Chapter 24
Dozer
I stay crouched in front of her chair longer than makes sense, just looking at her, this woman who has handed me the heaviest thing she carries without asking for anything back, and understand somewhere in the quiet that I owe her something more than a soft word and a steady hand.
She has tears drying on her face, but she isn't trying to hide them anymore.
That's what gets me. Kenzi has spent this entire week turning pain into information and fear into action.
Now she's sitting in front of me without any of the usual armor, and somehow that feels more intimate than anything we've done so far.
"I know why you told me," I say finally. "Same reason I'm about to tell you something I don't usually say out loud."
She wipes the last of the tears from her face, watching me with the particular attention she gives everything.
"Spartan Elite's lost people." I sit back on my heels, hands loose between my knees, making myself say it. "Not just Reyes, this week. Before him. Since I joined. People I considered my brothers. People I recruited to sign up with me after the military."
I take a breath. "Torres, four years ago.
An extraction that went bad in a way none of us saw coming.
Whitfield, the year after. Training accident that never should have happened and haunted half the team for months because it wasn't even the enemy that took him.
It was our own equipment failing at the worst possible second.
And Charlie, this week. Same convoy as Reyes.
Same ambush. Same road we drove down without knowing somebody had already sold us out. "
Her expression changes with every name. Not pity. She knows better than that. Something quieter. Recognition.
"You carry all of them."
"I lost men in battle too, but these feel different.
These are all brothers who served with me and who could have gone into safer jobs after the military but I recruited them.
I believed in Elite, I still do, and I thought it would be a good opportunity for them.
Selfishly, I wanted men around who I trusted.
I recruited my own team members and then watched them die.
Every operator carries the dead with them.
It's part of the job nobody puts in the recruitment pitch. "
That earns the smallest curve of her mouth. "Probably because 'come work for us and collect lifelong guilt and grief' doesn't test well with focus groups."
"Probably." The almost-smile disappears as quickly as it came.
"Your brother. My team. Different uniforms, same weight.
" I look at her, steady, letting her see more of it than I usually let anyone see.
"I understand exactly what it costs to lose someone that way.
To a mission. To a war that doesn't care how much a person mattered to the people who loved them. "
"You never talk about them."
"I don't talk about most things." A ghost of something that isn't quite a smile touches my mouth. "You've noticed."
"I've noticed everything." There's warmth in it now, real warmth, the grief from a few minutes ago settling into something gentler underneath it. "It's basically my whole personality."
"I know."
The words hang there between us. I realize, with a clarity I don't particularly want, that I'm closer to her than I've been to anyone in years.
I'm close enough that I can see the faint tracks tears left behind on her cheeks, the tiny crease between her brows that appears when she's trying not to say something, the way her fingers keep flexing against the arm of the chair like they're still remembering what it felt like to hold onto her brother's memory all these years.
It's the other kind of close that scares me. The kind that gives someone enough information to hurt you without ever having to pick up a weapon. The emotional close. The vulnerability that can be a weakness or a strength.
We sit there for a moment, close and quiet, the two of us having handed each other the heaviest things we carry within an hour of each other, and I feel something settle between us that doesn't need any more words to explain itself.
Not competition over who lost more. Not comfort performed for the sake of comfort.
Just recognition, the specific, rare understanding of two people who have both learned exactly how much grief weighs when you're the one carrying it.
"I don't know how to do this," I say, quiet, honest, admitting something I hadn't planned on admitting tonight either. "Whatever this is."
Her eyes stay on mine.
"I've spent years making sure nothing got close enough to cost me anything if it left. You're already closer than anyone's gotten in that whole time, and I don't know how to want that and still be good at my job."
She studies me for a second. "Maybe they're not as separate as you think."
"Maybe not."
The words should make me uncomfortable. Instead, they feel like permission.
Her hand lifts slowly, giving me every opportunity to move away.
I don't. Her fingertips brush along my jaw, light enough that I feel every point of contact, and something in me goes completely still.
It's the same gesture I gave her in that motel room.
Except this time nobody interrupts us. No car door slamming, no cell phone ringing on the nightstand, and absolutely no gunfire.
Nothing except her hand against my face and the fact that I want it there.
Her thumb moves once along my jaw, and I catch her wrist gently, not to stop her, just to hold on.
"Kenzi."
She looks at me. "Yeah?"
"I'm trying very hard to remember how to be patient."
That gets the smallest laugh out of her. "Now's probably a terrible time to discover a character flaw."
"I've got several."
"I've noticed."
Her fingers slide into mine, and that simple connection hits harder than it should. Maybe because we've spent days touching only when one of us needed to pull the other out of danger. A hand at her back. Fingers around her wrist. My palm on her shoulder. Contact dictated by survival.
This isn't survival. This is choice.
"Dozer," she says, quiet, my name in her mouth carrying something different than it has before. Not teasing. Not testing. Just true.
"Yeah."
"I'm done waiting for the right moment."
I don't move.
"I don't think there is one," she continues. "I think there's just this one, right now, and I'd rather take it than keep pretending I don't want to."
I close the last of the distance between us before she finishes the thought. My hand comes up to cup the back of her neck, and I kiss her.
I've wanted to do this since a rest-stop parking lot and a poisoned sample vial.
She kisses me back like she's been waiting exactly as long as I have.
One hand fists in my shirt. The other slides into my hair, and the first thing I think is that I should have done this sooner.
The second thing is that I don't think sooner would have been right. This is.
It's not rushed. It's just us. Grief and trust and every quiet moment of noticing each other collapse into one long, unhurried kiss that tastes like relief. Finally.
Her fingers tighten against my shirt, and I pull her closer, careful despite everything in me telling me not to be.
I've spent most of my adult life treating wanting something as a liability.
Right now, with her mouth against mine and her hand in my hair, wanting her feels less like weakness and more like the first honest thing I've done in years.
When we finally break apart, she rests her forehead against mine, breathing unsteady. A small, stunned laugh escapes her.
"Well," she says. "That took long enough."
"I don't rush things that matter."
"You said that already."
"Still true."
She smiles, real and unguarded, and I feel something settle into place in my chest that I haven't let settle in longer than I want to admit.
Not just want, though there's plenty of that.
Something steadier underneath it. The specific, rare feeling of having found someone worth building a different kind of life around, if we live long enough to get the chance.
Her thumb brushes once over my collar. "We should probably talk about what happens next."
I pull her back against me, and she comes willingly, her arms sliding around my neck, her body fitting against mine with a familiarity neither of us has earned yet but both of us somehow recognize.
"Later." I say, my mouth against her temple, "I'd rather just have this."
She pulls back just far enough to look at me, and whatever she finds in my face makes something shift in hers, the last of the teasing giving way to something more deliberate. She takes me by the hand and leads me to the bedroom. Pushing me into the room, she laughs.
"Then stop talking," she says, "and show me."
I don't need telling twice.
I kiss her again, slower this time, no rush behind it, because rushing would mean treating this like something we're trying to survive instead of something we finally get to choose.
Her hands find the hem of my shirt, fingers cool against skin still warm from adrenaline, and I let her pull it over my head because I've spent this entire week putting myself between her and every kind of danger, and this is the first time undressing has felt like the opposite of vulnerable.
She goes still when she sees the bandage at my side. I can almost hear her thoughts, wondering if I’m okay to do this.
"It's fine," I tell her.
"I'll be the judge of that."
"Kenzi."
"I know." Her mouth curves, something rueful and fond at once. "Kiss me again."
I do.
Her shirt comes off next, my hands slower than I mean them to be, because I've spent days cataloguing the shape of her without letting myself think too much about it.
Now I get to linger. I take my time doing it, watching her face while I do, and the way her breath catches under my attention is its own kind of confession.