Chapter 16 #3
The house is dark and still and smells like coffee and the lemon oil he uses on the dining room table, and the familiarity catches me somewhere behind the sternum.
I've been sleeping in this house for weeks.
I know where the creaky board is in the hallway and which cabinet holds the mugs and how the light falls through the kitchen window in the early afternoon.
I've rearranged his spice rack and judged his reading material and left my things scattered through the guest bathroom with the territorial creep of a woman who is losing the argument with temporary.
The guest room is to the left. I turn toward it, the pull automatic, the same way I've moved through this house every night since the first one.
Andy's hand is still holding mine. The turn toward the guest room pulls the length of our arms taut, and he doesn't let go. The resistance is silent and immovable.
The strength behind it is the same strength that pinned my wrists above my head the night before the wire and held them there while I arched against him and forgot every exit I'd ever memorized.
"You don't have to be alone tonight."
I turn back. He's watching me with the focused stillness that I've learned to read over the time I’ve been serving him bourbon he barely drinks, the look that means he's already decided and he's giving me the space to catch up.
The hallway is dark. The streetlight through the front window paints him in amber and shadow, and the lines of his face in this light are harder than they are in daylight, the jaw sharper, the eyes darker, the patience more visible for what it costs him to hold.
"Is that an order, Detective?"
"Does it need to be?"
The question hits the exact place where my bravado is thinnest. He knows me.
He knows that an order would be easier, that compliance is a door I know how to walk through, that obedience to a command is simpler than choosing for myself, because obedience is a transaction and choosing is a surrender and I have been confusing the two for my entire adult life.
"I don't know how to do this." The deflection I reach for dissolves before it forms, and what comes out instead is raw and graceless. "Trust someone. Let someone see all of it. I've spent my whole life building exits into every room I walk into, and you keep standing in all of them."
"I know where the exits are." His free hand comes up, and his thumb traces the line of my jaw with the slow, deliberate pressure that matches the way he interrogates, patient and thorough, unwilling to let go before he's gotten what he came for. "I also know you haven't used one in weeks."
The observation is surgical. He's right.
I haven't run. I've been standing in his kitchen and sleeping in his guest room and leaving my things in his house and not running, and the fact that he's tracked that, noted it, added it to whatever mental notebook he keeps alongside the case notes and the evidence logs, sends heat through me that the exhaustion can't suppress.
"If you were holding me here I'd know what to do," I tell him, and my voice cracks on the honesty of it. "I'd fight. I'd pick the lock. I'd find the angle. You're asking me to choose to stay, and that is the hardest thing anyone has ever asked me."
"I know." His thumb presses once against the pulse point under my jaw, and the possession in the touch is so precise, so controlled, that my breath catches and holds. "Start small. Stay with me tonight. Just sleep."
He says it the way he says stop and sit down and give me your arm: low and certain, leaving no room for negotiation while offering every room to refuse.
The command and the choice exist in the same breath, and the tension between them is the thing that has been pulling me toward this man since the first night he sat at my bar and watched me with the patience of someone who intended to wait as long as it took.
"Just sleep," I repeat, and the words taste like a dare, because we both know what his bed means, what his sheets will smell like, what the proximity will do, how thin the line is between lying next to him in the dark and the thing we did the night before the wire, when his hands were in my hair and his voice was in my ear and the distance between us was measured in skin rather than air.
"Just sleep." His eyes hold mine, and the banked heat behind the calm is visible if you know where to look, and I have been looking at this man for some time. "I didn't say it would be easy."
The honesty in that disarms me more thoroughly than gentleness would have.
He's not pretending this is simple. He's not pretending he's going to lie next to me and feel nothing.
He's telling me he wants what he wants and he's choosing to wait, and the restraint is a gift and a provocation, and the fact that it's both at once is the most Andy Broussard thing I've ever encountered.
"Okay."
He leads me down the hallway. His bedroom is his in every detail: the dark wood of the bed frame, the navy sheets, the case files he thinks I don't notice him relocating from the nightstand to the dresser.
He pulls a T-shirt from a drawer and holds it out, and when I take it, our fingers overlap on the fabric, and he lets the contact hold for a beat longer than the transfer requires.
The look he gives me over the stretched cotton is unhurried and thorough: the one that says he is aware of exactly how much of me is about to be undressed on the other side of the bathroom door, and the awareness is costing him, and he's choosing to pay.
I change in the bathroom. The hospital scrub comes off and his T-shirt goes on, and the cotton is worn soft and smells like his detergent and his skin, and the hem falls to mid-thigh.
I stand there for a moment with my hands braced on the counter looking at a woman in his shirt who has stitches in her arm and no more defenses left that are worth maintaining.
When I come out, he's stripped down to a T-shirt and shorts, the badge and the holster and the notebook set on the dresser with the precision of someone who respects his tools.
He's propped against the headboard, and the covers on my side are turned back, as though the bed has already decided what I'm still negotiating.
I cross the room and slide in beside him, and the sheets are cool against my bare legs and the mattress shifts under my weight, tilting me toward the heated center of him.
He reaches over and turns off the lamp. The room drops into darkness softened by streetlight and the glow of a clock, and in the dark the awareness of his body next to mine sharpens until I can feel the heat radiating off his skin from inches away, can hear the slow draw of his breathing, can sense the exact position of his arm before it moves.
His arm settles around my shoulders. The weight of it draws me against his side, and there is nothing neutral about the contact.
His fingers curl around my upper arm with a grip that is gentle in pressure and absolute in intent, a hold that says here the way he says everything: once, without repetition.
I go because resistance would require energy I no longer possess and because going is what I want and because the distinction between those two reasons stopped mattering miles ago.
My cheek finds the space between his shoulder and his collarbone.
Under the cotton, his heartbeat is slow and even, and the vibration of it travels through my skin and into the bone beneath.
I am aware of every inch of him that is touching every inch of me: his thigh pressed against my knee, his ribs expanding under my forearm, his breath stirring my hair, the controlled pressure of his hand on my arm holding me the way he holds everything, with the focused restraint of someone who knows the difference between gentleness and softness and is choosing both at once.
This is the man who waited out every deflection I threw at him until I stopped performing and started asking, who made me say what I wanted in a voice that had nothing left to hide behind.
That man is lying next to me in the dark with his hand on my arm and his heartbeat under my cheek and his mouth close enough to my hair that I can feel the heat of every exhale, and he is not moving.
The stillness is the loudest thing in the room. The want banked behind it pulses against my skin like a second heartbeat, and the restraint it takes to hold that still is a kind of power I have never encountered in anyone who has ever touched me.
"You're thinking very loudly," he says. His voice is low, roughened by exhaustion and the register he drops into when we're alone and the badge is off and the distance between us has narrowed past professional.
"I'm thinking that you're the most dangerous man I've ever met, and I'm falling asleep in your bed, and the fact that both of those things are true at the same time is either the bravest or the stupidest thing I've done. I broke into a cop's house once, so the bar for stupid is high."
His hand tightens once on my arm. "Go to sleep, Renata."
"Is that an order?"
"It's a strong suggestion from someone trying very hard to keep a promise."
The admission costs him. I hear it in the roughened edge of his voice, feel it in the tension that runs through the arm around me, the coiled restraint of a body that wants one thing and a word that requires another.
He promised just sleep, and he meant it, and the effort of meaning it with me pressed against him in his shirt in his bed in the dark is making the tendons in his forearm stand taut against my skin.
I press my face into the curve of his neck.
His pulse jumps under my lips, and the involuntary response sends a flicker of satisfaction through me that is entirely inappropriate for a woman who agreed to just sleep and entirely consistent with a woman who has been provoking this man and is not yet finished.
"Thank you," I say against his skin, and the words are small and sincere and carry no brat at all, and the honesty of them surprises us both.
His hand moves from my arm to my hair. His fingers push through it slowly, a rhythm that claims and soothes in equal measure, and my eyes close against the pulse in his neck, and my breathing slows, and the tension in my muscles releases in increments that feel like doors unlocking one by one.
I fall asleep between one breath and the next, with his arm around me and his fingers in my hair and the certainty that for the first time in as long as my memory reaches, I am not performing safety.
I am not calculating the distance to the nearest exit or the vulnerability of the sleeping position or the probability of needing to run before morning.
I am in the bed of someone who could have taken what he wanted tonight and chose to hold me instead, and his restraint is more terrifying than his hands ever were, and I am not running, and that is enough.