Page 39 of Angel’s Doll

It doesn’t mean he owns me. It means every one of these men takes a bullet before anything touches me. It means when I walk into a bar in this city, nobody has to ask who stands behind me, because I’m the one who picked him.

“You’re shaking,” I say.

“I’m not.”

“Jericho. You are holding a piece of leather like it’s a live grenade.”

“It’s worse than a grenade.” He means it. “So. Do you want the club to know it the old way? Stand with me. Wear my name because you picked it.”

“Yes.”

He blinks. “You want a minute to think about⁠—”

“Jericho.” I put my hand over his on the leather. “I told you once. I made this decision at the dumpster.”

He breathes out like a man setting down a load he’s carried up a hill.

He shakes it open and holds it up behind me. I turn around and shrug into it. Heavier than I expected. Leather always is.

He smooths it down my back with both palms. He breathes rough at the base of my neck. He stands there a second longer than the job needs, and I let him.

I turn around in his arms. “Well?”

“Turn around again.”

“Rude.”

“Doll.” Wrecked. “Turn around.”

I do, slow, arms out, and catch myself in the wing mirror of his bike, the same mirror he watched me button a borrowed flannel on the first day, when everything I wore belonged to somebody else. Black leather squared to my shoulders. Nothing in the reflection is borrowed anymore.

When I come back around, the nerves are gone out of him. What’s left is hungry, and it’s catching.

“You should get back to the party,” I say. “Prez’ll notice.”

“Prez can wait.”

“Somebody could walk in.”

“Door’s shut.” He gets his hands on my hips and walks me backward into the bench. “You want me to stop, you say stop.”

“I want you to stay loud,” I tell him.

He laughs into my mouth.

Then neither of us is laughing.

He kisses me like a man who’s been waiting six weeks, which he has. He gets his hands under my shirt, up my ribs. The bench is warm at my back. Outside, somebody wins at horseshoes and forty people lose their minds. I barely hear it.

“Not taking this off you,” he says against my throat, and his hands go under the cut instead of over it. I laugh. He groans. My zipper goes down.

He lifts me onto the bench. A wrench hits the concrete and rolls off under the bike. Neither of us goes after it. I get his belt open while he’s busy at my ear, telling me in that low voice exactly what he thought about across the whole six weeks, in detail, until I’m the one saying hurry up.

“Still with me?” He’s grinning. He already knows.

“Way ahead of you,” I say, and pull him in.

It’s fast and greedy. I bite down on his shoulder because the whole club is forty feet away through a wall. He holds my hips. I hold his neck. The bench takes it. Leather creaking, my name in his mouth, both of them, Doll and Sloane. By the end I’ve got my teeth in him to stay quiet and it isn’t working.