Page 56 of Lawless
He was silent for a long moment, and my guts clenched. Then he let out a breath. “You want to go public?”
“Yes.” I put as much force behind the word as I could without yelling it in his face. “If you’ll still have me, then yes.”
“I...” He looked stricken. “I don’t want to put you in a bad position in the community.”
“Fuck ’em.”
He swallowed a laugh. “I’m trying to be serious here, Natty.”
“Me too.” I put a hand on his hip, and he didn’t pull away. I curled my fingers into a fist, grabbing hold of his T-shirt. A desperate need rose up in me for him to hear me, to understand me even if the words didn’t come out right, and I was afraid I was going to mess it all up. “Dominic, maybe I made a mistake hooking up with you, because now I know what it’s like, what you’re like, I don’t want to go back to not having you. I want us to try.”
“I want that too,” he said, and my knees almost buckled with relief. “But, Natty, I don’t want that at the cost of you being an outcast, or whatever the fuck happens here to people who date coppers.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s sort of unprecedented. The last copper looked like a praying mantis.”
“Natty!” This time he didn’t manage to swallow the laugh, and it was the most wonderful sound I’d ever heard. He rested his hand over mine and squeezed. His laughter faded in the moonlight, but his smile took longer to vanish, replaced at last by a fond, soft expression I wanted to see every time he looked at me. His mouth quirked. “Okay.”
“Okay?” I asked, not certain that I’d heard him, my heart in my throat.
“Okay,” he said again. “If you want to try, then so do I.”
I loosened my grip on his shirt and moulded my palm to the curve of his hip. My eyes stung, and my smile shook. “Okay.”
And then I reached up with my free hand, held the back of his neck, and pulled him into a kiss.
“Well, bugger me!” Fisher Harry Finch exclaimed in his booming voice. “Young Natty Harper’s got his tongue down the copper’s throat!”
And, just like that, the whole island knew.
Dominic had saved my mum. That meant that the Dauntless Islanders were willing to have a drink with him. It didn’t mean, once they’d all spilled outside the church behind Fisher Harry Finch, that they were willing to welcome him to the family with open arms. Most of the narrow stares and cold shoulders were saved for me, though—you could expect the worst of a mainlander and a copper, but I should have known better. I should have remembered who I was and where I came from.
I did.
I held my chin up and kept my shoulders back, staring down everyone who was staring at me. I was a descendant of mutineers, and this right here was my mutiny.
“Me and Dominic are together,” I said, my guts twisting like they wanted to leap up my throat and drag the words back down. “And it’s nobody’s business but ours.”
I don’t know what hit harder out of those things—the revelation I was seeing Dominic, or the crazy idea that anything happening on Dauntless wasn’t automatically everyone’s business. I was pretty sure it was the second one, and nobody had said something as dangerous and provocative in the over two hundred years since the first Josiah Nesmith had announced that things would be better if he was in charge instead of Captain Hawthorne.
And, just like two centuries ago, there was a Nesmith at the centre of things now. Red Joe shouldered his way through the crowd, murmurs hushing in his path. He had a face like thunder, but that didn’t mean much, because he’d been wearing that expression whenever he looked at me from the time I was the annoying little kid following him and Nipper Will around.
Red Joe didn’t say anything when he reached us. He didn’t have to. He just clapped me on the shoulder, and then reached out and shook Dominic’s hand soundly. Then he took a swig of rum and said, “Give us a tune, Round Robbie. It’s a party.”
Round Robbie began to play his fiddle again, and it didn’t take long for the others with instruments to join in.
Dominic stared at Red Joe’s broad back as he walked back inside. “Holy shit,” he said. “He is the king.”
I tried to laugh, but the sound came out weakly. Because Red Joe might have walked over and given us his blessing in front of the whole island, but Nipper Will was still standing just outside the church door, right where the light spilling out from inside met the night. He’d heard the whole thing, and watched it too, and he hadn’t moved.
He moved when I caught his gaze, though, turning away and going back inside the church.
I don’t know what I’d expected from him, but it hadn’t been dead silence.
Fuck him. I’m a mutineer.
I took Dominic’s hand and squeezed it. Right here in public, with a bunch of islanders still looking on curiously. Dominic’s smile was worth it, even if his expression was more cautious than happy. That cautiousness was concern for us, for me, and for what it meant to be known to be with an outsider—and a copper was the worst kind of outsider, second only to a tax man—on Dauntless.
“Do you want a drink?” he asked me, his eyes wide. “Or should we get out of here before someone forms a bloodthirsty mob?”
