I Ran Home With My Baby to My Brother's Biker Friends, and the Three Who Tormented Me Said I Was Theirs to Guard novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: Hers

By midnight the house on Fourth Street had finally gone quiet.

Cyrus was asleep on the sofa downstairs, under the afghan my mother had crocheted, with one foot hanging off the end and his mouth open.

He had eaten twenty-two pierogi at the kitchen table and told us nothing about the jail except that the coffee was worse than Dutch's.

Dutch had gone home to the yard.

He had stood in the doorway in his coat and looked at the hall, the stairs, the photographs on the wall, and said, "It's the first time I've stood in here since."

He had not said since what.

Zuri was asleep upstairs, in the crib with the stars on the ceiling.

I had shut her door to a hand's width, and I had checked it twice.

Then I took the three of them up one at a time.

It was my own room at the end of the hall.

It still had the narrow bed from when I was fifteen, a purple quilt, and a window onto the Hillside's roofs and the harbor lights beyond.

I had spent nine years thinking of this room as a place that had been taken from me.

Tonight I had changed the sheets myself.

Nik came first, because I asked him first, and because I knew he would not mind.

He stood in the doorway and took in the quilt, and the shelf of dusty paperbacks, and a poster of a band I had loved at fourteen.

"God," he said.

"I'd have made you laugh in here."

"You'd have made me laugh at fifteen?"

"I'd have made you laugh at any age," Nik said.

"Come here."

He crossed the room.

I lay back on the bed, and he knelt on the floor beside it and put his hands on my ankles.

"Zo," he said.

"What do you want?"

"I want to be slow," I said.

"I want to see you."

"Slow," he said.

"Right."

He took my left foot in both hands.

He pressed his thumbs into the arch, and I gasped, and he grinned up at me.

"I told you," he said.

"I'm good with my hands."

"You said you were good with engines."

"It's the same skill," Nik said.

He worked his way up my calf.

He kissed the inside of my knee, and the soft place above it, and my hips lifted without my meaning them to.

He drew my sleep shirt up slowly, over my stomach and my breasts and off my head, and sat back on his heels to look.

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