Page 17 of Brutal for It
I shake my head. I can’t give it words. I won’t put that man’s mouth in this house. The thought of telling her what he said—of handing her that filth—makes my stomach roll.
“Tommy,” she mutters again, smaller. There’s a cut-glass quiet to her voice that means she’s lining up her own ghosts behind me in the dark.
I should tell her. I should say nothing you ever were for survival has anything to do with who you are now, that her past doesn’t get to tag along unless we invite it, that the world can burn itself for all I care before I let it pour itself into her ear.
Instead, what comes out is raw and wrong and exactly true. “I need you,” I say. “Right now.”
Her eyes search my face. She doesn’t flinch from the bruise or the blood across my knuckles. She looks for the man under them. “Okay,” she says, like it’s the simplest thing she’s ever been asked. “Okay.”
She turns the lamp off, takes my hand, leads me down the hall. My boots thump the way thunder does when it’s walking away. At our bedroom door, she pauses, face tipped up. “Tell me if I hurt you,” she whispers, thumb ghosting the edge of my bruise.
“Can’t, because,” I tell her, catching her wrist, pressing my mouth to her palm. “You don’t ever hurt me.” Sliding to our bathroom, I wash the blood from my hands and clean up for her.
We move slow because I’m big to her tiny frame and because she deserves slow, always. The shirt slides off her shoulders. I get clean hands on her, greedy in that quiet way a starving man is when the food is finally just right for him. She’s soft under my mouth, warm under my palms, familiar like the road home you can do with your eyes closed and still you look just to see it.
I don’t say much. I’m not a talker in bed on a good night and tonight my words are all action. I tell her with my hands. I tell her with the way I kiss, the way I lay my weight until she makes that sound that lives under my ribs, the way I hold her face like it’s a fucking treasure. Mine, I say without putting it into words. Mine in the way that means protected, not owned. Mine as in treasured, valued, and secure.
She answers with her body the way she always does—no doubts, no questions, just trust. Her legs hook behind my thighs. Her fingers pull at my hair. She whispers my name with that breathy break in the middle like it’s cracked open and remade and I crawl through it to where she is and plant a flag.
It’s different tonight. Not rougher, not faster. Just a giving, receiving, and claiming. There’s a way a man can look at a scar with his fingertips and tell it ‘you’re beautiful because you’re healed and because you happened and because the dark side didn’t win.’
There’s a way a woman can put a hand over a man’s heart and tell it ‘I hear you, I hear what you’re not saying, I feel your very depths so you didn’t have to cry.’
We speak those ways. We’ve been learning this language for years. Tonight we’re fluent.
After, I don’t roll away. I stay in her, wrapped around, one hand at the base of her skull, one palm open on her back where the breath moves. The room is black and light, quiet and loud as a clubhouse party at the same time. My pulse slows. The edge comes off the world. My body remembers it is not a weapon unless I ask it to be.
She brushes my jaw with her thumb. “You don’t have to tell me,” she states steady, voice low. “But you know I can take it, right? Whatever it is. You’ve always taken on my demons. I don’t mind facing yours.”
I swallow. She needs this. She needs to know I see her strength. She isn’t the broken woman she was. The words are heavy. “A man said something filthy,” I manage to get out. “About you. About… before. I didn’t give him the chance to finish.”
There it is. Enough to name the thing without bringing its weight into our bed. The corner of her mouth lifts, not in humor, in understanding. She nods once. “Thank you,” she whispers.
“For what?”
“For not letting him finish.” She shifts, winces at a hair pulled wrong, settles again. “And for coming home to me instead of finding him for another round.”
“You’re my anchor,” I share with her. “And my first place to run to. And my forever place to fall.”
She huffs a laugh that hits deep in my chest. “Poet.”
“Don’t use that word on me.” I find her hand in the dark and kiss her knuckles. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” She stays quiet for a long beat. “Are you?”
I could say yes. I could lie to help her sleep. But we don’t do that anymore. “I am now.”
“Good.” She tips up, kisses the edge of my mouth where it isn’t swollen. “Tomorrow, you’re putting ice on that eye, and I’m making you eggs.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
We drift. There’s a moment right before sleep where the brain decides if it’s going to take a ride through nightmares or if it’s going to sit steady after a good, quiet ride and stare at the stars.
Tonight, mine sits steady. It’s because of her. Because of what we share without saying.
Six
Jami
