All for You

by Laura Florand

  He nodded, staring at his thumbs.

  “All right,” Célie said slowly, straightening from the railing.

  He didn’t ask about the motorcycle, when she led the way back to her moped. He didn’t knead her hips when he rode behind her. He just balanced with the grip of his thighs.

  Sickness grew in his stomach as he entered the code for the building, and he entered it wrong twice, a last-ditch subconscious effort to stop this self-humiliation. He swallowed the sickness down, but the bones of it lodged in his throat and even poked through in odd places in his chest, spiny shame.

  That shame grew bigger as he opened the door, this acute, puncturing pressure from his belly out all through him. He stepped to the side and pressed his back to the wall, bracing himself so that he didn’t leap forward and start blocking her way to the worst rooms.

  The rotten floorboards were right there for her to see. The stains from God-knew-what on the walls. The half-ripped-out bathroom. The old, cheap, yellowed linoleum counters in the kitchen, and the ugly, rusty, chipped white sink. He drove himself back against the wall with all the strength of his legs and closed his eyes, listening to her move around the place. God, he didn’t want to see her expression.

  “It, ah, needs a lot of work,” she said finally, coming back from her solitary exploration of the rooms.

  “I know,” he said between his teeth, staring at the floor.

  She stopped in front of the windows. “Oh, wow. What a view.”

  He lifted his head a little.

  She opened one of the windows and leaned out. “You can see most of the park! And the Eiffel Tower!”

  He watched her silhouette against the light outside. “And you, ah, like the neighborhood, right?”

  “It’s funky. Diverse. Not so—” She did a snobby thing with her nose and waved toward the horizon, apparently indicating other possible quarters in Paris. “Wow,” she said after a moment. “I can’t believe you found a place right on the park.” She snuck a quick glance at him. “No wonder you grabbed it.”

  He opened his hands, palm up. See? I thought I was doing the best thing.

  She pulled her phone out of her jacket pocket and showed it to him. “Maybe you could have texted me. Sent me a photo. Called and said, ‘Célie, I found this awesome place, but I have to grab it fast. What do you think?’”

  “I had a plan.” He rested his head against the wall behind him. Go all out for your goals. He’d already waited at least eight years for Célie, which seemed a long courtship. And he’d forgotten what she told him, that she hadn’t been waiting for him.

  Because he’d been too proud to ask her to.

  She turned away from the window to look at him. “What was your plan, Joss?” she asked, her tone so much gentler than it had been last time this came up.

  “To turn it into something beautiful before you saw it. So that your face would light up, you’d think it was so wonderful, and you’d, you know … cover me in kisses.” His cheeks heated. That same old stupid dream. “I didn’t want you to see it like this.”

  “Joss.” She came toward him. A little shock ran through him when she slipped her hands around his waist and leaned back to look into his face. His cheeks grew hotter under her look, but he stared down at her, caught by the fact that she had touched him again. “I’m never going to think of you as a failure. You know that, don’t you?”

  He swallowed, and then tried to harden his jaw. He’d learned young to shut out shame and blame—his teachers’, and later his mother’s. A psychopathic corporal on a power trip could dress him down during training and try to shame him and his fellow engagés into giving up and quitting, and he just let it wash off him, water off a duck’s back.

  But Célie … she mattered.

  “Never.” She lifted her hands to rest them on his shoulders. “Not then and not now. That’s not who you are.”

  It was who he had been refusing to be since … maybe since he was twelve. When his dad lost his job and everything started to go so wrong.

  Maybe he’d been drawn to the military because he, too, needed a strong big brother or father figure. To help him figure out how to be the man he was trying to be.

  Célie gave his shoulders a gentle squeeze. “You’ve always sparkled to me, Joss.”

  His blush swept up so deep he could feel it burning in his forehead.

  She stroked it, from his forehead down to his cheeks, which she framed.

  He took a deep breath, trying to absorb the coolness of her hands.

  “Sparkle is maybe not the right word,” she admitted. “You’re so steady and deep and true. And you try so hard. Joss, I just … you have to trust me with you enough to let me in. Because otherwise it’s always you going off on your own to make sure everything’s good enough, and leaving me alone.”

  “I’m trying,” he said.

  She looked around, at the wreck of an apartment in its perfect location. “Joss. Maybe there are men who were born perfect, born rich, born princes. But I don’t give a crap about them. I like the … work of you. The heart. The effort. I like that if you walk into a dump like this, you immediately see that all it will take to make it magnificent is you.” She ran her palms down his arms to take his hands and lift them. “Your own hands.”

  His cheeks just refused to cool. His fingers wanted to link with hers and clutch, like a drowning man. And he was supposed to be stronger than all this. He was supposed to be saving her.

  “But I like to work, too, Joss. I like to build, and make things better, and put my stamp on the world. If this is supposed to be our home, I’d like to be right in here with you, from the very beginning, scraping plaster off brick and painting walls and doing whatever else needs doing, to make it a perfect place for us.”

  “It’s filthy work, Célie.”

  She shook her head. “I’d way rather crawl through the mud beside you to get to a goal than sit somewhere in a tower wondering what you’re doing and if you’ll succeed.”

  “I’ll succeed,” he said immediately. “I won’t fa—”

  She put her hand over his lips. “Maybe you will fail, sometime, Joss. Maybe you’ll screw up again. Most of us do, don’t you get that? It’s what we do with our failures, and how we pick ourselves back up and grow, that shows our worth. Just because something might not succeed as well as you want it doesn’t make you a failure, as if that one effort defines your whole worth.”

  His breathing grew slower and deeper at her steady, firm voice, that sickness starting to calm. That warmth she brought him was growing in his middle, quieting the rest. “I should … talk with you about this more,” he said.

  She smiled wryly, but her eyes were such a rich, welcoming brown.

  “You—make sense.” He rested his hands on her shoulders. God, they felt good under his hands. Small and strong. Her own kind of strength.

  “See? If you help make sense of me, and I help make sense of you … you see how that works? But for it to work properly, you have to let me know when you feel weak or wrong. So I can, you know, help get your head back on straight.”

  “Center me.”

  A surprised smile kicked across her face. “That’s what you do for me,” she protested.

  He ran his hands down from her shoulders, squeezing her upper arms gently. “I guess you’re saying that we can do it for each other.”

  The surprise faded from her smile, and she looked so happy. But she grew solemn again. “And if you’re doing something hard that I can’t help you with, that I can’t do, too, I’d like to be around to support you. I would have done that, you know. Finished up my baker’s apprenticeship and come to join you in Corsica, maybe opened up my own little bakery there. I bet I could have made a killing off all those hungry soldiers. But you would have had to trust me enough to risk letting me see you fail.”

  Trust her not to think of him as a failure, not to make him a failure by that very loss of belief in him, if she saw him struggle with or even fail at one of the
thousands of impossible challenges thrown at men who wanted to become paratroopers in the Foreign Legion.

  “I’m not your mother,” Célie said.

  He stiffened. “I know that, Célie.” For God’s sake, he was twenty-six years old, a paratrooper in the Foreign Legion, and she assumed he was still confusing his girlfriend with his mother? What the hell did a man have to do to prove himself as strong, free of his parents, above all that?

  Besides, Célie wasn’t anything like his mother.

  Not … anything.

  No matter how mad she got, she never shamed, she never reduced, she never called a man a failure. You’re amazing. Actually, half the time when she got mad at him, it seemed to be because he didn’t think he was amazing enough. The very opposite of shame.

  Célie smiled ruefully. “I know you know that here.” She rested her hand on his heart. “But sometimes you forget it here.” She touched her other hand to the back of his head.

  He raised his eyebrows at her.

  “Is that where the subconscious part of the brain is?” she whispered. “The back of the mind?”

  So he had to laugh a little. Damn, he loved her. He pulled her in closer.

  She held his gaze. “I won’t ever try to make you smaller. I won’t ever look down at you for not being good enough.”

  She was so fierce, as if the princess in the tower had always really been a dragon who happened to have long, curly eyelashes. No wonder that, eight years in, he still hadn’t managed to win her. He’d been trying to court the wrong damn species.

  “I think I always knew that here.” He covered her hand on his heart. “But maybe I sometimes forgot it here.” He covered her hand on the back of his head. “Or wherever that idiot part of the brain is.”

  She smiled a little. “And you know,” she said quietly. “I might do something hard. I might like to have you around to support me, too, in my quests. When I’m, I don’t know … working forty-eight hours straight the week before Valentine’s and would maybe, when I can finally stop, like someone who can just pick me up and take me home and feed me something besides chocolate and put me to bed, instead of having to make it home on my own.”

  Oh, yeah, he could do that. He liked the thought of it so much. Carrying her home—in his head, it was literally in his arms, through the streets, up the stairs—putting her to bed, giving her that cuddle. He wanted to be her source of cuddles more than anything in the world.

  He took another slow breath, long and clean, relaxing tension. “I like this communication of yours. Just talking it out. I like it this way, kind of … calm, you know? When you’re not angry or accusing or blaming, I can … hear you better.” Instead of his whole being bracing against it.

  She squeezed his face very gently. “I could maybe improve my communication style, too.”

  That made him smile. “I don’t know. The chocolate take on boiling oil from the castle walls had a certain flair.” Or maybe that had been a chocolatier-dragon’s version of fire-breathing.

  She laughed a bit and rose on her tiptoes suddenly to wrap her arms around his shoulders. “I can cover you in chocolate again sometime,” she murmured teasingly into his neck. “It’s a cute look on you.”

  Laughter. His arms closed around her. If she could tease him, then she had let him back in.

  “Trust me, I’ve been covered in worse.” He boosted her up, urging her thighs around his hips so he could fit them better together. That brought her face nearly level with his, and he kissed her quickly, unable to help himself.

  She kissed him back. It was supposed to be a quick, stolen kiss, but it turned into something else—slow and careful on both sides, tender and gentle, checking out all the angles. Are you still here? I can still do this? This way, too? And this way? Are we going to be okay?

  She leaned back to take a breath, her eyes a little shy.

  “Do you, ah … think we could go back to dating?” he asked. “Like girlfriend and boyfriend?”

  Her smile lit her whole face. “I would like that.”

  “And … would you consider taking on this dump of an apartment with me? Maybe we could beat it into shape?”

  She squeezed him in happiness and tucked her face into the side of his neck again, kissing his jaw.

  So that was what it felt like to get covered in kisses.

  Not quite how he had imagined it, but definitely good enough for him.

  “You don’t make any sense, though,” he mentioned, involuntarily. “I mean—you’d rather break your back and rub your fingers raw on this dump than have the apartment handed to you shiny and beautiful, with nothing for you to do?”

  “I don’t know, Joss. How would you feel if you found out I was working my butt off by myself trying to beat an apartment into shape to hand to you?”

  He hesitated a very long moment. His eyebrows drew together suspiciously. “That can’t be the same thing.”

  She nipped his neck very delicately. “Just chalk me up as weird, then.” She jumped down and spun around to look at the place and stopped before the wall covered with peeling, stained old wallpaper, her eyes narrowing. “What do you want to bet there’s a brick wall under there? It’s going to be a bitch to get off all the plaster and reveal it, though.”

  “Did you see the fireplace?”

  She looked back over her shoulder to give him a slow smile. “Nice, cozy rug right here?” She gestured to the space in front of the fireplace. “Couch here?” Another gesture.

  And she was right. It was so much nicer to work on it together.

  ***

  “I really do like this apartment that’s all bed,” Joss said that night, with that low, deep vibration of his voice through her back. His breath tickled her hair, his arm heavy and warm over her, that callused palm gently stroking her forearm. She smiled into the fold of white sheets that half blocked her view of the window. “I’m glad it’s going to take us six months to get that other apartment into shape. I’m sorry I take up so much of your space here, though.”

  Her smile deepened. “No, you’re not. You like taking up as much space as you do.”

  His thumb rubbed her forearm, and he kissed the top of her head.

  “I like this cuddle,” she whispered. “I like it so much.”

  “Yeah. I like it, too.”

  Yet another thing that made it better than all her vague imaginings—the sand-rasped depth of his voice, the way she could feel it in her own body, because he lay so close and warm against her. That warmth and sweetness that seemed to sink all through her and become her in some essential way.

  Maybe it was a good warmth and sweetness to let herself become.

  “I could tell you a bedtime story,” that low, deep voice said against her back.

  She linked her fingers with his big ones and waited.

  “There was once a man nobody believed in. Not one person. Except you. And he’d do anything, anything in the world, not to lose that belief in him. But he felt like this unfired clay standing out there in the rain, slowly dissolving, while she kept looking up at him like he was a marble statue. And one day, he thought: I will go get fired in a kiln at least. I will become that man, so nothing and nobody can melt me into mud at her feet instead of the hero she thinks I am. He thought it was a fair trade—to take away the clay and mud for a while so that he could come back as the real thing.”

  Her fingers tightened on his, pressing his hand to her belly. Oh, Joss.

  “But … he was just a stupid kid. And kind of screwed up. He didn’t know how long five years was, or that his girl couldn’t possibly wait in a tower that long—she’d climb down her own hair and cut it off to get free and go make herself into someone she could admire, since she had to have someone. He’s proud of her that she did that, though.” His arm squeezed her. “He’s sorry that he wasn’t there, but he’s very, very proud.”

  She brought their linked hands to her lips and kissed the calluses on his palm. “She’s proud of him, too,” she whispered. �
�She’s very, very proud.”

  Chapter 25

  “I love this rug.” Célie petted the plush, soft white thing. Joss watched her, a profound peace and satisfaction stretching through his body, like the warmth from the fire.

  Their motorcycle leathers hung by the door, drops of rain still clinging to them, and the light from the fire flickered over them. They’d finally been able to move in three weeks ago. Just in time for the Christmas season, when Célie was utterly swamped.

  She’d worked until ten yet again, and Joss had swung by to pick her up. Mostly Célie preferred to drive herself. In fact, he’d kind of created a monster with that gift of a motorcycle, because she drove way the hell too fast, he was always having to fight with her to slow down, and she’d decided to let her hair grow to shoulder-length so she could see if that and the motorcycle leathers made her look like Black Widow.

  She teased him about being Captain America, too, but Joss just shook his head at her. No offense to Captain America, but that man did not need to wait around eight years respecting Black Widow and not making his move on her. Just a little tip Joss could give him.

  Plus … Captain America was a superhero, serum-enhanced. And Joss … Joss was human. All the impossible tasks Joss and his fellow Legionnaires had accomplished, all the buildings they’d jumped from and cliffs they’d scaled and weights they’d carried, all the wounds they’d survived, they’d had to do it with their own base human bodies.

  With the clay of them, that they fired in a kiln of their own will.

  He liked the hardness of his human body. Liked the way it felt, when he picked Célie up on his own motorcycle because she’d worked so hard and so late that she … maybe didn’t need him. Maybe that wasn’t the right word. But it helped her, that he was there when she could finally get off, those nights when she was too tired to play at Black Widow. It helped her that she could slide exhausted on the bike behind him and wrap her arms around him and let him handle the traffic in the dark and the rain. It helped her that he made sure she put some actual decent rations into her body besides just chocolate, to get her ready again for another tough day tomorrow, and the next day, and all the way through until after New Year’s.