"I knew what you were to me in eight seconds."
"That's not… Dominik, that's not how it works. You can't just decide someone is yours and then restructure their entire biology to ensure they can't leave."
"I'm not restructuring your biology. I'm asking you to let me be part of it."
"You're not asking. You don't ask. You never ask."
She's right. I don't ask. I tell, I command, I direct, I establish. Asking implies the possibility of refusal, and I have never been interested in possibilities I can't control.
But I look at this woman, this impossible woman is cleaning my torn knuckles with a washcloth after I killed three men in the room next to her, and I realize that what I want from her can't be taken. Not this. A child isn't a conquest. It's a collaboration, and collaboration requires something I've never offered another human being in my life.
Consent.
"I'm asking," I say, and the word feels foreign in my mouth, clumsy and unfamiliar. "I'm asking you, Wren."
She looks at me for a long time. Long enough that the silence becomes its own kind of conversation, full of things neither of us is saying.
"Not now," she says finally, dropping her hand from mine, the washcloth now cold and stained.
Not nowis notno.
Relief washes through me, surprising me as much as anything else.
"Okay," I say.
"Okay?" She blinks. "I expected more of an argument."
"I told you I could be patient."
"Patient has conditions, you said. There's a cost."
"There is." I stand. She's still holding my hand, the washcloth forgotten, her fingers laced through mine in a grip that she initiated and hasn't released. "The cost is the same as before. Every night, I will remind you what I can make your body feel. And eventually, you'll decide that what I'm asking for isn't a cage. It's a home."
I lift our joined hands and press my mouth to her knuckles. Gently. Not the raw, devouring hunger I bring to her body every night but something else. Something that my father would have called weakness and my mother, if she'd lived long enough to have an opinion, might have called love.
"I know everything about you, Wren Calloway. I know your mother's name and your father's debts and your high school GPA. I know you worked two jobs at fourteen and graduated with honors and never once complained, not that you had anyone to complain to. I know you read books with your knees pulled up to your chest and you bite your lower lip when you're concentrating and you hum songs from the eighties in the shower."
Her eyes widen and she tries to shake off the surprise. I lift my hand to her arm, lightly touching where I want to hold on.
"I know you reached for my hand in the hallway tonight and pulled back because you're still deciding what wanting me makes you. I know you asked if I was hurt while you were still shaking from the gunshots. I know you're wearing my sweater right now not because you have nothing else but because it smells like me and that smell has become the thing your nervous system associates with safety."
Her eyes are searching mine now, her bottom lip pulled into her mouth, little dimples dotting her chin.
"I know you," I say. "And I know you will choose me in time. Not because I forced you, but because I will be the first person in your entire life who chose you first."
Wren
He leaves.
He says those impossible things about knowing me and choosing me and then he just leaves, walks down the hallway and closes the door behind him with the same quiet control he does everything, and I'm standing in the middle of the bedroom holding a bloody washcloth with my heart in my throat and his words still ringing in my skull like a bell struck too hard.
I will be the first person in your entire life who chose you first.
I sit on the edge of the bed and press the heels of my hands against my eyes and try to breathe.
He wants to marry me. He wants to get me pregnant. He's known me for eight days and he wants to fill me with a baby and tie me to him with the one kind of rope that I would never be able to cut.
He knows that. He's counting on it.