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I woke a while later, with Dante asleep against my side. I thought about the card in my shirt pocket, hanging on the back of the chair across the dark room. I’d carried it three weeks now, and I still hadn’t called Gerald. I understood, lying there, why I kept not doing it. It wasn’t the bar I was scared of losing anymore. Two months ago, I’d have made the call without blinking, because two months ago the worst thing that could’ve happened was losing a building. Now, there was a man asleep on my arm, and I had learned the hard way, twice, exactly what it felt like to build a life around someone and then watch the ground open underneath it. I didn’t want anything to open under this one, so I let the card hang on the chair and pulled Dante in closer and told myself, again, I’d call on Monday.

Chapter 21

Dante

Iwoke before Mark, which surprised me. I’d have bet good money I wouldn’t sleep at all.

The light was doing the gray thing it did before it committed to the morning, sneaking through blinds that weren’t mine in a room that wasn’t mine. For a second, I didn’t move. I just lay there and took my usual inventory.

Where I was. What was touching me. Where the exits were.

The answer to all three was Mark.

He was on his back with one arm thrown over his eyes and the other pinned under me, dead asleep, a mountain range of man breathing slow and even. I was tucked into the side of him with my head half on his chest and my leg over both of his. I hadn’t moved all night. That got me. I always slept light, guarded even. I’ve woken up at the wrong end of a bed with my heart going ninety miles an hour because a car door slammed two streets over. Somehow, last night, I’d slept the whole night through while pinned under the arm of a man like a drawbridge nobody was raising.

And I didn’t run.

That was the thought that bubbled up out of me in the gray light, quiet and almost funny. After thirty-nine years of guarding a locked door and a life built so nobody could leave it, I’d actually stayed. I hadn’t even considered leaving.

Perhaps most confounding, I couldn’t stop smiling. I kept grinning like some idiot teen who’d just had his cherry popped. Against every instinct, I lay there and let myself have it, the whole ridiculous, warm, impossible weight of it. Then my arm, the one wedged under his ribs, started to go tingly and numb. I shifted to save it, and the mountain range woke.

“Mm.” He didn’t open his eyes. His arm came off his face and landed on my back, heavy and sure, pinning me in place. “No. Nope. Too early. Stay.”

“My arm’s asleep.”

“Sacrifice it. You have another.”

“It’s my dominant arm.”

“Your other one will learn to jack you off. It’ll be okay.” He cracked one eye open, found me, and his whole face did a thing I wasn’t prepared for. It went soft and stupid and shy. This six-foot-three slab of a man-muscle went bashful in his own bed at the sight of me, color coming up under his gray stubble.

“Hey,” he said before smacking the morning from his lips a few times.

“Hey.”

“You’re still here.”

“I’m still here.”

“I wasn’t sure you would be.” He said it plain. In that moment, I understood that he’d braced for something, too. “I had a whole speech ready for if you weren’t here. It was going to be very dignified.”

“I’d like to hear it.”

“Too bad. You stayed. Speech is void, forgotten, tossed out.” He grinned and pulled me up higher against him, then he kissed the top of my head like it was nothing, as though he’d been kissing the top of my head for years rather than hours. Something in my chest folded clean in half.

Here is what I learned about Mark Delgado, and I thought I knew everything. I knew he was a good man. For two years, I’d watched him be good, watched him carry a whole family on his back and never set it down, watched him put a hand on a shoulder that needed one. Good was the first thing anybody learned about the man. Good was on the sign.

I didn’t know he was also sweet.

Nobody had warned me.

I looked at all his bulk and gray and grim, a man who put a drunk on the sidewalk without spilling his own drink, and “sweet” was not a word that came to mind, but he woke up and the first thing he did was make sure I was still there. The second thing he did was to blush about it. The third thing he did, once we’d untangled and I’d gotten my dead arm back, was disappear into the kitchen and come out some minutes later with a mug held in both hands like an offering.

Tea.

Not coffee.

Tea, because I take tea in the mornings and coffee at night, the opposite of him.