by Serena Bell
But all she could think about was the tenderness with which he’d taken her hand on the beach. He was a man who could be rough and gentle, a man who had hurt someone badly—to save someone he loved from pain.
It wasn’t the kind of justice she believed in. It wasn’t right.
And yet, she wanted him never to have had to make that decision. She wanted him to be able to live in a world where he would never have to make a decision like that again.
She wanted to live in a world where what he’d done wouldn’t keep him from being loved for all the good that was still in him.
One of the women at her table said, “Hon? You okay?”
She nodded.
Five pairs of eyes followed her gaze, and the woman who’d spoken first said, “Goodness.”
She took the last woman’s order—tacos, so apparently she hadn’t lost her persuasive powers—and headed behind the counter. She was sorting silverware when she felt him, close. Close enough that she was aware of the long, hard lines of his body, the warmth of his breath on her ear, the electrons that danced in the space between the surface of his skin and the surface of hers, a space that wanted to draw itself closed like a healing wound. “You’re working?”
There was a hopeful note in his voice that set off a resonant frequency in her chest, and she caught her breath. He must have heard it, because his breath snagged, too.
“I’m just filling in. Headed back to Chicago tomorrow.”
He looked crestfallen, which made her disturbingly happy. “You here to eat?”
“Actually, I’m here to see if I can help Markos with the trap. I’ve been helping out here a bunch…” He lowered his voice. “I didn’t tell him I learned how to do it in the prison kitchen, though.”
She liked his confidential tone, and the way he leaned close, so close she could smell the sharp tang of his soap. She could feel him in the tiny hairs that stood up all over her cheek and neck, in the trail of nerves down her arm and into her nipples, and in a straight shot of adrenaline that buffeted her heart and started heat swirling between her legs.
That adrenaline didn’t feel like fear. It felt like sex, pure and simple.
“Hey, dude,” Hadley said, and Kincaid followed him into the kitchen while Lily put her orders in, her body humming.
After a while, Hadley came to tell her that Blake once again hadn’t shown up. “Markos said I can ask you if you’ll cook.”
“I’ll cook if you promise not to harass me.”
“I promise not to harass you if you don’t fuck with the recipes,” Hadley said, loudly enough for Markos to hear, and Markos glared at both of them.
“I promise not to fuck with the recipes if they don’t suck,” whispered Lily, and she’d swear one corner of Hadley’s grim mouth lifted.
It felt like a victory.
Lily put on an apron and went into the kitchen. They were short-handed on both sides of the counter, so she did what she could wherever she could, and she loved the madness of it, of having to be in two places at one time and always keeping her mind on what needed to be rescued from the burner, while still giving her undivided attention to people. She found that if she started to think of time as infinitely malleable, it became that way, stretching like taffy so there was always enough of her for everything that needed to be done. She felt like taffy, too, soft and limber, like that sweet, boneless moment after sex.
Kincaid had finished with repairs and was sitting in his booth. His order, of course, was a burger.
She carried it out on a plate and set it in front of him. She sat across from him and watched him eat, never taking her eyes off him. She watched the way his big, callused hands—perpetually etched with dirt, even though she’d seen him wash them for long minutes under hot soapy water—grasped the burger. She watched his eyes close with pleasure when he took the first bite. She watched him chew, savoring, and the slow smile that spread across his face.
At least as good as sex.
Then he opened his eyes and watched her watch him, and his eyes challenged her. Oh, yeah?
Uh-huh.
He reached across the table and grasped her wrist. Tight. Tight enough to bruise, tight as the squeeze of her thighs together under the table. She let him see it wash over her face, that taut, hot pleasure, gave him all the yes she could with her eyes.
“I’d better get back to work,” she said.
“Probably a good idea.” He released her.
But his eyes were still telling her he had other ideas.
Would it be any different, if they tried again? Would she be able to let herself go this time?
What do you think you’re doing? she asked herself. But the truth was, the answer was, that what she was doing was enjoying herself for the first time in a month. Yesterday she’d given him his laptop, the will, and his grandmother back, but he’d given her something, too. He’d swept away the numbness. She’d seen him and it had all fallen away, all the weeks when she’d wondered how she could be living her oldest dream and still feel so dead.
Now she was living for sure, buzzing and vibrating, and feeling like she was exactly where she was supposed to be. Like all her mistakes had led her straight to the heart of life.
Maybe that meant they weren’t mistakes.
Maybe there were no mistakes. There were only choices and where you stood now and what you needed to do next, to be alive.
She was pretty sure she knew what she needed to do next. It was terrifying to throw your plans to the wind, to let go of what you’d always thought you should do—but liberating, too. The freedom of it rushed all around her, like the powdery air when you finally let yourself go on the ski slope and discover, for the first time, that you’re fully in control.
When things slowed down, she asked Alma if they still needed her, and Alma shook her head. “Don’t be a stranger.”
“I don’t intend to,” Lily said. She didn’t tell Alma what she was thinking, though. There was someone else she needed to talk to, first.
She told Hadley she was taking off. “Thank you,” he said. “You kept us out of the weeds. Go home. Alma and I will shut down.”
He didn’t say it kindly, or graciously, but he said it levelly, and she knew two things. That they were friends, of a sort, and that she wanted to run a different kind of kitchen than this, one where it was okay to be gentle sometimes and no one saw it as weakness.
When she finished extricating herself, she looked up, but Kincaid was gone.
She grabbed her purse and headed for her car. When she turned into the alley where she and Kincaid had first discovered each other, he was there.
She wasn’t really surprised to see him there but she gave a little jump anyway, and let out a squeak.
Heat leapt behind his eyes in the dimly lit alley. He took a step, crowding her to the wall.
Her body caught fire so fast it hurt, the rush of blood, the tightening, the way her muscles clenched and her soul threw itself open.
He turned her against the wall so her cheek pressed against the sandpaper roughness of the brick, and she whimpered.
“That.” His voice broke. “When you do that.”
“My car’s in the lot behind Sweet Treats.”
They didn’t make it inside his house. They parked in his driveway. She got out of the car and gave him a coy look over her shoulder, and he bent her over the trunk, reached under her skirt and tore the damp, twisted scrap of lace that had once been her underwear. He touched his finger to her swollen sex. “Mmmphn.” An indistinct, barely human grunt against her hair, while that finger eased her open—not that she needed easing. She backed herself up against him. Now.
He took her, fast, hard, and mean. He came in ten efficient strokes, choking out her name, hurting her ribs and hips where bone crunched against metal, making her flinch at the violence of his entry. The lace of her bra scraped her nipples, and she came, too, against his hand shoved between her and the car, rubbed his knuckles raw and bit her own lip.
Into the sound of their breathing, rapid and harsh, she said, “I’d rather be afraid than half-alive,” and he made a sound that wasn’t a word, but if it had been, it would have been amen.
Chapter 21
They lay in his bed for hours, while moonlight moved across the ceiling and then vanished completely, while a pale peach light heralded sunrise, until the whole room glowed with morning. And he told her.
“Nan was out. She had this Monday morning grocery run—she’d go to the little market and then the big market, and she was never gone less than two hours. I wasn’t living there by that time; I had my own place. This was the third time I’d tried to talk to him. The first time I really had just tried to talk, and the second time I’d threatened, but nothing had changed. Sunday night, the night before, he’d hurt her worse than I’d ever seen. He’d made her cry. Nothing made Nan cry. I don’t even remember her crying after my parents died. Maybe she did, but not where I could see.”
She curled around him and stroked his hair and comforted him with her body. And he kissed her face and held her tight. Holding her was the best thing, and holding her knowing that she could still give herself to him and get what she needed in return, that was even better.
“So that Monday morning I went, and I was determined to do whatever it took to make him hear me. But you have to believe me, I wasn’t thinking about cutting him. I was thinking I’d have to really get in his face, threaten him, cajole, convince him to get help, maybe talk him into leaving.
“I did all that. I threatened and cajoled and begged. I told him he was hurting her and I reasoned with him. I said, ‘I know you’re not this man, that there’s a better person inside you that doesn’t want to hurt her, but I know you must be hurting—’ ”
Lily made a soft little sound of distress. “Kincaid.”
“I believed it, Lil. That was how much good I saw in everyone, even him. Before. You can’t really hold on to that. That’s what I regret most, because I was like my grandmother before prison. She used to say that Arnie was hurting and that’s why he hurt her. She said he was like a wild animal that bit you when you tried to take care of it—but I don’t know. I don’t believe it anymore. I couldn’t hold on to believing that everyone is good, not anymore. I had to find a way to live in a world where many people are mostly good and some people aren’t.
“I think—”
He broke off.
“I think that’s what I like so much about you. That you’re good at the core, and you believe people are good like you.”
She shook her head.
“No, it’s true. You’re too good for me,” he said.
She shook her head. “No,” she said. “It’s not like that. We just do what we have to do, the best we can. We try to be good, but there’s some gray, too, and we’re going to be gray sometimes.”
He took a breath. “I told him if he hurt her again I’d kill him. And he laughed.”
She gasped.
“And I lost it, Lil. I lost it.”
It all rose up then, the rage and frustration, the impotence, and most of all the fear—fear that he would lose his grandmother, whom he loved, who loved him, who was the only person in his world, to this—to this shell of a human being, to this monster.
“Her knives were sharp. Her knives were always sharp.”
He’d never said any of it out loud. And he was so afraid, because he knew that once he told her this, she would know it about him, and he would never, ever be able to take it back.
“I lost it, but I also didn’t. I was cold and calm inside, black and dark. Not gray, Lil. The darkest moment of the night.”
“I know,” she whispered, and tucked his head against her chest, so his cheek was cradled against the soft curve of her breast.
“I took a knife from the block and I held it to his throat and I showed him how serious I was, because I knew that was the only way. I had to make him understand.”
“But you didn’t kill him,” she said.
He shook his head.
“Did you want to kill him?”
It felt like a path diverging, the truth and giving himself up to her completely in one direction, and in the other, the way she had held herself back from him that night over the car, and how much it had hurt. They could only do this if there was no holding back. It was all or nothing.
“Sometimes in prison I wished I’d killed him.”
He’d never told anyone that, either, and for a long time the words hung there in the strangely luminous room, the human capacity for causing pain balanced in the glow of what was best in people.
She tucked her nose down against his hair and breathed warmth against his scalp, and little by little, as she didn’t push him away, as she didn’t recoil in horror, his fear began to soften, to turn wispy, and finally, to fade.
“My grandmother—” He had to stop. His breath rasped against the hurt parts in his chest. “I lost her and I was scared—of losing you, too.” The next breath was a half-sob.
She gave him a moment to put himself back together again, without fussing or soothing. She just waited.
“That’s why I didn’t want to tell you what I did, because I didn’t want you to stop believing I was good. You were so good, and with your faith in me, your trust in me—I started to believe maybe I was good, too.”
She made a small grating sound and closed her eyes tight. “And then when I found out, I did exactly what you’d been afraid of—”
“No,” he said. “No. I thought that at first. But now I understand. You just did what you felt. And that’s what I—that’s what I love about you.”
She put her palm to his cheek and her lips to his ear and whispered, “And you listened. You heard me. I love you, too.”
They lay still in the rosy quiet dawn and contemplated that. They glowed with it.
“Do you still wish you’d killed him?”
There was something about her question, about her willingness to go as far as it was possible to go and still be willing to go one step further with him that choked him and made it impossible, for a moment, to answer.
She breathed quietly next to him until he believed his heart would keep on beating, and hers, too, right there, beside him.
Finally he said, “No. No. I can’t. If I had, I’d spend the rest of my life in prison, and I wouldn’t be here. With you.”
He touched her forehead, her nose, her cheeks. Her skin was softer than satin, and her lashes fluttered at his touch. He felt the butterfly of that movement in his own gut, and then it caught and became a deeper pull.
“I want you every possible way at once,” he said, with wonder. “Hard and fast, slow and gentle, with you begging me to stop and begging me to keep going. Dirty and mean and hurting, and clean and sweet and warm.”
She nuzzled her nose into his neck and wrapped her arms tight around him. “Let’s try that,” she said. “All at once.”
By the time they got out of bed to shower and cook breakfast, the sun was high; yellow light flooded the room, and he knew her, all the ways it was possible to know.
Chapter 22
She sent Tucker home without her and extended her stay a week. If her boss hadn’t been Tucker’s dad, he probably would have fired her ass, but he cut her some slack.
“Are you coming back to Chicago?” Tucker asked.
“I don’t know.”
“This is the twenty-first century, Lil. You can’t just give up everything for him.”
“I know,” she said. “But I’m also not willing to walk away. That’s why I don’t know.”
“Would he come to Chicago?”
“Maybe someday. But he can’t right now.”
In twenty months, if he didn’t slip up, he’d be free to live in whatever part of the country he wanted. Chicago made as much sense as anywhere else.
Except that Tierney Bay made a different kind of sense. Tierney Bay pulled on her the way Kincaid pulled on her, getting deep under her skin and speaking to some
part of her she hadn’t even known existed. Her sister was here. Her nieces and nephew were here. Alma was here, Hadley was here, Grant and Jeannie were here.
The diner, with all its warts, was here, filled with people she had come to know and love. Filled with a kind of spirit she’d never felt at Weekdays.
“I don’t know,” she told Tucker again.
But she felt a kind of pleasure in the not-knowing that she wouldn’t have expected. She felt okay with living in the space between her past and her future, because Kincaid was in this space too, and they were trying to travel through it together, into whatever came next.
The days ticked by and the date of her departure came closer, but the hours passed in a blur, of physical pleasure and unfolding intimacy. She catalogued for Kincaid every scar on her hands and arms, every place a knife had slipped, hot oil had splattered, a panicked grab for a pan had seared her flesh.
She traced the edges of his tattoos, the fine lines and details. She lay quietly and listened to his prison stories. How he’d managed to get a fellow con’s conviction overturned, how he’d used his jailhouse law skills to get justice for men who’d been unfairly thrown into solitary or had small privileges taken away. How it had made him increasingly popular with the other inmates and increasingly unpopular with the guards. He showed her the scars where that unpopularity had bitten him.
He wasn’t a law student, not in the traditional sense, but he wanted to be one.
“I’m going to take some of the money and try to get someone, somewhere, to accept me into law school. There’s a new low-residency program, mostly online, first of its kind—I’m going to start there, because then I can start this fall instead of having to wait until I can leave this county.”
But even if he got accepted into a program, it didn’t mean he’d be allowed to take the bar. “Most states, you have to prove you’re truly and permanently living clean. So it’s a long shot. It’s subjective.”
“There are people here who will vouch for you.”
“We’ll see.”
“Everything’s a long shot,” she said. “I could work decades in hot kitchens and never own my own restaurant. And I could own my own restaurant and it could be a failure.”
