Chapter 13 #2
The conversation shifted after that. Not back to the morning’s flirting, but not deeper either. They found a middle ground, talking about smaller things that still mattered. He didn’t leave the desk for two hours. The threat assessment sat half-finished on his screen the entire time.
The texts continued through the afternoon and into the evening, the gaps between messages shrinking until they were responding to each other within minutes.
He told her he liked the work but not always the rooms it put him in.
She told him she liked the work but not what it cost her to keep moving.
Neither of them unpacked those statements further.
They just let them sit between messages, two people admitting to the same exhaustion from opposite sides of it.
He grabbed food at some point, locked up the office, drove back to the hotel. Changed out of his training clothes, sat on the edge of the bed, and kept texting her. The conversation had become the shape of his whole day.
But it had reached the edge of what a screen could carry. The questions he wanted to ask needed voice. Tone. The silences between words that told you more than the words themselves.
He wasn’t sure how she’d react, but he called her.
She picked up after two rings. Neither of them spoke right away. The line was open and quiet, just the sound of her breathing, steady, a little shallow. Both of them adjusting to this. Hearing each other’s voice for the first time since the hedge maze.
Different rules.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
A pause. He leaned back against the headboard and waited to see if she’d fill it.
“This is different,” she said.
“It is.”
“I can’t backspace if I decide I shouldn’t actually say something.”
“Neither can I. That’s sort of the point.”
A breath of something that might have been a laugh. “So what do you want to talk about?”
“Your shoulder.”
The silence that followed was different from the pauses in their texts. He could hear her in it. The quality of her quiet. A shift, maybe her weight moving, maybe her sitting down.
“I’m fine.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“You didn’t ask anything. You just said my shoulder.”
“Okay. How is your shoulder? The one you ripped out of its socket to get through an iron gate four days ago. That shoulder. How’s it doing?”
“Healing.”
“Did you see a doctor?”
“I don’t need a doctor for that.” She said it with no drama.
“Fallon, what happened at that gate wasn’t normal.”
“I know it wasn’t normal. I was the one doing it.”
“Then you know it’s the kind of thing that needs medical attention.”
“What I know is how my body works. I’ve been managing it for a long time.”
Managing. Like an illness or permanent ailment. He pressed his palm against his forehead. This wasn’t a woman shrugging off a one-time injury. This was someone describing a relationship with her own body that he understood nothing about.
“It wasn’t the first time you’ve done that,” he said.
She didn’t answer right away. “No.”
“And you’re not going to tell me why.”
“Not tonight.”
Something in her voice shifted on those two words. A door closing gently, but not locking. He heard the difference and decided to let it stand.
“Okay,” he said. “Different question.”
“Should I be nervous?”
“Why did you do it? At the gate. Instead of just staying and talking to me.”
She was quiet long enough that he started counting. Four seconds. Five. He could hear something on her end, the creak of what might have been a chair.
“I couldn’t stay,” she said. “I know you wanted me to, but I couldn’t.” She stopped. The silence stretched. He opened his mouth to fill it, to give her an out, to say something that would ease the weight of whatever she was trying to get to. He caught himself and closed his mouth and waited.
“I was in the middle of something,” she said finally, coming at it from a different angle. “Something that mattered. And I couldn’t take a chance on it falling apart, no matter how much I wanted to stay and talk to you.”
“I wouldn’t have turned you in even if you’d been twirling a diamond bracelet around your finger singing look what I stole.”
“I couldn’t take the chance.”
He let that land.
“Then promise me something.”
“Isaac.”
“Never do that again. Never break your own body to get away from me.”
“You don’t understand what you’re asking.”
“I understand enough to know that I never want to see you go through that sort of pain again. Especially not because you see me as a threat. As long as you’re not hurting people, I’m not coming after you.
I won’t turn you in. I won’t report you.
I won’t use what I know against you. And I’m asking you to promise me that you will never do what you did at that gate again. Not to get away from me.”
The line went quiet. He could hear her breathing. Could almost hear her thinking, the particular silence of someone measuring a promise against everything it would cost to keep it.
“I promise,” she said.
Her voice was steady. He believed her.
He let the silence settle as something they were now in together rather than something that separated them. Outside, the city made its distant noise. A siren somewhere, fading.
“I have one more question,” he said.
“You’re pushing it, Baxter.”
“You know my last name? That’s more than I know about you.”
“Sorry, buddy.” He could hear the smile in her voice. “Win some, lose some. What’s your question?”
This had bugged him for four months. “Why did you sneak away from the hotel that night in Boston?”
The longest silence yet. He lay back against the headboard and looked at the dark ceiling and listened to her not answer.
“I left because I wanted to stay.”
“That’s what you told me at the fundraiser. I’m not sure I believe you.”
“Well, it’s the truth. I wanted to stay. I was lying there and you were asleep and your arm was...” She stopped. He heard her breath catch, just barely, and then she controlled it. “I don’t know how to explain it. Being there with you mattered. And things that matter are things you can lose.”
He closed his eyes.
The words sat between them on the open line, carrying the weight of every locked door and side exit and empty pillow she’d left behind. He didn’t rush to respond. He let her hear that he wasn’t filling the space, wasn’t deflecting, wasn’t charming his way past the thing she’d just handed him.
“Waking up and reaching for you and finding you gone…” he said. “That stayed with me. I need you to know that.”
She didn’t say anything. He didn’t need her to.
They were quiet together for a long time. He could hear her breathing even out, and his own matched it, and the silence between them stopped being absence and became something that had its own shape.
“I should go,” she said finally. Soft. Almost reluctant.
“Yeah.”
“Goodnight, Isaac.”
“Goodnight, Fallon.”
The line went quiet.
Isaac set the phone on his chest and stayed where he was. The room was dark. The bed was empty on the other side. He put his hand flat against the mattress where no one was sleeping and left it there.
Whatever this was between them, it had stopped being a game.
He wasn’t sure it ever had been one.