Page 36 of Angel’s Doll

“Victor decided everything for ten years. Grief isn’t deciding this. Fear isn’t. I am. I’m not paying you. I’m not thanking you. I’m deciding it’s you.” A breath. “I know you’d stop the second I said stop. That’s exactly why I’m asking you not to.”

She’s had enough of men handing her their fear and calling it protection.

“You say stop⁠—”

“You’ll stop. No matter what. I know,” she says. “Jericho.”

My given name in her mouth takes my knees out worse than the gunfire did.

After that I stop talking and start being careful with my hands.

I undress her slow, the dry shirt I gave her minutes ago. She laughs once, shaky and real, at the waste of it, and the laugh loosens both of us. She pulls my shirt over my head. Her fingers map the scar on my ribs, the ink on my shoulder, learning me with the concentration she gives everything. I hold still for it. Being learned by her is worth holding still for.

I lay her down on the bed and take her apart gently first, mouth and hands, until she’s trembling for the right reasons and saying my name like an instruction. Only then, braced over her, do I ask.

“Still with me?”

“Still mine,” she says as she pulls me down.

I go slow. Slower than I’ve ever been with anything. When her breath catches on the edge of hurt I stop dead, all of me shaking with the cost of it, and she presses her heels into me and says, “Don’t you dare stop.” So I don’t.

I watch her face the whole time, and soon the hurt leaves it and what’s left is wonder, hers and mine both. She moves with me, asks for more here, less there, imperfect words but perfect honesty, and I give her everything she asks for.

It’s not taking. Nothing about it is taking. When she comes apart she says Jericho, and I follow her over saying Doll into her hair like a prayer I finally believe in.

After, I clean her up with a warm cloth and no ceremony, pull the blanket over both of us, and tuck her spine against my chest. Her mother’s ring has swung around on its lace and sits between her shoulder blades. I leave it there.

“Talk to me,” I say. “Any regret in this room, I want its name.”

She turns in my arms so I can see there isn’t. “You’re still doing it. Worrying you let the night choose for me.”

“I don’t want you waking up thinking that. Not ever.”

“I had made my decision before tonight,” she says, already going under, her hand flat over the oldest scar I’ve got. “I think I made it when I took your hand to get out of the dumpster. Tonight was just about catching up.”

She’s asleep in minutes, in my bed, breathing slow while the compound settles back to its normal routine. The war we prepared for is being swept off the board by men in better suits than us.

I stay awake and hold what she spent.

I didn’t take her freedom. I’m where she spent it first, and I mean to be worth the price.

Every door in this room opens from her side. My job now is keeping it that way.

EPILOGUE

DOLL

Maverick pulls Darling’s chair out at noon, same as every Sunday, and the whole lot settles around that small ceremony like it’s the bell for church.

Grill smoke over the picnic tables. Two long tables pushed into one. Phoenix ferrying trays from the kitchen and threatening the hands that reach for the foil early. Levi on the gate, trying to look bored and failing, because today there’s cake.

It’s the first Sunday since Victor’s house.

The news gave it four paragraphs. Home invasion gone wrong, two men dead, an investigation that everyone at this table knows will stay ongoing until it quietly isn’t. Chicago’s people walked the house before the first badge did. They were thorough. The Quinlans buried their cousin in Chicago. Nobody sent flowers. The truce holds.

I still wake some nights with three flat tones in my ears. Angel doesn’t tell me it will pass. He turns on the light and stays awake with me until it does.

Cash finds me between the coolers and the horseshoe pit with a folder under his arm. Other men bring beer to a barbecue. Cash brings probate.