Page 27 of Angel’s Doll

His breath arrives first, warm. Then his mouth, and everything I’ve read goes out of print.

Nothing on paper mentioned the patience. Nothing mentioned that he would pay attention to what makes my breath stutter and then come back to it, unhurried, thorough, in no rush to be anywhere else. Nothing mentioned the sound he makes against me, low and wrecked, like I’m the one giving.

It builds again, higher, no ceiling anywhere I can find. My hands finally learn where they go. His hair. His shoulder. He hums against me when my fingers tighten, and the sound nearly finishes it.

I wait for the turn, the shift that means now it’s about him. It never comes. There’s no turn in him tonight. There’s me, his patience, and the lamp I asked him to leave on.

I break with his name on my lips.

He stays with me through it, hands steady on my hips. When I come back, he kisses the inside of my knee and says my name against my skin.

After, the room comes back a piece at a time. The lamp. The floodlight stripe on the ceiling. His heartbeat under my ear, and it is not calm. That’s the part that undoes me. He wants. I can hear it running under his ribs. He set every bit of it down and asked for nothing.

Old training reaches anyway. My hand starts down his chest with a purpose I only half understand, and he catches it, laces our fingers, brings my knuckles to his mouth.

“No.” Gentle, and not negotiable.

“But you⁠—”

“Not because you owe me.” He sets our hands flat over his heart. “When you touch me, and Doll, you will, it’ll be because you want to. Not to get square.”

“Okay,” I say, and find out I mean it.

He reaches over me and turns off the lamp. The floodlights keep their stripe on the ceiling, the club’s idea of a night-light, the fence lit because tomorrow we have to face the Quinlans and the world out there gets loud again. His arm comes around me. I fit against his side, my mother’s ring a small warm circle between us.

“Tomorrow’s going to be loud,” I say.

“Probably.”

“Should I be scared?”

“You should sleep. Scared’s my shift.”

I laugh into his shirt, and my eyes are already closing.

I asked for what I wanted. The most dangerous man I’ve ever met said yes and took nothing.

His arms aren’t a place I was put. They’re a place I decided to go, and to sleep in.

14

ANGEL

Iget one boot laced before she stirs.

Up, dressed, no lying there taking a morning that wasn’t offered. Two nights ago she was afraid of the dark. Last night was a different country. A man could come home from a night like that thinking he holds a passport now. He doesn’t. Every door in her still opens from her side, and I mean to keep it that way.

The second boot’s in my hand when the blanket shifts.

“You’re sneaking.”

“I’m dressing. Sneaking’s quieter.”

She sits up in one of my tee shirts, hair pressed to one side, her mother’s ring out of her collar where the night worked it loose.

“What time is it?”

“Church time. Quinlans.” I pull the lace tight. “You get a say in how much of it lands on you. You want the plan before, after, or not at all?”