Page 10 of Mischief

He comes to my place after close.

Not the clubhouse, not tonight.

My apartment, the one nobody in my family knows he's ever set foot in, where the deadbolt's thrown and the blinds are down and I get to stop performing for a few hours and be a woman whose man is standing in her kitchen, not saying whatever he came to say.

"You're leaving in the morning." I hand him a beer he doesn't open. "Early. I can tell, you've got the packed look."

"First light." He sets the bottle on the counter, unopened, and looks at me like he's trying to fit me somewhere he can carry me. "It's a long ride. I want the daylight."

"How long of a ride, Bodul?" I set my own beer down without drinking it and hold his eyes.

"Tindra." He drags a hand down his face, and my name comes out of him like a plea and a warning braided together.

"You can tell me that much." I step in and flatten a palm against his sternum so he can't retreat into the counter. "You're not telling me where, fine, I've been a club brat my whole life, I know when not to ask. But how long a ride? That's not a secret. That's just a number."

He goes still for a moment, and then he gives me the one true thing he's going to give me all night.

"Long enough that I'll have to stop and sleep on the way," he says. "I won't make it in one push. I'll be wrecked when I get there."

There's something in how he says it, get there, like the destination is a debt coming due, and every instinct I've built in twenty-five years of reading men in this life tells me to push untilhe cracks open and hand over whatever's putting that look on his face.

And I don't.

Because the other thing I've learned in my life is that you can't love a man in this world and also demand every corner of him.

Some rooms stay locked. You marry the locked doors or you don't marry the man.

So instead of pushing I close the space between us and put both hands flat on his chest, over the heart, where his shirt's soft from a hundred washes, and I feel him breathe out slow like I've unhooked something.

"Then come to bed," I tell him. "You've got a long ride, and I've got a five a.m. open, and neither one of us is fixing whatever's eating you standing in my kitchen."

His hands come up and frame my face, and he tips my head back.

He looks at me so long and so carefully that the chill comes back and pools cold at the base of my throat, because thisisn'thow you look at a woman you'll see in a week.

My breath goes shallow.

There's a sting starting behind my eyes, sudden and stupid, and I blink hard against it and refuse to let it get anywhere, because I don't cry over a man leaving on business and I'm not about to start.

This is how you look at something you're afraid you're about to lose.

"Hey." I catch one of his wrists. "Whatever it is. Wherever you're going. You come back, and you tell me then, if you can. And if you can't, you don't. But you come back. That's the only part I actually care about."

"I'll come back," he says.

He kisses me then, slowly, both hands still holding my face like I might come apart, and I let him.

I kiss him back, and I don't take it any further even though every part of me wants to, because he's dead on his feet and dawn is coming and there'll be time.

There's always time.

That's the lie I go to sleep believing, curled against him in the dark with his arm heavy over my ribs and his breath slowing at the back of my neck.

I wake at first light to a cold sheet and a note on the pillow in his blocky, bad handwriting.

Gone to handle it. Six days, maybe less. Keep your doors locked. Love you. —B

I read it twice, and I tell myself the cold weight under my ribs is annoyance and not fear.