Page 88 of Lady and the Butcher
The world outside the window unfurled, dark and salt-sweet. He drove the way he touched me—decisive, unhurried, always aware. I pressed my free hand to my ribs and felt my breath doing the work it knew—slow in, slower out, soften what clenches, make room for what’s coming.
When we turned down a narrow road toward a low shape on the river, I realized I had stopped shaking. I hadn’t stopped wanting. Not just for him. For the life that didn’t ask me to choose between being held and being whole.
He squeezed my hand once before we got out. “Two nights,” he said. “Then I take you back to your father, and I start taking apart a life I no longer want to live.”
“You’re not saying that because you’re scared tonight?” I asked.
“I’ve been scared since the night you made my mind shut up,” he said. “I just didn’t call it the right name.”
He opened my door and I stepped into night air that smelled like river and the next right thing.
Somewhere in the dark, a boat line creaked. Somewhere else, a heron lifted off black water with a sound like silk tearing. He took the bag from my shoulder without asking, and I didn’t correct the impulse.
I wanted to be taken care of by him.
Inside, he didn’t put me against glass or ask me to say I was his. He drew a bath and set my bare feet on the cool tile and washed the salt from my skin with his hands open and careful. He kissed my wrists like oaths. When I trembled, it wasn’t fear. When I cried, it wasn’t panic. When he finally put his mouth to mine, it wasn’t a taking. It was a vow.
“You terrify me,” I whispered into his throat.
“And?” he asked, the question a smile against my hair.
“And I still want you,” I said. “But I need you to want a life I can put my name on.”
“I do,” he said. “Starting now.”
Outside, the river kept its own counsel. Inside, he lowered me to clean sheets and didn’t ruin me. He remade me, piece by piece, with patience that felt more dangerous than any threat. When I came apart, it was quiet, my hands fisted in his shirt because he hadn’t bothered to take it off. He was still dressed like a man who could walk out into the night and pull it down around himself, if he needed to, and still he stayed. When he followed, it wasn’t a groan into my throat—he buried his face against my sternum like a man who had found water and intended to drink.
Later, when sleep tugged at my bones, he checked the locks I couldn’t see and the angles I didn’t know to worry about. He came back and lay on his back and let me put my ear to his chest. His heart was steady. Mine matched it.
“Two nights,” I said into his skin.
“Two,” he agreed.
“And then you start shutting doors.”
“Then I start shutting doors,” he said, and I heard the part he didn’t say—or die trying.
I pressed my palm flat over his heart and counted the beats I had almost lost. Outside, the lighthouse swung its slice of lightacross a city older than either of us and did it again, and again, as if that were the simplest thing in the world.
29
By the third morning, back at Dad’s, St. Augustine had started to smooth my edges. Atticus had left for a while—slipped out with a promise to keep a close eye, on me and on the street that wasn’t theirs to touch. I woke to the oak tapping the screen and the smell of coffee drifting down the hall. Dad hummed something old and off-key while he fried eggs.
The cottage held the quiet I’d come for. Not empty. Full of small sounds. The kind that let a body unclench.
Dad and I took our mugs to the beach and walked the hard line where the water kissed our ankles, then ran away. The sky wore a thin glaze of cloud. Pelicans glided low. Dad didn’t ask me anything I couldn’t answer. He let the tide set our pace.
The ache in me hadn’t gone. It had only moved deeper.
I could pretend it was distance that hurt. It wasn’t. It was the shape of a man who had taught my body a new language and then kept speaking it in my head. I kept my phone face down in my pocket.
I still felt the thread of Atticus like a wire. It hummed when I got too quiet.
After lunch, Grandpa came by with a newspaper under his arm and a list of opinions about the weather. He kissed the top of my head and sniffed the air like he could smell worry. He didn’t mention it, though. He told me the surf would be good at four.
I tried to nap and failed.
The quiet in my father’s house was kind. My mind was not. It filled the room with Atticus. The sound he made when he pushed into me. The way his voice changed when he saidmine. The look he wore when someone crossed a line. The blood on his knuckles. The gun on the nightstand. The knock. The way he had saidsafelike he was naming a place he had built with his own hands.
