Page 15 of Yours to Keep
“We danced all night,” she continues. “There was a hall down by the waterfront. That’s where we met. I danced with him five times that night.”
“Five?”
“Yes, five, Eli.” Her smile deepens. “He just kept finding reasons to ask me again. By the second dance, I already knew.”
I pause. “Knew what?”
“That I loved him,” she says simply. “In my bones. In my whole being. I knew he was going to be mine the moment I met him.” Her voice softens. “It was kismet, Eli.”
The word lands heavier than it should, and I swallow hard. The room feels smaller somehow, like the air has thickened without me noticing. Marge keeps looking out the window, already somewhere else now. She in another time… another life… another version of herself I’ll never get to see.
“We would walk along the waterfront every day,” she whispers. “Even when it rained.”
The ache arrives without warning, sharp and immediate, alive in a way I can’t hold back. I look down at my hands; they’re shaking.
My vision blurs before I can stop it. I blink hard, but it doesn’t help. The tears come anyway. Not quiet or controlledones, but the kind that break through whatever I’ve been holding together all morning, and they rip straight through me.
I press a napkin to my face, trying to stop them, trying to hide them, but my body won’t listen. Not anymore.
Marge doesn’t move at first. She simply lets me fall apart in front of her, as if she understands there’s nothing to fix except the fact that I’m still here.
Then she turns, and I know the exact second she sees it.
Her voice disappears, and the room goes quiet in a way that feels different from before. It isn’t peaceful or safe anymore. It is just still.
Her expression changes slowly: confusion first, then recognition, then something that looks like it physically hurts.
She sees the bruises. The swelling. The truth.
For several long seconds, neither of us speaks.
4
CJ
My fifth cup of coffee was cooling on my desk when the office door slammed open hard enough to rattle the frame. I tense at the noise, a reflex I hate. I force my fingers that are tight around my pen to relax as I watch Deck walk in, as if the building belonged to him and I was just borrowing space.
I mean, technically itdidbelong to him, seeing as he co-owned the place with me, but tomatoe, tomato.
“Good news,” he says.
I don’t look up. “Do you realize every time you say that, it’s never good news?”
Deck dropped into the chair opposite me, all six-foot-five of muscle, tattoos, and questionable life choices. The chair groaned under him, and I made a mental note to apologize to Facilities later.
He looked like trouble wrapped in denim and a leather jacket, but beneath all that noise he was the softest man Iknew. We met in the army, before life split intobeforeandafterCharlie. Losing Charlie had carved both of us into different shapes, and neither of us had fully come back.
Deck and I had requested to leave, and we built PalMerc Security out of nothing. One client. One truck. It used to be a dance hall years ago before becoming a laundromat. We converted it, keeping the old feel, and now we operate everywhere, protecting CEO’s, celebrities, and people who can’t afford to be seen as vulnerable. We don’t sell safety. We sell time. Enough time to survive.
Deck became the backbone of it, though I’d never say that out loud. He handles the jobs that never make reports unless something goes wrong. Officially, we exist. Unofficially, we’re ghosts.
A dull ache settles beneath my sternum, the same one that always surfaces when I think about Charlie. He could have been a part of this. That feeling hits me like a quiet bruise that’s never healed.
Somewhere along the line, Deck decided his life purpose was finding “the one,” and his current strategy sits somewhere between optimism, chaos, and complete delusion.
I take a slow sip of coffee.
“What do you want, Deck?”
