Page 48 of Slander
I make myself say it plainly.
"I feel good," I tell him. "I feel—Njal, I don't regret one second of it. I keep turning it over, looking for the part I'm supposed to be sorry about, and there isn't one. There's just you, and that you were kind to me, and how I wanted it, and I let myself have it." The words come out thick, catching on the way up. "I've never let myself have anything."
"Now you have." He says it like a fact, like the weather. "And you'll do it again, and the sky'll keep right on staying up."
I laugh, wet and surprised, and he pulls me into his chest and holds me there a while.
His hand moves slowly on my back, and I like it.
"I keep waiting to feel different about myself," I say against his collarbone. "That's the part I can't get over. My whole life, the lesson was that this—what we did—was the thing thatruinsa woman. How you give it away and you come out the other side less than you were." I press closer. "And I feel like more. How is that possible? How did they have it so backwards?"
His hand goes still on my spine.
"Because the people who taught you that weren't trying to keep you whole," he says lowly. "They were trying to keep youtheirs.Easier to own a woman who thinks wanting something is a sin."
I let myself be held by a man in the morning light, and nothing falls out of the sky.
And because nothing falls, I let myself ask him things.
Lying against him with my ear over his heart, I ask the questions I've been swallowing for two weeks.
"The club," I say. "In Tallahassee. What is it, really? Because the way people in this town saybiker,and the way you are, those aren't the same thing."
"They're not." His chest rises slowly under my cheek. "It's family. It's men who'd put themselves between me and a bullet and not think twice, and I'd do the same. That's the part nobody outside it understands."
"Why do I feel like there’s more?"
A pause. His hand stills on my spine.
"There's things I can't tell you, Soph." He says it gently, but there's no give in it. "Not because I don't trust you. Because they're not mine to tell. A man gets to know those things by earning his way in, and the price of knowing is you don't say them outside the walls. That's not a wall I built between you and me. It's one that was there before you, and it stays."
I think about that.
I think I should maybe be afraid of a man with rooms in him I'm not allowed into.
But I was raised in a house full of locked rooms, full ofwe don't discuss thatandthat's between your father and the Lord.
Njal's the first person who ever told me a door was closed and told mewhy,instead of pretending the door wasn't there.
"Okay," I say.
His chin dips against the top of my head. "Okay?"
"Okay. I can live next to a closed door if you tell me it's closed."
He's quiet for a second. Then his arm tightens around me, just once, like my words meant something to him.
He waits until the coffee's poured to tell me he's going to Tallahassee.
We're both in his kitchen, Hoagie thumping his tail against the cabinets, and something in the set of his shoulders tells me it isn't a thing he chose for today.
"Club business," he says. "It's got to do with you. With all of it." He sets his mug down. "I'd tell you more if I could."
"Closed door?"
"Closed door." The corner of his mouth moves. "You learn fast."
He kisses me before he goes, long and unhurried, his hand cradling the back of my skull like I'm something that could spill.
