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“At the gym,” I say.
She faces me for the first time. She wants to call me a smartass because it’s apparent where we are. But questions are building in her eyes. Before she can start asking them, I grab her and the food, and we head inside. But we don’t go inside the gym. We go inside the place next to it.
“Whose place is this?” she asks when we step inside.
The smell of fresh paint and hickory from an extinguished fire lingers in the air. It’s apparent the old place has been updated, but the bones remain the same. As for furniture, there’s an old table set in the dining room, an old sofa in the living room, and nothing but a new mattress, with new bedding, and a tiny old dresser in the master.
I don’t answer. I take the food from her and set it on the table. Then I help her out of her coat, hanging it on an old coat rack that was left behind.
She’s looking around but not moving from her spot.
“You did it,” she says. “You bought the gym. And this place—to live.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I did.”
I did it because she gives me something to hope for. One night, after we’d taken a ride to Coney Island, she suggested that I find a channel for my darkness. Someplace to put the more aggressive urges in me to a different use.
“Fight,” she’d told me. She raised her fists. “Like boxing. Or whatever else it is those men do—the ones who are extreme about it. That might fulfill those needs. Maybe if you don’t ignore them, you’ll understand what’s driving the urges. You’ll be able to let it run wild and tire it out.”
She had no clue, though, that I’d always fought. And it never tired anything out. But for her, I would dedicate myself to a different path in life.
At the time, Gallo had been interested in the gym, but the old man selling refused to sell to him. He knew who Gallo was, and he didn’t want something he’d spent his entire life building to be turned into a front. He told Gallo he would have to kill him to steal it, and if he did, he had already willed it to an Irish family who had been interested in it before. The Irish family was connected, and Gallo knew it. The old man had outsmarted him, but because of the interest in the place, no regular person would touch it.
Gallo lost interest, but I never did. The place had stuck with me. Lucila only reinforced my decision to buy it. The old man knew who I was, but after I told him my plans, he nodded and told me it was mine. But it also came with the place next door. It was both or nothing.
Both were mine.
The silence between us stretches, and after a minute or two, she finally turns to face me. She knows me, but there are still things she doesn’t know about me. She has no clue what I’m capable of, or who’s out to recruit me into a lifestyle that takes a certain man to live it.
It really doesn’t matter in the moment, though. Because I’m so in love with her that anything is possible. All the chains that usually feel so fucking heavy don’t exist when she’s around.
We move toward each other at the same time. It’s instinctual. Like moving toward home. We fit. But after I realize how close I am to fucking her in the hallway, I stop. Her silence in the car haunts me. The entire situation does. The ride to the hospital. How pale she was. The second time in my life that I thought my heart would stop because there was a chance hers had. But I need to say something first.
We both open our mouths at the same time—
“Marry me.”
“I’m pregnant.”
Our words collide, but the pieces of the crash fit into place, leaving our entire future whole.
I’m not shocked that she is. Neither is she. We’ve never protected ourselves from this outcome, or from each other. But my words have her blinking at me.
“You want to marry me?”
“All my life,” I say.
She grins. “You didn’t know me all your life.”
“The first time I saw you says differently.” I shrug. “When you know, you know.”
“I know,” she whispers.
“That a yes?”
“All my life,” she says.
She makes a breathless noise when I pick her up in my arms, her feet not touching the floor. She looks down at me, a smile on her face.
