Page 62 of Open Road

“Three years old,” I say.

“Yeah.”

“She runs this compound.”

“She runs me,” Roam says. “The compound is secondary.”

The word is right there, at the back of my throat, warmer than it was this morning, more certain. The compound, the yard, the wall that held last night and the men who made it hold, and this man standing beside me in the morning sun who kissed me in front of my daughter, let my daughter decide, and is still standing here with his coffee going cold because he is not going anywhere.

Home.

I haven’t said it.

The sun is warm. Inside, Rose is negotiating with Devil about the cookies. Gerald’s tail is wagging in the sunshine.

And I’m close.

Chapter Twenty-One

ROAM

Janie takes my hand, not the way she’s touched me before, the checking-in press of fingers, the deliberate contact of a woman who has learned to make every touch a decision. This is different. Her hand finds mine at the bottom of the stairs and closes around it. She looks at me once, a look with no ambiguity in it, and starts up.

I follow.

The room is mine, but she moves through it as if she’s measured it already, which she probably has. Janie maps every space she occupies, the exits, the windows, the light sources, an old habit. The kind the body keeps long after the reason for it is gone. She doesn’t turn on a lamp. The late afternoon comes through the blinds in long, flat strips, and it’s enough.

She turns me around.

Her hands go to my cut, and she pushes it off my shoulders. Sets it over the chair with a care that stops me for a second, the particular way she handles it, not like an obstacle but like something that matters. Then her hands are on my shirt, and I let her work the buttons because watching her do it, focusing, and deciding no version of me interrupts this.

Janie pushes off the shirt.

Her hands move across my chest, the tattoos, the dog tags, the geography of whatever forty-three years of hard use looks like, and she takes her time. Not hesitant but thorough. She reads me the way I read her, with patience and the attention something deserves when it matters.

Then she drops to her knees.

And the breath leaves my body.

Her hands are at my belt, unhurried and deliberate. She looks up at me once before she takes me in her hand, and what’s on her face is not uncertainty but intent—the face of a woman who has decided something and is seeing it through to its conclusion.

Her mouth finds me.

The sound I make is not a sound I planned to make.

She’s slow, thorough, the same focused attention she brings to everything, building it in careful increments, her hands and mouth working in concert, and what this requires of me is something I have not been asked to produce in a very long time—stillness and control. The particular discipline of a man who wants one thing badly enough to keep every muscle locked against it.

Her hair is dark against her shoulders, loose, and my hand goes there, stopping an inch from it. Hovering. Every instinct points in one direction, the want of it specific and immediate, to wrap it around my fist and stop being careful, stop accounting, take what she’s offering the way I would take it if she were—

She stops and looks up.

Her eyes find mine in the low light, and she reads me the way she reads everything—fast, accurate, and sees exactly what I’m holding back from. The calculation behind my eyes. The hand that isn’t quite touching her.

“I know you won’t hurt me,” Janie says.

Not permission or invitation, but a statement of fact delivered in the voice she uses for things she’s certain of. Janie has run the numbers on me over weeks of close quarters, watched how I move in a room and handle what I’m responsible for. She knows the difference, has always known the difference, and she’s telling me she knows.

The last of it goes.