He Bought My Father's Debt, So Now He Owns Me novel · Chapter 20 of 24

Chapter 20: The Last Night

We did not sleep that night, and I did not mean to.

It was past midnight, and the wind had gone from a hum to a long low moan across the water.

Cal had carried the last of the candles through the house and set them on the bedroom floor in a ring.

The power was gone, and the bed stood in the middle of the ring like an island.

I stood at the foot of it in his shirt.

It was the white one, the one I had torn in the kitchen a month ago, with a button missing at the throat.

"Tomorrow noon," I said.

"I know," he said.

"I'm going to walk onto that dock and say things in front of a hundred people. I'm going to look at a man who put me on his knee."

"I know," he said.

"I want to have been somewhere tonight," I said. "I don't want to go into it having been careful."

He stood at the head of the bed in the candlelight, in his trousers and nothing else.

I saw the scar on his shoulder go gold and dark.

"What do you want?" he said.

"Everything," I said.

His chest rose.

"I want you to take it," I said. "All of it. I've never given it. I've told you where to put your hands and where to touch me, and I've held every rope, and I'm tired, Cal. I'm so tired of holding. Tonight I want you to hold it."

"Jo," he said.

"I want you to tell me what to do, and I'll do it."

"You're sure?" he said.

"I'm asking you to," I said.

He did not move for a long moment.

I watched something go across his face, a kind of fear and then a kind of wonder, and then a darkness that was neither.

He came around the bed.

He stopped in front of me.

He took the front of his own shirt in both hands, where I wore it, and opened the one button that was left.

"Take it off," he said.

It was not the voice I had heard in the courthouse.

It was lower, and it was quieter, and there was no hatred left in it.

I felt it in my knees.

I dropped my arms and let the shirt slide off my shoulders and fall.

I stood naked in a ring of candles.

"Good," he said. "Now turn around."

I turned.

I felt his hands on my shoulders, and his breath on the nape of my neck.

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