Page 87 of Lady and the Butcher
“What does it make us?” he asked, and his mouth went softer like he already knew the answer and needed me to say it.
“Real,” I said. The word came out like a drop of blood. “Not a fantasy I can put back in a drawer.”
He exhaled once, slow, like a man who had loosened a knot. “Good,” he said, and then his mouth was on my forehead, my cheek, the corner of my mouth. Not consuming. Blessing. He kissed me like he was pressing a seal into wax. When he pulled back, I was shaking again and calmer than I had been in days.
“Pack a bag,” he said. “Two nights. I’ll put eyes on this house. Your father will not spend them alone.”
“I’m not leaving him,” I said.
“You’re not,” he agreed. “He’ll be with your grandparents. You’ll be with me where I can control every single variable. I won’t argue with you about this, Lady.”
“I’ll argue,” I said.
“Then you can argue on the way,” he said, and it should have made me want to bite him. It made me want to breathe into his chest until my body reset.
Dad came back in as I slid off the counter. He looked at Atticus, then at me. He didn’t look surprised that the air between us had changed temperature.
“Go,” he said. “Let him protect you for a couple of nights. I’ll get in touch if I need you.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“For what?” he asked, dry as kindling. “For being loved by a man who looks like he eats problems for breakfast? Don’t be daft. Take the bag you haven’t unpacked since you got here.”
I packed fast. Soft shorts. A tee. A sundress. Toothbrush. The book I wasn’t reading. When I came back through the hall, Atticus had one hand on the doorframe like he was absorbing the house through his palm. He looked at Dad and said, “I’ll bring her back.” Dad nodded once. Men do offerings with nods.
“Where are we going?” I asked when we stepped onto the porch. The sky had gone purple at the edges. The porch light made a halo on the old wood.
“Somewhere on the water,” he said. “Where sound travels and eyes don’t.”
“Is that a riddle?”
“It’s a promise.”
He opened the passenger door of a truck I hadn’t heard pull up, and I climbed in because every cell in my body had already decided to. He rounded to the driver’s side. I watched his hands on the wheel and thought of the note and the men who had vanished into the mangroves when they heard his voice. I thought of Stephen’s gray and the way Atticus had saidI know. I thought of the little boys with red fists and furious lungs and the little girls whose mothers wanted them to grow into something both soft and unbreakable.
When he pulled onto A1A, the lighthouse swung its light across the road. We slipped under it and kept going.
“You’re shaking,” he said without looking, and reached for my hand. He laced our fingers and put them on his thigh like he needed the weight.
“I’m angry,” I said, and realized it as I said it. “I’m angry that they came to my father’s house. I’m angry that I brought your trouble to his door.”
“You didn’t,” he said. “I did. And I’m done letting it leak.”
“What does that mean?” I asked, turning toward him, hunger and fear and something holy rising together in my chest.
“It means,” he said, knuckles whitening on the wheel, “I’m going to shut doors I should have shut before I ever touched you. It means I don’t lose what’s mine because I was too proud to change how I keep it.”
The wordmineshould have scared me. It did. And it warmed me like good whiskey.
“What happens after you shut them?” I asked.
He slid me a look that was too soft for the man who had leaned his mouth to a door and made men disappear. “Then we see if you can stand me without the noise.”
“And if I can’t?”
“I take you home,” he said. “And I build something you want to live in with the parts of me you can.”
I was getting used to his way of talking in circles and philosophies and symbolism.
