CHAPTER 14 #2
Nobody commented. Reyes developed a sudden deep interest in the supply shelf. Quinn came through with the gray sock riding her forearm, needles ticking, slowed at Vera's shoulder exactly long enough to say it — “Good hands, kid”
“and was gone into the alcove before it could become a conversation, off to sit with a pilot who thought he was fine.”
I poured coffee and put the mug into Vera's hands instead of words. She took it and held it with both of them.
“Inventory's crying, jefe.” Reyes had a clipboard and his mourning voice.
“We burned a month of suture and half the gauze shelf in three hours.
Order's at the freight office in town — I roll after the transfer's away, call it half past one. Feed store, freight, and the good espresso beans, which are the real emergency.” He looked at Vera.
“Ride along. I'll buy you a coffee that isn't this.”
She considered the mug in her hands. “If nothing on the list bleeds,” she said, “I'm in.”
By half past ten the house had settled into its night sounds — steel roof ticking off the wind one panel at a time, the bunkhouse down to one lamp.
I stood on the west porch in the cold and let the day drain out through my boots.
The wind worked the cottonwoods off in the dark, and in the gaps between gusts the valley went to a stillness I recognized: lit, live, pulsing, nothing with a voice.
The whole night ran like the quiet bay.
She came out with her jacket over her shoulders and her hair down, and I knew her weight on the boards without turning. That's a thing that had happened sometime in the weeks since she arrived. I hadn't authorized it.
“Debrief, Sergeant?” Armor, but worn loose.
“Pressure's holding. The nurse'll fly out splinted and mad about it. Colt walked his skid marks until Reyes fed him meatloaf.”
I turned. “That's the debrief.”
“That's not why you're standing in the wind.”
“No.” I let the wind have a second. “Here's the rest. I put a dying man against a door I knew you had not been able to cross. I gave you a choice, but the patient was still on the other side of it. I am sorry for the weight of that. I am sorry for the how.” The wind filled the pause.
“I keep trying to be sorry that you crossed. It will not take.”
“Ninety seconds,” she said. “You lied to me. It was five minutes.”
“Medicine ran long. It does that.”
She laughed, low, and it wasn't armor at all. “You didn't ask me to be well. Everyone for two years has asked me to be well. You asked whether I could operate.” Her chin came up. “I held it.”
“I was there.” My hand moved on its own logistics — knuckles along her jaw, where the wind had been. “Best surgeon in the room. And I had a man open on a table between us, so I kept that to myself.”
“And now?”
“No table.”
She kissed me first. No count of three, no camera to blame it on — both hands fisting my collar, the whole day arriving at once as want, and the dam didn't creak, it just went.
I caught her waist and gentled it, slowed us down to something with a floor under it, and she made a small disbelieving sound into my mouth that I meant to keep.
“Two days ago you blamed the light,” I said against her cheek.
“There's no light out here, Sergeant. Not one thing to blame.”
“Then come inside. You've been cold since supper, and if we're doing this, we're doing it warm, behind a shut door, with the whole night to spend.” Her hand found mine.
“Fair warning: I don't intend to rush one thing about you.”
We went up through the dark kitchen, and the stairs told on us both. At the top, Havoc raised his head off the hall runner, took our measure with one professional glance, and relocated to the head of the stairs, an old soldier changing posts.
“Good man,” I told him. He yawned.
At her door I stopped. Her hand was still in mine; the lamp she'd left on laid a warm strip under the door, and I took a steadying breath, the kind I keep for hard doors — except nothing on the other side of this one was hard, which was new.
“Vera.” Not Doc. Her eyes came up.
“Last question tonight, and I need it in words, because I'm not built to guess about this. Tell me plainly.”
She stood in her doorway with her chin level and nothing armored anywhere on her.
“Yes. This. You.”
She pulled me through by the collar, and I shut the door with the flat of my hand.
The lamp was low, the blue walls gone the color of deep water, the heater ticking through the connecting bath. She reached for my belt like a woman with a plan, and her hands landed in mine, kissed the knuckles of the right one — the one that had held — and set both of them back at her sides.
“Let me,” I said. “You did the day's work. This part's mine.”
I undressed her slow, as I'd never been permitted to be careful with anything. Her henley traveled at a speed no garment has managed in the history of cotton — I got a laugh for that — and then the laugh went quiet, because I'd stopped to look.
“Look at you.” It came out plainer than praise — inventory, if inventory could be reverent. “I've been trying not to do this since the annex. You should know the campaign's been a total failure.”
Her bra went, and her jeans. The film canister on its chain stayed at her throat, where it rested. My mouth followed my hands — collarbone, the swell of her breasts, the drop of her ribs.
The burn on her left forearm had gone to that new pink that reads louder than a scar. I turned the arm to the lamp, kissed the healthy skin alongside it, once above, once below, never on, and laid it down on the quilt like borrowed gear I meant to return in better shape than I found it.
“That's the arm,” she said, watching me do it.
“I know what it is. I dressed it.” I kissed the pale inside of her elbow.
“It gets respect and right-of-way.”
She laughed — up onto the quilts, bare, black hair everywhere — and pulled my henley off with two fists, and then her fingers were in my hair and stayed, which answered everything.
I learned her with my hands first. Slow over her breasts until her breath lost its rhythm, thumb dragging until she said my rank like a complaint. Down the line of her ribs.
Between her legs, where she was already wet, and the sound she made then was low and honest and better than any voice a monitor ever had.
I worked her with no hurry and my whole attention — two fingers inside her, curling, patient, thumb riding her clit in slow circles, my eyes on her face, the best readout I'd ever stood watch on.