Chapter 11 #3
We break apart. His forehead rests against mine, and we're both breathing in a way that has nothing to do with the late hour or the coffee.
His hand stays on my neck. My fist stays in his shirt.
The table sits beside us with its notebooks and laptops and the scattered remains of a working evening that just stopped being about work.
"That can't happen again," I say. My voice is rougher than I want it to be. The words land between us with all the conviction of a woman locking a door she's already opened.
Andy's thumb traces a slow line down the side of my throat. "We both know it will."
He says it with the quiet certainty of someone who has been watching the evidence accumulate and has reached a conclusion he's not interested in revising. The tone holds no arrogance and no smugness, just the steady weight of a man stating what he knows.
I should pull back. I should let go of his shirt and sit down and rebuild the composure that just collapsed like a lock I picked on purpose and pretended was an accident.
My hand stays in his shirt.
"If this is happening," he says, and his voice drops into the register that bypasses my brain and finds the lower parts of me with the precision of a man who knows exactly where to aim, "then we're having a conversation first."
"A conversation," I say, managing to summon enough composure to make the word sound dry rather than wrecked. "You want to talk right now?"
"I want to be clear about a few things before either of us takes the next step.
" He lets go of my neck, but the loss of contact is strategic rather than retreating.
He sits back in his chair and gives me the steady, assessing look that I have learned to recognize as the one that precedes a line of questioning I'm not going to enjoy.
"I want to cover birth control, testing, and boundaries. "
The shift from consuming kiss to clinical inventory is so aggressively practical that it loops back around to being the single most attractive thing a man has ever done to me at a kitchen table.
He just kissed me until I made a sound I haven't made for anyone in years, and now he's sitting across from me with the same composed, thorough focus he brings to a warrant affidavit, running a pre-op checklist on our potential sex life like it's a case he intends to prosecute without leaving a single evidentiary gap.
"You always this thorough, Detective?" The bratty deflection comes out before I can stop it, which is fine, because I don't want to stop it.
The deflection is the only thing standing between me and the realization that a man who kisses like a controlled fire and then immediately pivots to responsible adult conversation is exactly the kind of Dom I've been testing every man at Dominion to find.
"Yes." He doesn't smile. He doesn't take the bait. He sits there with his rolled sleeves and his arms on the table and waits.
"IUD," I say. "It's current, and I'm consistent about STD screenings. Everything's on file at the club if you want to check."
"No need. I get tested regularly, and the last results were clean."
"And when you say regularly, you mean what exactly?"
"I mean I get tested between partners as a matter of practice. My results are on file at the club, same as yours, and I keep a copy in a folder in my nightstand."
"Of course you do." The laugh that escapes me is real and surprised, and I let it stay because the image of Andy Broussard filing his STI results in a bedside folder with the same methodical care he brings to warrant affidavits is so perfectly, absurdly him that hiding the reaction would cost more energy than I have left.
"You keep a personal backup of your STD screenings in your nightstand. Next to what, your tax returns?"
"I keep everything in a folder." He watches me with the patience that has outlasted the deflections, the challenges, the bratty lines I've thrown at him since he first sat at my bar. "You're deflecting."
"I'm processing. There's a difference."
"You're processing the fact that a man just told you he keeps organized medical records and it turned you on."
The accuracy of the observation lands like a paddle strike, precise and well-aimed and exactly hard enough to force a reaction before I can bury it.
The flush that climbs my throat is involuntary and visible, and Andy tracks it the way he tracks everything about me, with the thorough, unhurried attention of someone who is building a file he never intends to close.
"Condoms," I say, matching his directness. "It's your call."
"I don't use them if both parties are clean and covered. My preference is skin." He holds my gaze. "What's yours?"
"So is mine."
The words sit between us, small and loaded, the weight of a decision that just stopped being hypothetical. He nods once, the way he nods when he adds a fact to his notebook, confirmation logged, detail catalogued, case advancing.
"Boundaries," he says. "We're going to need a longer conversation for that one.
I mean limits, signals, the things you want and the things you don't. I watched you scene with Arnold, and I've been reading what you show me at the club and in this house for weeks.
I have a working theory about what you need. I'd rather hear it from you."
"A working theory," I say. My voice comes out steadier than I feel, which is the goal. "You've been profiling me."
"I've been paying attention. The difference is that profiling assumes I've reached a conclusion. What I've reached is a hypothesis, and I'd rather test it with your input than assume I'm right."
The honesty of that lands somewhere behind my sternum and stays.
The Doms I've scened with at Dominion treated the negotiation as a formality, a checklist to clear before the main event.
Andy is treating it as the foundation, the load-bearing wall that everything else gets built on, and the patience with which he's laying it tells me he has no intention of rushing the construction.
"Not tonight," I say, and the words cost me because the want pressing against my ribs would very much like tonight to be the night. "The conversation, yes. Not the rest. Not yet."
He nods again, and the acceptance is immediate and clean, a man who heard the answer and has no interest in negotiating around it.
He stands, collects his notebook from the table, and stacks it with the pen in the neat arrangement that is the only organizational system in this house I haven't rearranged.
"When you're ready," he says. "You set the pace."
"That doesn't sound very dominant of you."
"Consent is the foundation. The dominance comes after." He picks up his mug, rinses it in the sink, and sets it on the rack I installed because his dish-drying system was an affront to anyone with spatial awareness. "Goodnight, Renata."
My name lands in his mouth in that low register that bypasses every wall I've built and finds the woman behind them.
"Goodnight, Andy."
He walks down the hall toward his bedroom, and I sit at the table with the taste of him still on my lips and the phantom pressure of his hand on my neck and the understanding that the composure I've been maintaining just collapsed like a lock I picked on purpose and pretended was an accident.
I know the steps between his door and the guest room because I counted them the first night, too.
Every one of them is smaller than it was yesterday, and the woman staring down the hallway he just disappeared into knows exactly what she wants and is terrified of the wanting and is going to walk toward him eventually, because he is the first person who ever caught the sound she buried and refused to let her pretend it didn't happen.
I press my fingers to my mouth. The taste of him is bourbon and patience and the slow, certain heat of a man who kissed me like a verdict.
The hallway is dark, and I walk it toward the guest room instead of his door, because the pace is mine to set and I intend to make him wait the way he made me wait, the way he's been waiting at my bar for over a year, patient and relentless and watching.
He can handle it. He's the only one who ever could.