“I’m totally fuckin’ in love with you.”

I leaned back and stared, a flare happening around my heart that started to spread throughout my chest cavity.

“Gone, babe. Gone,” he continued. “You’re sweet and you’re funny and you’re not selfish. How you could think that, I do not know, seein’ as you put your ass on the line to save the soul of the man you were living with.”

As much as I was rejoicing in what he’d said to me, I had to lay out where all that was at.

“That wasn’t just for him, Snap, it was also for me.”

“All right, if you told tell me there is some form of pure altruism out there, Rosalie, I’ll tell you you’re wrong because it doesn’t exist. Even if you get nothin’ outta something good you do, you still get the satisfaction that you’re the kind of person who would do it. So in the end, that’s getting something. So yeah, part of your angle was to get something outta that. You also got your face fucked up and your ribs busted. You knew that was a possibility and instead of getting shot of that guy, you carried on. So what do you think that says to me?”

“I was with that guy,” I replied. “The wrong guy.”

“No,” he denied, beginning to sound impatient. “It says if you care about someone, it’s not about going that extra mile. It’s about giving everything. Honest to God, I fell in love with your tits and your hair and that beautiful voice and the way of you that I’ve learned recently you got from your mother and that cute-as-fuck skip-walk you got goin’ on first, Rosie. But after that, all that is you filled in the rest and I don’t give that first fuck he was there in between. He isn’t anymore. And that’s where we are now. He doesn’t factor to me. He only factors to you and you’ve gotta let that go, Rosie. Because for me it’s already gone.”

“I get into this with you and later, it comes back to haunt me, that would not be good, honey,” I pushed.

“It won’t.”

“You can’t tell the future, Everett.”

“When it comes to you, I can,” he declared, all flinty. “We’re gonna finish this conversation and the food. Then we’re gonna go upstairs and finish what we started this morning. Tomorrow, we’re gonna wake up and do more a’ that. Repeat for eternity, tossin’ in a couple of kids along the way. That’s our future, Rosie. And just to make that clear, knowin’ now you’re falling for me, my world shrank to what’s on this couch the minute with both sat on it but you should know, my world started shrinking long before that. And I’m not only good with that, it makes me really, fuckin’ happy.”

Right then, I was really fucking happy too.

“I have a feeling,” I whispered, the words uneven from the emotion stuck in my throat, “that you’re not gonna let me pay rent.”

A smile bloomed on his face, huge, handsome, amazing.

He knew I was happy too, finally allowing myself to reach for it, and he was right about there not being any pure altruism because he also knew he gave me that, and he got something huge out of it.

That was what made him happy.

The chance at a shot of making me happy.

God, that was all just so Snapper.

“You wanna exercise your independence, we’ll negotiate somethin’ that makes you feel easy about that but you can still buy garden furniture. The bed, babe, that’s not gonna happen since, if shit works out the way it should, I’ll be in it as much as you, so that’s on me.”

“Are you saying that you wanna…” I swallowed, happy we were there, no…thrilled, but this was maybe too fast, “move in together?”

He shook his head. “Nope. I think you need some time and space, and we got more gettin’-to-know-you shit to do. But yeah, obviously eventually. Definitely.”

And with that, Snap shoveled in more food.

I called his attention back to me. “Snap, Valenzuela and Bounty.”

“Babe—”

“It worries me.”

He gave me a thorough look and I could tell he was thinking deeply about this.

It took two mouthfuls of rice and korma with a chaser of a bite of tikka masala coated naan for him to come to a conclusion about what he was going to say.

“You know Chaos has been patrolling our turf now for well over a decade.”

I didn’t know that.

“Okay,” I replied.

“Nothing has happened, Rosie. Not even close. Before Valenzuela, patrol wasn’t even that big of a deal because everyone doin’ stupid shit in Denver knew to keep it off Chaos. We just did it regularly to make sure that message stayed out there.”

“Okay,” I repeated.

He studied me again while he was eating and I took another bite too while he did it.

Finally, he pressed forward.

“Before my time, when they were pullin’ outta some shit they were into, they lost a man.”

Uh-oh.

“Good guy,” he carried on, “way everyone tells it, the best.”

“Snapper,” I whispered.

“And I tell you that, Rosalie, because that loss did two things. It tore apart every member who stayed in the club and it solidified the brotherhood as well as the path they were on to get clean. I know that’s a dichotomy but it’s the way the story is told and it’s the brotherhood I know. So what I’m sayin’ is, that last part, we got in hand, but that first part, every brother is going to do everything in their power not to let that happen again.”