I shook my head. “That’s a lot of pressure to put on a recovery.”
“Yeah. I got to ten months once. When he was nine. Even started planning out what I would say to him, how to approach Stella . . . Woke up two weeks later, down in Mexico.” He shrugged, a rueful gesture, and then said, “I’ll tell you one good thing that came out of our breakup, if that’s what I can call it. Whatever that was in my kitchen, when you saw his picture. I gave it up. The whole idea. Meeting him is a fantasy. I could get ten years sober, and I still won’t go and see him. I’d have to tell the kid his mother’s a cheat and a liar and his dad’s a thief. If I wasn’t going to blow his life up like that when he was three, I don’t see how I can do it now, when he’s a teenager. When it’s time for college, or before, if something happens and he needs it, I’ll turn the fund over to Stella. She can explain it however she wants.” He bent to look at me. He put his eyes so close to mine it became hard to focus. “I’m not telling you this because of us. I’m not now going to try to get a year chip with you as some kind of messed-up prize at the end of it. I’m done with that kind of deal, and I’m done with drinking. For what that’s worth. I’ve said it before, but this time there’s no conditions. I’m just done. I hope—I believe—I mean it this time.”
“I hope so, too.” Even if he failed again, he would not stop trying. I knew he wouldn’t, because I knew him.
He threw up his hands and said, “And you know I fucking love you. So?”
I looked into his right eye, then his left, back and forth.
“Why do you love me?” I knew what I wanted, but on his side, I didn’t want it to be because I could be so bad for him. I didn’t want to be a pretty fist that he could bang himself into. I leaned against the wall, my head right by the keypad. “If we’re going to take a run at this, it has to be more than good sex and your masochism.”
I wasn’t sure he was going to answer. I wasn’t sure he had a reason, and he could be so hard to read. But then he smiled.
“Because everyone on this shithole planet says a lot of pretty words to make themselves look good while they do awful things,” he said. “You’re the opposite.”
It was a good answer. A good thing to say. I peered from one eye to the other, back and forth, harder than I had looked into Clark’s eyes, or the gun’s. Birdwine’s left one was rimmed in black and violet, still swollen. I watched his pupils expand as I leaned up. There was a fair amount of crazy present, sure, but in the darkness of his eyes I saw myself reflected clearly. I was real to him. He saw me all the way down to the bottom and knew every awful thing I’d done. More—he knew all that I was capable of doing, and yet he looked at me like I was something worthy and good.
“Come upstairs,” I said. There was a promise in the words that spoke to more than sex. I thought it was implicit. But he only waited, silent. He didn’t even blink, until my own eyes felt dry and itchy on his behalf. Finally I added, “Yes. Okay. Yes. I fucking love you.”
“Oh yeah,” he said, and punched the entry code in for my door. I didn’t think I’d ever given it to him, so he must have watched me key it in and remembered, damn the man.
We were silent and untouching in the elevator. We waited, and it felt right to wait until we were in my place. There we had a door to close behind us, and no walls. We went up the stairs to the loft, and we had each other there with Henry dozing on the dresser, purring to himself.
We were so careful with each other. We had to be. We touched softly in deference to all the ways that we were wounded, working around each other’s bruises and ruined places. This was not our usual sex. It was a delicate, new thing, and as we moved together, I could see Atlanta’s skyline spread out before us in an electric dazzle, as if the city had set itself alight inside the blackness strictly for our pleasure.
He stayed put after. I never wanted anyone to stay, but I did not want him to leave me. Not tonight. He folded himself around me, dozing, but I didn’t sleep. I was thinking of my mother. I was thinking that she had looked down the barrel of her own gun, in those medical scans. When the doctor told her, Weeks, if you are lucky.
She’d started bringing Hana to me, but she’d come the long way, trying to find a way into a future through our past. She had counted on being lucky.