Chapter 8 Watching #2
The moment stretched. His chest was still heaving, the rise and fall of it pulling my eyes to places I was actively trying not to look.
His skin was flushed from the effort, warm color spreading across his chest and climbing his neck.
His eyes held mine, and for a second the careful analytical distance he maintained was simply gone—replaced by something unguarded and warm and quick.
"Irish." Slightly breathless. From the pull-ups. Obviously from the pull-ups.
"Just came to ask about the Ridgeline filings," I said. My voice was rougher than intended. I cleared my throat. Didn't help. "The discrepancy in the quarterly shipping volumes. The ones from—"
I was stalling. I could hear myself stalling. I was a man who talked for a living, who'd talked his way out of firefights and into bedrooms and through every crisis in between, and I was standing in a doorway watching a shirtless accountant drink water and coming apart at the seams.
"I can pull those up after I shower," Nolan said. He reached for his shirt. Pulled it on. The damp fabric caught on his shoulders and clung, which was worse somehow, the cotton outlining everything it was supposed to hide.
"Yeah. Good. After the shower." I drummed my fingers against the doorframe. Twice. Stopped myself. "No rush."
His eyes stayed on mine for one beat longer than casual. That flicker again. Warm. Quick. Gone before it could be named.
I turned and walked down the hallway with the studied calm of a man who was absolutely fine and not at all having a cardiac event.
Halfway to the storage room, I stopped. Leaned against the wall. Pressed the heel of my hand into my sternum where the ache was building, and closed my eyes.
We'd done this before, Dec and me. Brought someone into our bed.
A handful of times over the years. It was fun.
Hot. Uncomplicated—because it was only ever skin.
A night, maybe two. The door opened, everyone enjoyed themselves, and when it closed, we were still us, unchanged, the foundation untouched.
What I felt for Nolan wasn't skin.
It was bone.
And the difference between skin and bone was that bone breaks, and when it breaks, it doesn't heal the same.
Our room was at the end of the officers' hallway.
Small. A bed that Dec had made with hospital corners because the man couldn't leave a sheet untucked without his military training staging an intervention.
A lamp. Our bags stacked neatly against the wall.
The room smelled like gun oil and his soap and the faint cedar of the closet, layered underneath with the warm, woody sweetness of the sandalwood candle he always lit on the nightstand.
The combined scent hit me the way it always did, every single time: a slow warmth that started behind my ribs and spread outward.
Eight years. Nearly eight years of walking into rooms that smelled like him and feeling the same thing.
He was packing the go-bag. Methodical. Each item considered, placed, secured.
Extra magazines. Water purification tabs.
A compact med kit. Binoculars. The matte-black Sig he'd cleaned twice today—his hands moving with the precise economy that defined him, no wasted motion, every gesture serving a purpose, the tendons in his forearms shifting under the skin with each movement.
I sat on the bed and watched him the way I'd been watching everything lately. Hungrily. Terrified.
"Ghost is solid," I said. Trying for conversational. Landing somewhere in the vicinity. "Kid's got good instincts. Just needs someone steady next to him."
"He'll be fine." Dec's voice was low, focused on the bag. He folded a dark shirt and placed it in the bottom with the care of a man packing for a mission he intended to come back from. "His fieldcraft is better than he thinks."
"Runs in the family, apparently. The whole stepping-up-under-pressure thing."
Dec looked up. Those dark eyes found mine, and the room compressed to the space between us, the way it always did when he actually looked at me. Not glanced. Not assessed. Looked.
"You're worried," he said. Quiet. Not a question.
"I'm always worried when you're in the field without me." The grin. Muscle memory—nearly involuntary. "Who's going to watch your six? Ghost? The kid can barely watch a movie without fidgeting."
Dec held my gaze. He wasn't buying the grin and we both knew it.
The truth sat in my throat like a coal. Hot.
Getting hotter. Dec, I think I'm falling for Nolan.
Not the way I wanted Marcus in Portland or the bartender in Flagstaff.
Those were gravity, attraction with a clean arc up and a clean arc down.
What I feel for Nolan doesn't arc. It just keeps climbing.
And I'm terrified because what if you don't feel the same and what if this is just me and what if telling you changes what we are—
"Be careful out there," I said instead.
He crossed the room. Sat beside me on the bed.
His thigh pressed against mine, warm and solid, and his hand found the back of my neck in the grip that had been his since the beginning.
Firm. Grounding. His thumb traced the tendon below my ear, slow and deliberate, and the touch sent a current down my spine that pooled in my gut and stayed.
"Always," he said.
I kissed him. Leaned in and caught his mouth and poured everything I couldn't say into the pressure of it.
His lips were warm and he tasted like the coffee he'd been drinking all afternoon, bitter and familiar, and his hand tightened on my neck, pulling me closer.
His stubble scraped against my jaw. I pressed deeper, and the sound he made was low and quiet and meant only for me, and I held onto it the way a drowning man holds onto wood.
I held on one beat too long. I felt him notice. The fractional pause, the slight tilt of his head when I pulled back, the question forming behind those dark eyes.
He didn't ask.
I didn't answer.
"Come back with everything we need," I said. My voice was steady. My hands were not. "Nolan and I will have the case file ready to match your photographs by the time you're back."
He studied my face for three more seconds. Reading me the way he read terrain. Then he nodded, squeezed my neck once, and went back to the bag.
I lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. My leg was throbbing. My chest was worse. The truth I hadn't said filled the room like smoke, invisible and acrid, changing the texture of every breath.
Dec left at 5:00 AM.
I stood in the lot and watched him straddle the Harley, the leather of the seat creaking under his weight, his hands settling on the grips with the easy familiarity of a man who'd been riding longer than he'd been doing almost anything else.
Ghost swung onto his bike beside him, bouncing once on the seat, rolling his neck, his whole body vibrating with the coiled energy of a kid on Christmas morning who'd been told he could open the presents.
"Two days in the dirt with binoculars and protein bars." Ghost grinned at me, teeth white in the dark. "Best vacation I've had all year."
"Bring me back a souvenir," I said. "Something tasteful. Maybe a weapons manifest."
"I'll gift-wrap it." He pulled his gloves on, fingers flexing, already restless for the throttle.
Dec looked at me. Held it. The visor was up and his dark eyes caught the light from the clubhouse doorway, and he didn't say anything because we'd already said everything we were going to say and the things we hadn't said would keep until he came back.
He dropped the visor. Kicked the engine over.
The Harley's rumble hit my chest before it reached my ears—a deep, rolling thunder that vibrated through the soles of my boots and up into my sternum.
Ghost's bike joined it a half-second later, higher-pitched, sharper.
The combined sound filled the lot and bounced off the perimeter walls, and the desert dust stirred beneath the exhaust, fine grains catching the faint light and swirling in the warm air that pulsed from the pipes.
They pulled out through the gate. Side by side.
The rumble softened as they hit the access road, thinning from thunder to a low drone, and the red glow of their taillights shrank through the settling dust until the dark swallowed them and the sound faded to nothing and the only thing left was the ringing silence of a desert that had just been full of noise.
The dust drifted down. Settled on my bare arms. Fine and gritty and still warm from the exhaust.
The desert was still. Cold. Pre-dawn cold—the kind that arrives just before sunrise and lasts until the sun crests the ridge and burns it off in minutes.
I stood in it and let it press against my skin and felt the absence of Dec settle into the spaces he usually occupied.
The space beside me in bed. The space across a room that he filled just by standing in it.
The specific, calibrated pull that I'd oriented my life around for eight years, suddenly gone.
Not just worry for his safety. I'd survived deployments and ops and four months of listening through a radio—I could handle a couple of days.
What I wasn't sure I could handle was two days alone with Nolan.
Not physically. I trusted myself. My hands stayed where I told them to stay, and my mouth said only what I allowed it to say. That had never been the problem.
The problem was everything else. The late-night conversations that kept running longer than they should.
The way his laugh surprised us both. The way he looked at me sometimes across the storage room, quick and unguarded, before the analytical shields came back up and whatever he was feeling got filed away in whatever internal system he used to keep his emotions in quarantine.
The problem was that I was afraid I'd say something honest. And honesty, in this particular situation, with this particular man, might be the most dangerous weapon in the house.
The sun crested the ridge. The cold burned off in seconds, the desert shifting from blue to gold, the warmth hitting my skin like a hand pressing flat against my chest. Somewhere inside, I heard the coffee maker kick on—the old one, the one that gurgled and spat and took twelve minutes to produce anything drinkable.
Nolan would be awake soon. He'd come to the storage room with two cups, one black, one with too much sugar because somehow he'd learned my order without ever asking, and he'd set mine on the table without a word and open his laptop.
The room would fill with the silence that existed between two people who had stopped needing to talk to be comfortable.
And I would sit across from him and feel the ache in my chest that had nothing to do with my leg and everything to do with the man who'd become essential without asking permission.
I rubbed the dust off my arms. Rolled my bad leg once, testing. Took a breath that tasted like exhaust and desert sage and the fading ghost of Dec's engine.
The clubhouse door was warm when I pushed it open.
The hallway smelled like coffee and leather and the particular quiet of a building full of sleeping men.
I walked toward the storage room, my footsteps loud in the silence, my pulse doing things I refused to count, and I thought: two days.
Two days of being honest might break everything.
Two days of not being honest might be worse.
The coffee maker gurgled. The sun climbed. I sat down at the table and waited for the man I was trying not to fall in love with to walk through the door.