Page 109 of Bounced!

Rod was already in his kitchen, of course, already hollering, already at war with a fryer. Already home.

The good folk of Ybor filled the bar. They filled every inch of it. The band set up in the corner, and the taps ran, and Rod’s food came out in an endless river. Noise rose until it was the exact noise this place had made on its best nights, the sound of hundreds of people who had all, at one time or another, been saved by this room on this corner.

Mark found me at the door. He had a rag over his shoulder and a look on his face I’d learned to love. It was his overwhelmed one, the one he got when his caring for everybody threatened to spill over the top of him.

“You’re at the door,” he said.

“Still my job.”

“You gonna stand here all night reading the room?”

“No.” I took the rag off his shoulder. “I’m done standing at that door, Mark.”

“You keep ending up here, though.”

“I like watching them come in, so I can welcome them home.” I looked out at it, the whole roaring, saved, wonderful thing. “That’s different than guarding the exit.”

He pulled me outside for a minute, into the cold, under the new sign. The street was quiet after the roar of the bar, the January air sharp and clean. Our new sign hummed softly above us and tossed blue light down onto the sidewalk. Down the block, I could see scaffolding on the units Mark was going to bring back to life. The whole corner was coming alive instead of coming down.

“I want to ask you something,” Mark said. “And I’ve been trying to figure out how to do it right, and there’s no good way, so I’m just going to do it wrong.”

My heart did a thing.

“Mark—”

“Not that.” He laughed, quick, nervous. “Not . . . I mean, yes that . . . eventually . . . obviously. I’m forty-eight. I’m not going to pretend I don’t know where this goes, but that’s . . . I’ll do that right, with a ring when you’re not expecting it. That’s coming, fair warning.” He blew out a breath that fogged in the cold. “This is something different. It’s smaller but also bigger, I think. I don’t know.”

“Okay.”

Under the sign, in the blue light, in the January cold, he took my hands.

“Move in with me,” he said. “I want my house to become ours. I know why you kept your condo. I’ve always known why you kept it. It’s your exit. It’s the place you go back to when everything gets too big or real or whatever . . . and you need a wall between you and the world.” He held on tighter. “I’m not asking you to give up having a wall. I’m asking you to, well, make me the wall instead. Come home, all the way home. Give up the exit, because I swear to God, Dante, you’re never going to need it again, not with me. I’ll be the safe place you were keeping that condo to be . . . if you’ll let me.”

I stood there in the cold, and I couldn’t think. I definitely couldn’t talk. My eyes were misting, and it was freaking cold, and my breath puffed and—

He’d seen it all.

Of course he had.

He’d known I’d never quite let go of the condo, the books on every wall and the good chair and the door I could close. He’d known it was the last exit I’d kept, even after I’d let myself have everything else. He was right. My whole life, I’d kept an exit. Even in love, I’d kept one door I could walk out of, because a man who’d lost what I’d lost never fully stopped planning his escape.

And there was Mark, offering to be everything I’d kept the exit for.

“I’ve had an exit my whole life,” I said. My voice wasn’t working right. I blamed the cold. “Every room, every job, every . . . every person. I always knew where the door was, Mark. That’s how I survived. That’s the whole reason I’m still—”

“I know, babe.”

“I don’t know how to not have one.”

“I know that, too.” He put his forehead against mine, the way I loved so damn much. “So we do this slow. Keep the condo for as long as you want, but the offer stands, and it’s not going anywhere. Neither am I. Come home when you’re ready. Tonight, next month, next year, I’ll be the door you don’t have to guard.” He smiled, that big, helpless, goofy one that looked so ridiculous—and so perfect—on such a serious face. “That’s the whole deal, Dante. I take care of what’s mine. And you’re mine. And I’m yours. I will be your safe place until one of us is dust.”

I stood there under a sign that said we belonged to something now, in the arms of a man who’d just offered to be my wall or my exit—to be my home—and I felt, for the first time in my whole guarded life, no urge to leave at all.

“Yes.”

He blinked. “You don’t have to answer right—”

“Yes, Mark. I’ll come home, all the way. I’ll sell the condo to somebody who needs an exit, because I’m done needing one.” I got my hands in his coat and pulled him in. “I found the thing on the other side of the door, remember? Turns out it was you. It was all of this. Why would I keep a way out of the only place I ever wanted to be?”