Page 37 of Into Ember

I don’t know what that means yet. I know it means something.

Vick moves. There was never much kitchen between them, and now there’s none of it.

Gunnar takes one step toward Vick with a face I’ve never seen on him, no grin anywhere in the ruins of it—

“Don’t.”

Erik is having none of it.

And they stop. All of them. Not because they can’t — I have watched these men move a full dinner table like a footstool and treat a door like a suggestion — but because he asked. I watch four very large men stand down on one syllable and hate every second of it. Gunnar’s jaw is working. Leif has gone somewhere cold behind his eyes.

And Rayner stopped like he wanted to. He’s the only one in this room who did. He’s watching all of it with the face from before, the saving-a-seat face, which cannot be right, also I cannot deal with whatever that is right now.

Vick takes Erik by the front of the shirt and puts him into the counter.

It’s fast and it’s hard, and on the stove the breakfast Erik never got to finish jumps in its pan, and my own breath does something ugly on the way in.

Erik doesn’t move.

His hands stay down at his sides, open. And that’s the part my body understands before the rest of me does — I have watched this man remove a grown man from my personal space with one arm and no visible effort. He is not being overpowered. He is choosing this. He’s standing there with a fist in his shirt, letting it happen, and his voice comes out the same as before.

“Not in front of her.”

Vick’s grip tightens. A seam gives, somewhere.

And I’m scared. Genuinely, correctly scared, and my brain does the math at full speed — that man is twice my size, that man could put me through a wall by accident, Erik can defend himself, there are four men in this room who could end this and were told not to, there is no version of this where I help, I am a writer from Chicago holding a cold coffee—

The mug is on the table. I don’t remember putting it down.

The sound is back under my sternum, low and rolling, and there’s no time for that either, because my feet are already moving, and nobody told them to, and I couldn’t stop them if I tried.

I don’t try.

And then I’m between them.

Staring up at Vick. Right in the eyes.

I don’t know who this man is and I don’t care.

Erik is mine.

Chapter 14

Erik

One second Vick’s fist is in my shirt.

The next it’s gone, and I’m trying to catch up.

Her scent hits me before anything else. Close, too close.

She was at the table.

Why isn’t she at the table?

Then I feel her back against my chest. Her shoulders squared, feet planted on the kitchen floor like she grew out of it.

Vick is stumbling backward.