Page 15 of Angel’s Doll

“Nothing to mention.”

“At Halcyon they’d have invoiced me by dinner.”

I’ve been hunting for traps since the alley, and I keep coming up bare.

“Twelve hours. I’ve known you twelve hours and nobody in this building has asked me for a single thing I didn’t offer.”

“Thirteen,” he says. “About.”

A laugh gets out of me, small and cracked. He watches it land on my face and stays crouched there, patient, my thumb still at his mouth. I make myself take my hand home.

“Why Doll?” I ask. “The truth.”

He takes a moment with it. “Your picture’s in your uncle’s file. Before the alley, that’s all you were to me. I wrote corporate doll under your face. Pretty thing on Hale’s shelf.”

No apology in it, no flinch either. He hands me the ugly version whole, and that’s how I know the rest of his versions are real.

“I was wrong about you. I knew it by the time you climbed out of the garbage. The name stuck anyway. Say the word and it dies tonight.”

I turn it over. In Durey’s mouth, darling niece was a price tag. In Victor’s, my own name was a summons. But this man says Doll careful, the porcelain held in two hands, not displayed on the shelf.

“I’m keeping it,” I say. “It’s mine now.”

“Yeah,” he says. “It is.”

He rises off his heels then, and sits beside me on the edge of the bed, a careful foot of space between us. The mattress dips toward him. I let myself list into the lean and stop, one degree short of his shoulder.

“Angel isn’t your name either,” I say. “Your real one.”

He’s quiet long enough that I brace for the no. It would be fair. I’m not sure how it goes, club rules and all.

“Jericho,” he says. “My mother used to call me that. She’s gone. Bishop uses my name when I’ve earned a sentence.” A beat. “That’s the whole list of people.”

Jericho.

Everything with my name on it belongs to Halcyon. My phone, my card, my address, my coat. And this man reaches into the short list of what’s only his and hands me one across a foot of blanket. I put it away next to the driver’s license in my pocket. Two things now. Both mine.

“Jericho,” I say, testing the weight of it.

His jaw tightens once, like the sound found an old bruise.

I’ve been wondering about his mouth all day. Whether it could possibly be soft, over the cut and under all that quiet violence. I’m done wondering. I turn. I close the foot of space. I kiss him.

His mouth is soft. Softer than the cut promised, careful of its own damage, warm. For one second he holds absolutely still, the same stillness he gave me in the alley, letting me choose it all the way. Then he answers. One hand comes up to my jaw, fingers sliding into the hair behind my ear, and he kisses me back, slow, thorough, asking for nothing past the kiss itself. He tastes faintly of coffee. Under my palm his heart is going hard, and the gap between that hammering and his gentle hands undoes me more than the kiss does. He wants me I think and he isn’t taking.

I know what it is to be wanted as furniture. Useful, placed, replaceable. I have never once been wanted like this, held like a decision I get to keep making.

He’s the one who ends it. He gentles the kiss closed, rests his forehead against mine, and we breathe each other’s air while his thumb moves once along my cheekbone.

“Nothing more tonight, Doll.”

I brace, old habit, for the sound of a door closing. He must catch it crossing my face, because his hand firms at my jaw, tips my chin up so I take the next part straight.

“Next time you kiss me, it’s not going to be at the end of one of the worst days of your life.” His voice has gravel in it now, the cost of the stopping finally audible. “You’re going to have good days. I plan to be in them. I’ll wait for one.”

Not a refusal. A reservation.

“Okay,” I whisper, and the word doesn’t cost me anything at all.