Selena

 

I don’t mean to talk for as long as I do. Maybe it’s the idea that soon all of this might be over: everything. My life, my budding love, my plans for the future. Far From the Madding Crowd will remain unfinished on my bedside table until the landlord comes by to clear away my things. Stuck in this tiny cell with Dante’s arms around me, I find I can’t stop talking.

 

I start with my childhood, telling Dante about how my mom and dad would argue almost every day. “It would start about little things,” I say. “Or at least they seem like little things to me when I look back now. I remember one day when my mom forgot to go to the laundromat; we didn’t have a washer. Dad came home and she said she’d do it tomorrow, and he went berserk. He never hit her that I saw, but he stomped around the house, grumbling to himself that he’d been at work all day and she couldn’t even get the laundry done. But Mom worked nights, and she was sleeping …” I sigh. “Anyway, it ended with Dad becoming a professor poet like he’d always dreamed, piggybacking off of a poem Mom wrote, and moving east. He sometimes sends us Christmas cards; sometimes he forgets. I don’t think he ever wanted me, or Mom, or any of it.”

 

I could stop here. I’ve given him a morsel. I don’t need to utterly unload on this man. And yet, even as I have this thought, I continue to talk. I tell him about Clint. “It was nice at first. I was at college and he approached me in front of all my friends with a bunch of flowers. I remember thinking he was brave and handsome.” And then I go on to tell him about all the subtly aggressive things he’d do, like delete text messages from my friends and tell me I did things when I was drunk which I didn’t, in fact, do. “And then the hitting started.”

 

I feel sick as I talk. Vomit rises in my throat, acid on my tongue. I will myself to stop—I’m offering my deepest secrets; I don’t want to be a victim in his eyes—but I can’t. I tell him about all the beatings and then I tell him about the final showdown when I finally ran away. “And that was the day I found out …” I laugh madly. “Cancer,” I mutter.

 

“Jesus Christ,” Dante mutters.

 

I go cold, frozen. Jesus Christ … I try to read his tone of voice. Maybe he regrets asking to know about me. Maybe he regrets coming here to try and save me. I imagine his thoughts: “Crazy lady, psycho lady, damaged goods. What sort of psycho have I risked myself for? Goddamn.”

 

But then he kisses me on the forehead. “Thanks for sharing that with me, ma’am.”

 

“You don’t have to call me ma’am now.” I giggle, relieved by the smile I feel against my skin as he kisses me again. “Doesn’t that seem a little formal?”

 

Dante looks around the room. “I guess the time for formality is over, right?”

 

“I don’t think we ever had a time for formality,” I say. “We’ve moved fast. We’ve probably been in each other’s company fifteen hours total.”

 

“The best fifteen hours of my life, ma’am.” He winks at me.

 

I nudge him. “Aren’t you scared? I’m scared.”

 

“I won’t let anything happen to you,” he says. “You have my word on that. It looks like they’re going to be taking me someplace and letting you go—”

 

“Taking you where?” I lean back, watching him. “What do you mean?”

 

He pauses, and then says, “Down to Mexico to work as an enforcer or some shit. I don’t know. All that matters is they’re letting you go. That’s all I give a damn about.”

 

“I don’t want them to take you,” I say. “That’s not fair.”

 

“Fair? It ain’t fair for you to even be here, Selena. None of this is fair.” He grabs me by the shoulders and pulls me to his chest, stroking my hair. I want to disentangle myself and probe him some more, but it feels so good to have his fingertips on my scalp. “Don’t you worry about it.”

 

“Don’t talk to me like I’m a dainty little woman,” I say. “That sounded dangerously close to: ‘Don’t you worry your pretty little head about it.’”

 

“Are you in the business of twisting a man’s words, then?”

 

I scoff. “No twisting required. I just had to read between the lines.”

 

“There were no lines.”

 

I slap him playfully. “I wish we were somewhere else. I feel happy and then terrified and then happy and then terrified and none of it makes sense. I keep waiting for that door to open.”

 

“Me too,” Dante says. “But I ain’t scared about it opening. When they come to get me that means they’ll be letting you go. And you can see your mother and be with her when she gets better.”

 

“Gets better.” I smile sadly. “I doubt it.”

 

“You don’t know, though.”

 

“There’s an experimental treatment, but it’s expensive and the insurance company is messing her around.”

 

“Cancer is a mean bastard.”

 

“Amen to that.”

 

He kisses my forehead again. “I don’t know if I should tell you this since it might make you lose hope, but my momma died of cancer.”

 

A shock runs through me. “Seriously?” I blurt.

 

He nods.

 

“What type was it?”

 

“Are you sure you want to talk about this?” he asks.

 

“Are you sure you do?” I counter.

 

He shrugs. “Usually I ain’t the sharing sort. Maybe that’s an understatement. Maybe usually I’m the sort to run ten miles in the opposite direction if a lady tries to get me to share something about myself. But with you …”

 

“Are you saying I’m special?”

 

I’m joking but he stares down at me with hard eyes. “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

 

He looks so sexy staring down at me like that; I can’t stop myself from leaning up and kissing him. I kiss him hard, pressing my lips against his so that our teeth click together. He reaches down and grabs my leg. Passion ignites, flares throughout me. My cheeks get warm, my pussy warmer. Perhaps I would fall into it if the memory of what happened last time we fell into it was not a bruising lump on my head. I pull away.

 

Dante glances at the door. “I guess we don’t wanna put on a show.”

 

“Definitely not,” I say. “You were saying …”

 

He laughs gruffly. “I was hoping that kiss had made you forget. I guess I’m not as magic-lipped as I thought I was.”

 

“Magic-lipped. It seems you have a way with words, Dante.”

 

“I fluked. Don’t expect that kind of poetic shit regularly.”

 

I prod him in the belly. “Talk to me,” I say softly.

 

“I don’t know what there is to say. It was lung cancer, but she didn’t smoke a day in her life. My father was already dead. When I was four he caught a bullet in a gunfight and went down and never got up again; that’s always how my brother explained it to me. I’d ask where Daddy was and he’d say he fell down and he was never getting up.”

 

“That’s mean,” I whisper.

 

“No,” Dante says firmly. “It was right of him to give it to me straight. The time for being soft was over. So my momma got lung cancer having never smoked a day in her life. She was a bit of a fitness freak, actually. She had the exercise bike and the sit-up machine and a big pile of equipment in the garage. She’d sometimes drag the equipment onto the driveway and make a gym for herself. Once the cancer started on her, she didn’t last long. Five months and she was dead. I remember holding her hand as she went, and she was talking to me about her exercise equipment—at a time like that! She smiled and said it seemed like a dream that she was ever able to do one hundred sit-ups.” He pauses. His voice is choked.

 

I kiss the place just under his eye. I think I taste tears, but I’m not sure.

 

“She died then.” He shrugs. “I saw it coming but it still hit me like a gunshot.” He winces, as though saying the word gunshot reminds him of the one in his leg. “She was a good woman, and she’s dead. I wish I could say something more meaningful than that, but I don’t know if there’s anything more to say.”

 

I try not to cry. He’s not talking about my mother. But I can’t help it. I think of Mom laid up in bed, the machines beeping as the life is stolen from her, clawing at the blankets and demanding to know where her daughter is. Cancer breeds dark thoughts, and the darkest of all is that I promised myself as soon as Mom was diagnosed that I would be there when she died. I want to expect the best, but my time with Clint robbed me of unwavering optimism. I would be there … But now I won’t, I reflect as the tears pour out of me.

 

“It’s okay,” Dante says, wiping the tears from my cheeks with his hand. “Just because my mom …”

 

“I have to be there,” I sob. “I can’t stand the idea of being in this disgusting place when Mom is dying all alone.”

 

“You won’t,” he says. “You’re getting out of here. I swear I’ll make that happen.”

 

For the next hour or so we’re quiet, lying in each other’s arms, listening to the distant footsteps outside our prison cell. A couple of men talk in mumbled tones in the hallway.

 

“You mentioned a brother,” I say, breaking a silence. “Where is he?”

 

He was stroking my hair; now his hand freezes. He makes a fist and lets out air through clenched teeth.

 

“What is it?” I ask, looking up at him.

 

His jaw is clenched, his temples pulsing. It’s like he’s trying to hold closed a door which has immense pressure on the other side. “My brother,” he whispers. He stands up, clicking his neck from side to side and rolling his arms in his shoulders. “My brother,” he repeats. “That’s a can of worms, Selena. I don’t know if you wanna open them.”

 

I stand up. Pins and needles make my left leg weak. I stumble, grip the wall. Dante rushes forward and catches me. “My knight in shining armor.” I grin up at him.

 

He grins back, though it looks as if it takes him some effort. “If you say so, ma’am.”

 

“You don’t have to tell me about your brother,” I say. “But you do have to let me change that.” I point to his bandage. Blood drips down his leg.

 

“Fair enough.”

 

He sits down. I tear the fabric of my jeans. “Thank God for cheap denim.” Then I remove the fabric he tied and carefully make a folded bandage of the denim. I use a thin strip of denim to secure the bandage in place. “How’s the pain?”

 

“It’s okay,” he says. “I’ve felt worse, and I’ll feel worse again.”

 

“You don’t have to be so tough,” I say.

 

“That’s where you’re wrong. A man in my position—that’s all he can be.” He wraps a piece of my hair around his finger. “My brother was getting out of the life. Hell, he was damn near out when the shit went down. We had a crazy argument about it. I almost shot him. Almost shot my own brother.” He tells me about the day he found his brother packing up his stuff, about how he fired a shot into the air. “And I thought that was it, you know? I thought he was gone now and I’d hear from him in a few months and learn that he’d set up a life in Maine or somewhere like that, somewhere with seasons and picket fences. But then I get a call from Brose—the flowery bastard who calls himself the Gentleman—and he says he’s got my brother as his prisoner. Says I need to pay a ransom. So I take the ransom money to the clubhouse—alone, like I was asked—and we meet in the parking lot. Me, Markus, Brose, and about ten of his men. They’ve all got guns, but I don’t.”

 

He pauses.

 

“What?” I ask.

 

He takes breath. “Just never talked about this before.”

 

“It’s okay.” I rub his hand. “You don’t have to—”

 

“I want to,” he interrupts. “I feel better. Less weighed down. I think I have to finish.”

 

I wait. For several minutes we sit in silence. Then he says, “I dropped the bag on the ground and Markus stepped forward. And that would’ve been it. Markus could leave, and I’d go to war with the Wraiths. But what you’ve gotta understand about Markus is that he’s a devil when he gets angry. And he is—was—pissed. I keep saying is, like he’s still around, and …” He rubs his head. “I’m tired.”

 

I kiss him on the cheek. I can tell this is taking a toll on him. I can tell just from this moment that he’s never shared anything even close to this with another person before. I feel privileged and moved. Again I wish we were someplace else without the sword hanging over our heads.

 

“He was angry, really damn angry at being taken by Brose. So as he was walking to me he turned around and punched Brose across the face. He punched him over and over, split his eye, split his lip, damn near split his skull. I jumped on the nearest man. When Markus got to fighting, I got to fighting; that was just the way it worked. But there were more of them and it didn’t take them long to overpower us. Brose’s men pushed Markus to his knees, Brose took out a pistol, and Markus’s body fell to the ground, his face covered in blood. I collapsed next to him and screamed and roared and then I tried to get my hands on Brose, but ten men had their guns on me. Brose let me go ’cause he liked the sight of me so upset, I reckon. And I just left, Selena. Just walked away from my brother, leaving him there on the concrete. I bought his body later so we could bury him. I had to buy the body! I had to send one of my men to the Wraith compound and make a deal for the body just like I was making a deal for a shipment of guns. And I just left. My brother, bloody and dead, and I just walked away.”

 

“What were you supposed to do?” I ask softly.

 

He leaps up, limping on his good leg to the wall, and then punches the tiles hard. They crack and fall away. “Anything!” he snaps. “Fight, kill, die. Not run away like a coward.”

 

I go to him and place my hand on his shoulders, kneading them. “You had ten guns on you. You said that yourself.”

 

“I shouldn’t even be talking about this,” he says. “You were stabbed by some prick and I’m standing here moaning like a woman about my problems.”

 

“You’re not moaning.” I take his face in my hands and lock our eyes. “Don’t go all hard on me now. You’re allowed to be upset. It’s good to be upset.”

 

“It’s good to be upset?” He raises an eyebrow. “How’s that?”

 

His lips are quivering and he keeps closing his eyes as though fighting off tears.

 

I wrap my arms around him and lead his face to my chest. “Hush,” I whisper, as he starts to cry. “I’m with you. I’m here.” He cries chokingly at first, fighting off the sobs, but then he loses control and vibrates with unstoppable emotion. I cradle him the whole while, stroking his hair, whispering and trying to soothe him. It’s clear he hasn’t cried in years, if ever, from the way the tears consume him. He’s not an expert crier, like I was, able to switch off the tears when Clint walked through the door.

 

When he’s done he turns away, head low. “Goddamn,” he says, wiping his face. “I don’t know what the fuck just happened to me.” He wipes at his face and then turns to me, eyes red but dry. “That’s won’t happen again. You have my word on that.”

 

“What are you talking about?” I say. “Nothing happened that you need to make amends for. You just cried. You’re allowed to cry.”

 

“That’s where you’re wrong,” he says. “A man in my position is never allowed to cry.”

 

We return to our place on the floor, nothing to do but hold each other and wait.

 

“I tricked the guards,” I say. “Before you got here. And I got free from my cuffs.” I tell him about the screw and the takeout, the bat and the violence.

 

He smiles sideways at me. “It’s like we’ve swapped places. I’m the emotional woman and you’re the tough man.”

 

I pinch his nose. “Listen here. A woman can be strong and a man can be emotional. Okay?”

 

“I’ll agree to that if you agree to never tell a soul you saw me cry, even your own mother.”

 

I place my hand on my chest. “I swear I will never tell anybody that you have a heart.”

 

He inclines his head, ignoring the sarcasm. “Much obliged, ma’am.”