Claimed by the Detective and the Don

Chapter 13 — A Way Out

COLE

I told myself I wasn't going back there tonight. I'd told myself the same thing walking home from that alley with Enzo's voice still sitting in my ears, telling myself a smart man would let the watching work on him a while before he gave them anything worth reporting. I went anyway. Some habits don't survive good sense. Mine never had.

I came up through the fire escape ladder side instead of the front, past the boarded transom where the wood had rotted soft enough to work loose with two fingers, the way I'd done it a dozen times before Sal ever had reason to care who came and went. No shadow followed me tonight. I'd made sure of that, three wrong turns and a long wait in a doorway that smelled like fish guts, until I trusted the street behind me was empty.

She opened the door before I finished knocking, like she'd been standing on the other side of it waiting for a sound she already knew.

"You shouldn't be here," she said. She said it in a way people don't mean to be believed.

"I know."

"Sal's men—"

"I know that too." I stepped inside anyway, and she let me, the way she always did. She closed the door slow behind us so the lock caught soft. The room smelled the same as it always had, candle wax and old smoke, and under that, her.

Neither of us said anything else for a while. I put my hand against her jaw the way I liked, she tilted her face up into it the same way, like her body remembered the shape of this even when the rest of her was too tired to decide anything on purpose. I kissed her slow, and she made a small sound against my mouth that wasn't relief exactly, but wasn't far from it.

"It's been a while," she said against my lips.

"I know that too."

Her hands found my collar, pulled, and I let her walk me back until my shoulders hit the wall by the window, the neon from two streets over painting her face red then dark then red again. She worked my shirt open with the same fast, certain fingers she'd always had, like she was scared of what would happen if she slowed down long enough to think about it.

"Careful," I said, when her mouth found the side of my throat. "Somebody could see the light change."

"Then be quiet about it."

I kissed her harder than I meant to, one hand sliding up under the thin robe to the bare skin of her back, and she arched into it, breath catching, her fingers tightening in my hair like she wanted to hold on to something that wasn't going to stay still. The robe opened with the movement, and the red neon light fell upon her body: her n*****s hardened, the line of her stomach rising and falling with each breath, her angular hip pressed against mine. I ran my hand down her back to the curve of her lower back and squeezed, pulling her toward me, so that she felt against her stomach what I could no longer hide.

My fingers found the waistband of her underthings, silk that had gone warm against her skin, and I pushed them down past her hips without looking away from her face. She let out a sigh, and her mouth trailed down my chest, tracing the line of my sternum with her lips, moving down while her fingers unbuckled the belt without hesitation. I leaned my head against the wall and looked down: her dark head moving, the red light flickering and illuminating the line of her spine.

She stood up, and I spun her around to face the wall. Her back slammed against the plaster with a dull thud, and she spread her legs without having to ask. I settled between them, one hand on her hip, and when I entered her we both exhaled at the same time, as if we’d been holding this breath for weeks and could only let it out now.

The wall took the weight of both of us, her leg hooked around mine, her name breaking apart in pieces against my mouth the same way mine had broken in hers every other night, like neither of us had learned anything since then except how much we still wanted this. I grabbed her hair firmly and she looked up to me. Her eyes were dark, half-closed, and the neon light cast a red glow on her cheek. Then she whispered closer to my ear, in that low, broken voice, until she had to bite my shoulder to keep from screaming.

After, we lay tangled in her sheets with the rain starting up outside, her head on my chest, my fingers moving slow along her spine. Neither of us talked. It was the only kind of quiet that ever felt safe in this city, the kind that came after, when the wanting had been answered instead of just carried around.

My coat was still on the floor where it had landed, the billfold half out of the pocket. I reached for it without thinking, and counted it out on the nightstand the same as every other night. Old habit. The kind that outlives the reason it started.

She glanced at the money, then at me.

"You don't have to keep doing that," she said, quiet, the same words she'd said every night, like a line neither of us had bothered to rewrite.

"I know." I looked at the bills sitting there instead of looking at her. "I don't know why I still do it."

That was a lie, and we both knew it. I knew exactly why. It wasn't payment, hadn't been for a long time. It was the last thing either of us had to point to and call arrangement instead of the word neither of us was ready to say out loud. Calling it money meant we didn't have to call it anything else.

She didn't argue. She never did. She just reached over and laced her fingers through mine, which was its own kind of answer, and for once neither of us reached for the old excuse to explain what we were doing lying there together.

"You're thinking something else," she said finally, her voice low against my skin.

"I'm always thinking something."

"Tell me the one that's making your heart go like that." She had her palm flat over it, like she could read the actual words in the rhythm.

I sat up on one elbow so I could see her face when I said it, because I wanted to watch it land instead of guessing at it in the dark.

"Come with me." I said it plain, not dressing it up the way I might have a month ago, back when I still believed there was a version of this that didn't require both of us to burn something down to get it. "Not next week. Not when it's safer. Tonight. I've got a car two blocks from here and enough money put away to get us further than either Sal or Cortland can reach."

"Cole—"

"I'm not asking you to think about it for a week. I'm asking you to say yes before you find one more reason not to."

She didn't laugh it off the way she used to. That was the first thing I noticed, that the old reflex wasn't there anymore, the quick joke that used to close this conversation before it opened. She just looked at me, and something moved behind her eyes that I hadn't seen there before, something closer to a woman finally letting herself want a thing out loud.

"Say it again," she said. "So I know I heard it right."

"Come with me. Tonight. Just us, nobody's territory, nobody's name."

She was quiet long enough that I thought I'd lost it, that the moment had passed the way it always did, right before she found some careful reason to stay. Instead she sat up, the sheet falling away from her shoulders, and put both hands on either side of my face the way she'd never done before, like she was steadying herself as much as me.

"Yes," she said.

One word, and it landed in that room heavier than anything either of us had said and done all night.

"Yes," she said again, quieter, like she needed to hear herself say it twice before she believed she'd meant it the first time. "Take me with you. Tonight. I don't care what it costs."

I kissed her once, hard, sealing it before either of us could think better of it, and for one whole second the entire rotten city outside that window stopped mattering at all.

Then the door slammed open behind us.

Sal stood in the frame, coat still on, rain still dripping off the brim of his hat, and whatever he'd walked in expecting to find, it was written all over his face that this hadn't been it.

.