Chapter 6
BONES
The meeting's done and the room's emptying out around us.
Birdie hauling the mustard bowl back to the kitchen, Cash folding the easement paperwork into his jacket, Bishop's chair scraping the concrete as he stands. Bandit’s still at the long table with both hands around a coffee gone cold, and I've already decided where she's sleeping tonight.
"There's a room," I tell her. "End of the hall, past Smoke's. Bed's made. It's yours."
She shakes her head before I finish the sentence.
"I can't."
"You can."
"I have a pharmacology exam at eight, after that I'm on the floor at Brightmoor till three, and then I owe the clinic four hours I already said yes to." She ticks them off, flat, no complaint in it. "I've got to get home."
I've got the whole argument loaded. This is the safest building in the county and I would be close by … but no. This girl's been holding her entire life together with both hands and a hair elastic. She needs to go home. I'll take her there.
"Okay, Bandit."
Her eyebrows go up. "Okay?"
"I don't like it. Doesn't make it not yours to call." I stand and pull my keys. "But I'm taking you home. The bus sits this one out."
She doesn't fight me about the ride.
She takes the spare helmet, pulls it on herself and climbs up behind me like she's got the right to. Her arms come around my middle and lock without me reaching back to set them there.
"Which way."
She tells me and we ride away.
The city slides past us wet and lit up. She fits her chin between my shoulder blades, and I take the corners slower than I'd take them alone, because every mile of this is a mile she's not gone yet.
Somewhere on an empty stretch I catch myself riding under the limit.
A grown man dragging his boots on a Harley so a girl stays pressed to his spine a few more minutes.
The building she points me to is three floors of brick with a street door that's given up holding itself shut. Her place is on the second, end of a hall that smells like everybody else's dinner. One room and a kitchen I could stand in the middle of and touch both walls.
There's textbooks everywhere. Stacked on the one chair, splayed open across the bed, a fat one face-down on the counter with a highlighter holding the page.
Index cards taped to the cabinet, drug names and doses in handwriting that shrinks as it runs out of room.
A mug in the sink. One plate. A lamp angled at the only place in the room anybody could read.
No photos, no second toothbrush in the cup I can see through the open bathroom door, no sign one other person on this earth has set foot in here, at least not in a long time.
She's been doing all of it alone. The exams, the bus alone and sometimes the bounty in her dumpster runs. Every piece of her life, she's put together by herself, in a room the size of the shower block at the plant.
I should leave. I'm standing half in her doorway with the keys still in my hand and every reason to go, and I'm not going.
“Bad.” I say, closing the door behind me.
She turns.
"There's something you should have straight before I walk out of here.
" I don't dress it up. She's earned it plain.
"Angel sent me to the free clinic when we figured out Brightmoor was dirty and found out you worked the hall where they kept Darling.
You were a lead. My job was to get close and find out what you knew. "
She blinks. I see the hurt in her eyes and then it's gone. It costs me to watch it.
"So the kiss…"
"Hear the rest before you build the whole thing wrong." I take one more step in. "You stopped being a lead the first Monday. Before you even told me about your reallocating resources, the job died on me. I didn't even notice it because I was too busy looking at you." I hold her eyes.
"Okay," she says, wrapping her arms around herself. "And when you find Darling? After?"
"I'll stay."
"You don't even …"
"When we find her. After. Whenever this is done and there's no case left that needs you in it." I close the last of the gap. "I'm not going anywhere, Bandit."
She crosses the rest of the distance herself, comes up on her toes, and her hand digs into the gray at my temple, fingers spreading through it like she's been waiting forever for the say-so. The sound she makes when she touches it is going to live in my head a while.
Then I quit thinking.
I get a hand at the back of her neck and the other at her hip and I kiss her.
The patience I found at that water cooler is gone. There's no slow version of this one. She opens on a breath, and I walk her the two steps back to the counter because her place is too small for anything but close.
She fits herself up the whole length of me. Her fingers tug once in my hair and it pulls a rough breath straight out of my chest. A textbook hits the floor. Neither of us looks.
I've held my hands steady over men coming apart on an operating table. They're not steady now.
She breaks off to drag in air, and her eyes come up to mine, blown dark, and there it is, the thing that stops me. Not her hands sliding under the hem of my shirt. The trust. She's running on too little sleep and right now, cracked open and alone, she'd let me do everything I want to her.
That's exactly why I won't.
I bring my forehead down to hers and hold us both there.
"Hey." Rough. "Look at me."
She does.
"Not like this."
"Bones!"
"Not because I don't want to." I take her face in both hands so there's no reading it any other way.
"I've wanted to since I saw you at the clinic.
But not with an exam at eight and you running on fumes.
" I press my mouth to her forehead, slow.
"I'm not interested in a night you second-guess on the bus tomorrow.
I want you when there's nothing chasing either of us and neither of us has a foot out the door. I can wait for that. I'm good at it."
She lets out a breath that's half a laugh. "You're really not making me want you less."
"Wasn't trying to."
I make myself step back. Hardest field discipline I've pulled in years, and there's no enemy in the room, just a girl in a doorway in a too-big building, looking at me like she'd rather I stayed.
"Lock this behind me," I say, tapping the door.
She locks it. I hear the bolt slide as I hit the stairs, and I stand on the wet sidewalk by my bike a second longer than I need to, looking up at the single lit window on the second floor.
I'm a grown man, a Bastard who's buried more feeling than most men ever have to carry, and like a love-struck teenager, I'm wondering how soon I can come back without it looking like I invented the reason.
I kick the bike alive and pull out slow, and by the end of the block I've already got it. That street door's busted, and a man who fixes things has every reason in the world to turn up tomorrow after office hours with a drill.
I'm in so deep … I don't think I'm ever climbing back out.