Move With Me
Chapter Six
The café was exactly as charming as Vera had promised. Exposed brick, hanging plants, sandwiches with literary names on a chalkboard menu. I ordered something. I'm sure it was fine.
I have no memory of eating any of it.
All I could focus on was Vera touching her lips every few minutes, absent and unconscious, like she kept forgetting and then remembering.
The way her eyes would find mine across the small table and darken in that distracting way, pupils swallowing the blue every time our knees bumped beneath it—which was happening with a frequency that had long since exceeded coincidence.
It wasn't accidental. I knew that. She knew I knew that. We were both pretending not to know it together, which was its own particularly pleasurable exercise.
"You're not eating," she observed.
"Neither are you."
She looked at her sandwich like she'd forgotten it existed, then back at me. "I'm not hungry. Not for food, anyway."
I stared at her.
"Vera."
"Yes?"
"You can't just say things like that in a public café."
"I'm simply being honest." She took a sip of her water, and I watched her swallow in a way that was distinctly unprofessional of me. "You said you appreciated the clarity."
"The clarity is going to give me a medical episode."
"You're a firefighter." She set the glass down. "Trained for high-pressure situations."
"Not this particular high-pressure situation, no. This one was not in the manual." I leaned back, arms crossed, studying her across the table with what I hoped came across as composure. "You're enjoying this."
"Tremendously." She propped her chin on one hand. "I find that I enjoy most things that make you look at me like that."
"Like what?"
"Like you're trying very hard to remember where you are." She picked up her water glass, watching me over the rim. "It's extremely flattering."
I said nothing. This was a deliberate choice. Words, at this particular moment, felt inadvisable.
"You came to my library with the intention of seducing me," she said very matter-of-factly, setting the glass down. "I have been successfully seduced. Congratulations."
I laughed. "Is that right?"
"It is. I've been keeping track of the evidence.
" She ticked it off on her fingers. "The book you were holding upside down.
The way you leaned against the shelf. The fact that you asked me to lunch and have been looking at my mouth for the last forty-five minutes.
" She folded her hands. "The data is very clear. "
"Library science."
"Library science." Her eyes found mine and stayed there, calm and blue and bottomless. "So. You gonna do anything about it?"
Something shifted in the air between us. Not a question, really. More like a door she was offering to open, handle extended, and the only question was whether I'd take it.
"There are a lot of things I could do about it," I said very carefully.
Her lips parted slightly. "Like what?"
The café was doing its charming café thing around us—the scrape of chairs, the hum of an espresso machine, a couple at the corner table sharing a dessert—and I leaned forward, closing maybe two inches of the space between us, and watched her breath catch.
"Well," I said, keeping my voice low, "I could start by telling you what's going to happen when I take you home."
She went very still. Her knees bumped mine under the table. Definitely not accidental.
"And what," she said, with remarkable composure, "is going to happen?"
I held her gaze for a long moment.
"You're going to let me be in charge," I said. "And you're going to find out that you like it."
The flush started at her throat and climbed upward. Her eyes didn't leave mine, but they went a shade darker, that particular darkness I was already learning meant I'd hit something true.
"That's a very confident thing to say," she managed.
"Occupational hazard."
"You're very calm about this."
"One of us should be."
She laughed, a short, undone sound, and pressed two fingers to her lips like she was containing something. Her knee nudged mine again. "And if I have ideas of my own?"
"You can tell me all about them." I let that sit for exactly one second. "And then I'll tell you what we're actually doing."
Her eyes went fully dark. The flush completed its journey to her cheeks. She picked up her sandwich, put it down, and picked it up again.
"You're not what I expected," she said.
"What did you expect?"
"Someone less—" She gestured, vaguely, at me. All of me. "—this."
"That's not an explanation."
"You know exactly what I mean." She finally took a bite of her sandwich, chewed, set it down. "The tattoos suggest a certain—"
"Don't finish that sentence in a direction that ends with you calling me a softie."
"I was going to say intensity." Her eyes were laughing. "But now I'm curious about the softie theory."
"We'll table it."
"We will not." She leaned forward, mirroring me, and dropped her voice to something that matched mine.
"Because I think you are, actually. I think underneath the extremely effective, intimidating firefighter exterior, you're someone who's going to take very good care of me.
" She held my gaze. "And I think that's why you want to be in charge.
Not because you want control. Because you want to give something. "
I looked at her for a long moment.
She looked back, composed and warm and entirely too perceptive.
"Like I said," I said finally. "Terrifying."
The smile she gave me at that was slow and luminous and went straight through me like a current. "Thank you."
"It wasn't a compliment."
"I'm choosing to take it as one." She stole my untouched water glass, took a sip, and handed it back. "Three and a half hours," she said. "My shift ends at four-thirty."
"That's a monumental eternity."
"Mm." She took another bite of her sandwich. "Whatever will you do with yourself."
"Suffer," I said. "Possibly dramatically."
She considered this. "You could take the long way around the outskirts. The red rock formations are nice in the afternoon light." She looked at me sideways. "I know you must ride when you need to think."
"You've been reading me too closely."
"Library science." Serene. Unrepentant. "We observe."
"I'll be back at four-thirty," I said. "On the dot."
"Of course." She looked back at me, the picture of innocence.
"Vera."
"Petra."
"I should be very clear. I am taking you home today."
Her smile widened. "I was counting on it, Miss June Edition."
My stomach clenched, and I groaned. "You found the calendar."
"I found the calendar. The sexy calendar. You're very photogenic, by the way. The axe really—"
"We're never speaking of this again." I pressed a hand over my face.
"I'll let it go on one condition. Will literally never bring it up again."
"What do you want?"
She looked at me across the small table, both our untouched meal between us, the afternoon light warm on her hair, her eyes steady and blue and entirely sure of herself.
"You're taking me home today," she said.
I smiled through a wince. "Yes."
She held out her hand across the table.
I looked at it, then at her.
"What's this?" I said.
"A handshake. To seal the terms."
"We're shaking hands. On me taking you to bed."
"It's professional." Her chin tilted up slightly. "Unless you're planning to renege."
I reached across and took her hand.
She had a librarian's hands—slim, delicate, warm.
She shook once, formal and brief, and started to pull back, and I held on for one extra second, just long enough to make her breath catch again, just long enough for my thumb to graze the inside of her wrist where her pulse was running considerably faster than a handshake warranted.
Then I let go.
"Four-thirty," I said.
"Four-thirty," she agreed, and went back to her sandwich with the composure of someone who was not, in fact, composed at all.
I took Vera's suggestion and killed time in the desert, taking the long way around San Jacinto's outskirts where the scrubland opened up and the red rock formations jutted toward the sky. The wind helped. It usually did.
This was moving fast. Possibly too fast. One date, one kiss in a library against the Le Guin section, which I had already decided I was going to tell absolutely no one about and also think about for the rest of my life, and now I was taking her home to dominate her and—
My hands tightened on the handlebars.
I'd been to war. I'd fought fires that wanted to eat everything they touched. I'd rappelled out of helicopters into smoke so thick I couldn't see the rope below my own hands.
None of that had made my pulse do what it was currently doing.
Vera Montgomery was genuinely going to be the end of me, and we hadn't even made it upstairs yet.
When I pulled up at four-thirty, she was already outside, emerald dress, slightly-mussed hair, watching the parking lot entrance.
"Hi," she said, a little breathlessly.
"Hi yourself." I held out my spare helmet.
She eyed it the way you eye something you've decided to trust against your better judgment. "Ready as I'll ever be."
"First time on a bike. Questions before we begin?"
"Just one." She took the helmet. "If I scream, is that normal?"
"Very common. Considered good form for a first-timer, actually."
"Okay." She held the helmet up and stared at it. "How does this—"
"Here." I took it back and settled it over her head, my fingers finding her jaw to adjust the strap.
She went very still under my hands, watching me through the lifted visor with those enormous blue eyes.
I caught the chin bar and tilted her face up slightly to look at her very directly and very seriously.
"You're going to hold on," I said. "Lean with me in the turns. Don't fight the bike."
"Don't fight the bike," she repeated solemnly.
"Move with me."
"With you," she breathed. "Got it."
She climbed on behind me, and her arms came around my waist, and her chest pressed against my back, and her thighs settled against mine, and I sat very still and had a very direct conversation with my own nervous system about operating heavy machinery.