t need caffeine to function,” Dawson says, watching me from the doorway like I’m the most interesting thing that’s happened to him all week, which, given last night, is either a low bar or a very high compliment.