Chapter 9 #2
“Let me see,” I said, because I needed a reason to keep touching him that wasn’t please, just please.
It wasn’t bad. Superficial. My voice found a notch between steady and something more. “You should clean it.”
“I will.” His gaze cut to my mouth again, then settled on my eyes, the way a man looks when he’s deciding whether to step off a roof into a river he’s never trusted.
“You ran like that was something you do every day,” I said, because I had to say something that put language around the way my body had reacted to what I’d seen—him moving, him taking charge, the clean, efficient violence of it.
I had never, in my entire catalog of boys and men, met anyone who carried danger like it was a tool and not a costume.
He didn’t pretend. “Sometimes,” he said.
Heat slid low and dense, shameless as a tide. I thought of the toy in my nightstand and felt both absurd and freshly furious with it—its small hum, how it had never given me this. No one had. Not the frat boys or the polished Charleston sons or the good men who’d been safe as church.
My body was opening like a door for a stranger in an alley in the rain because he had put himself between me and a gun without making a speech about it.
“Thank you,” I said again, and the words didn’t feel smaller the second time. “I mean it.”
“Don’t thank me for doing what anyone should have done,” he said.
“Anyone didn’t,” I said, because I’d watched the crowd part and the phones lift and the man in the hoodie sprint.
His jaw worked once, a muscle jumping there. “You learned anything from that?” he asked lightly, a rasp of humor under it.
“Yeah,” I said, and then because the filter was soaked through and useless, I let the rest out. “That I shouldn’t leave my purse on a chair.” I held his gaze. “And that I’m in trouble where you’re concerned.”
The not-quite-smile came and went. “You don’t know me.”
“I know enough.” I tilted my face up an inch. He was so close I could see the pale line where one scar crossed another under his jaw, could count the slow blink that meant he was choosing restraint on purpose. “I know what it does to me when a man like you moves like that.”
“Natalie,” he said, warning and want braided in the syllables.
A car rolled past the alley mouth, a hiss on wet pavement. Somewhere behind us, someone laughed, too loud, the sound cutting off as a door shut.
I felt the shape of a future headline stir in the back of my mind—Planner seen kissing stranger in alley while city preps for flood—and my stomach tightened at how easily the world twisted things into the wrong kind of headline.
Public perception was a dam with hairline cracks I’d been staring at my whole life.
Not now, I told myself. Not with rain coming. Not with cameras eager. Not with a man at my mouth who looked like he’d been built to break me on purpose and put me back together better.
I stepped back an inch. He let me. The restraint tasted like sex more than kissing would have.
“I promised a tour,” I said, breath shaky but brain returning to its job. “It’s not going to be coffee-and-pastries pretty anymore. You still want to come?”
“I’m here,” he said, simple.
“Good.” I swiped a strand of wet hair off my cheek, trying to feel like a person and not a live wire. “Then come watch the first band hit with me. If it stalls, we’ll move cars. If it pools, we’ll call Public Works. If anyone gets stuck—”
“Not a hero move,” he finished quietly.
We walked back toward The Rise, the alley expanding into street again, people and sound rushing in around us.
I snagged a handful of napkins from the counter and pressed them into his scraped knuckles.
He took them, and because I wasn’t done being reckless, I wrapped his hand myself.
The sight of those big fingers in my palm did something chemical to me.
He watched me the way men watch bombing runs—awe and intent, the quiet that comes before and after a strike.
At the corner, two teenagers huddled under a shared umbrella, phones up, whispering.
One looked at me, then at Ethan, then at the alley.
I could already feel the algorithm chewing on us—the outrage, the oohs.
I was used to being someone in this city—Butch’s granddaughter, the planner with the maps.
I wasn’t used to being half of a story I hadn’t approved for release.
“They’re going to talk,” I said, more to myself than him.
“About what?” he asked, not naive, just unconcerned.
“About me,” I said. “About you. About ‘what kind of woman’ … when the rain’s coming and I should be …” I trailed off, anger and wanting tangling in a knot.
He lifted our wrapped hands, just enough to make me look. “Let ’em talk,” he said, and the ferocity in it was quiet and devastating. “Do your job. I’ll do mine.”
“What’s your job?” I asked, because if he was going to say something like that in that voice, I needed the shape of it.
His mouth edged toward that not-smile again. “Right now? Keep up.”
Thunder shuffled its feet somewhere offshore. The wind changed, a breath taken in.
“I owe you dry clothes,” I said. “Or a towel.”
“Start with showing me where the water lies,” he said. “Then we can hunt a towel.”
We stepped out together, rain dotting our shoulders, the city tightening its jaw for what was on the horizon. I felt the pull of two tides—the one in the sky and the one under my skin—and for once, I didn’t tell either one no.