Chapter 4 #2
She comes with her thighs locked around my shoulders and my name in her mouth, the waves of it rolling through her. I smile against her and feel her shudder at that, at knowing I'm smiling. I let her feel it for a moment before I pull back.
I reach for my wallet. She watches me find the condom.
"You carry those?" she asks.
"I'm not a monk."
Her mouth curves. Just barely. "No. You're really not."
I get the condom on and pull her to the edge of the table and get my first real look at her and my brain goes completely offline.
Fuck.
Not out loud. Barely contained. She's flushed and breathing hard and her hair is half down around her shoulders, sitting on a conference table in nothing but that dark lace.
The full curves of her, the slim dip of her waist, the length of those legs.
Her hazel eyes on mine, dark and blown and not looking away.
I have imagined this. I did not imagine this correctly.
I catch a stiffness she's trying to hide under everything else. The fall yesterday. The mare.
"Your shoulder." My voice comes out rougher than I mean it to.
"It's fine." She reaches for me, impatient, like the words are an interruption she doesn't have time for.
I don't ask again. I just recalibrate, hands finding her waist instead, careful of that side, weight braced so she doesn't have to hold herself up with that arm.
I am already so close it's embarrassing. She came on my mouth and I nearly lost it then and there and I have been white-knuckling it since.
I push inside her and we both go still.
"Christ." Out loud this time, low, against her temple.
I can't help it. She is so warm and so tight around me and I have my hands on her hips and her thighs are wrapped around me.
I have to stop, jaw locked, forehead dropped to hers.
Three seconds. Four. Not nineteen years old. Will not do that to either of us.
Her hips tip toward me. Her hands pull at my shirt and she makes a small sound. Not quite pain, but I feel her check herself, adjust, lean the good shoulder into me instead.
"Knox." Not a warning. A demand.
"I know." I pull back and drive into her and feel her gasp against my jaw. "I know exactly."
It's desperate and exactly right: her in nothing but that dark lace bra, panties pulled aside, me still in my shirt with my jeans at my boots, both of us tangled and urgent on a conference table at seven in the morning.
Her nails find my back and I keep one hand on her shoulder, steady, like I can hold the injury still just by covering it.
I find her throat with my mouth and I tell her, low and flat, what she feels like.
What she's doing to me. Things I have never said out loud to anyone.
She makes a sound that tells me she heard every word and I do it again.
Neither of us is quiet. I don't care. I cannot make myself care.
She comes a second time clenching around me. I follow her over the edge and it wrecks me completely, down to the floor of whatever I'm built from. I stay there with my face in her hair and my hands on her hips and try to remember what I was before I walked into this building this morning.
I can't quite get there.
The conference room reassembles itself around us. The fluorescent hum of the lights. The stack of altered manifests on the floor where they slid. Her annotated cargo record, face-down on the edge of the table.
She slides off the table and I step back and give her the room to do it. She pulls her jeans back on. Efficiently. Not looking at me. Her hair goes back into place with two practiced movements. She has done this before, put herself back together in a room.
I button my shirt, tuck it, and pick up the cargo record from the floor.
The silence is not awkward. It's enormous. The kind of silence that has weight and walls and takes up all the available air in a room.
She picks up her pen from where it rolled to the edge of the table. Clicks it once. Sets it down.
She looks at me.
"That was a mistake," she says. Her voice is steady. It costs her something to make it steady, but she makes it anyway. Maren Sullivan's default setting is competence and she will deploy it even now.
I look at her for a long moment. At the flush still in her cheeks. At the way she's holding the pen to give her hands something to do. At the place on her throat where my mouth was.
"No," I say.
Her chin comes up. "Excuse me?"
"It wasn't a mistake." I pick up the cargo record and set it on the table between us. "You decided. You knew what you were deciding. Maren Sullivan doesn't make mistakes. She makes choices."
Her eyes hold mine for three full seconds.
I watch her want to argue and find nothing to argue with.
"We have a missing driver," she says finally.
"We do."
She pulls the laptop toward her and opens it. Her jaw is set and her hands are steady and she is going to make me watch her be completely professional for the rest of this morning and I am going to have to let her. That's the deal. I understand the deal.
Then she says, without looking up from the screen: "This doesn't happen again."
I say nothing for long enough that she looks up.
"Again," I say.
One word. She hears it. Her breath catches, just barely, just for a half-second, and then she looks back at her screen. I can't wait to take my time with her and hear her moans then.
She returns to the employee record ten minutes later. Robbie Vásquez. Twenty-two months with Sullivan Transport. Gone.
"Tate drove past his address before this meeting," she says.
I go still.
"He texted me." She glances at her phone screen for the first time since we sat back down.
"Just now." She takes a drink of her coffee, sets the cup down.
Her eyes find mine and stay. "Nobody home.
Neighbors haven't seen him since yesterday morning.
" A beat. "His work truck is in the lot outside this building. His personal vehicle is gone."
"He left his work truck," I say.
"He left his work truck."
I run the sequence. Manifest, GPS corridor, cleaned cargo record, timing. The shape of it is not a Sullivan betrayal and not a Blackwater leak. It's something built around both families, assembled in pieces, and Robbie Vásquez is one of those pieces and he is in the wind.
"He knew what was going to happen to that shipment," I say.
"More than that." She closes the laptop and her hands are steady on the lid. I notice her hands. I notice everything about her and I have not stopped noticing since she walked around that table. "He knew what was coming for him after."
"Tate drove past," I say.
She looks up. "Tate checked. Nobody home, vehicle gone, neighbors haven't seen him. That's a dead end."
"Tate knocked on the front door."
"And?"
"I want to go inside."
She sets the pen down. Studies me across the table the way she studied the cargo record, looking for the thing underneath the thing.
"Knox. Tate said the place was empty."
"Tate knocked on the front door," I say again. "He waited. Nobody answered. He drove past the neighbors. That's a wellness check." I hold her gaze. "I'm not going to knock."
The sentence lands in the room and I watch it arrive behind her eyes. The certainty of a man who has walked into places before and found what people leave behind when they think no one is coming. I have never said it out loud in front of anyone who wasn't already standing beside me in the dark.
She doesn't blink. Doesn't reach for her coffee or her pen or any of the small gestures people use to buy time when they've heard something they weren't ready for.
"You've done this before," she says. She isn't asking.
"Yes."
"And you're telling me."
"I'm telling you because Robbie Vásquez didn't leave his work truck in the lot and drive away because he got a better job offer.
He left because someone moved him or someone scared him into moving himself, and whichever it was, the answer is inside that house.
" I lean forward. Not toward her. Toward the work.
The distinction matters and doesn't matter at all because my body stopped recognizing the difference an hour ago.
"Tate is good. Tate is careful. But careful doesn't find what people hide when they're running. "
She's quiet for three seconds. I count them by the pulse I can see at her throat.
Then Maren stands, the same half-second hitch in her shoulder where yesterday's fall still lives, and picks up her keys.
"My truck," she says. "I drive."
She walks out ahead of me and I follow and I look at the conference table once before the door closes behind us. The altered manifests. The cargo record. The chair she pushed back when she made her decision.
She's already in the driver's seat when I reach the passenger side.
Engine running. One hand on the wheel, the other holding her phone, pulling up the address Tate texted her.
She doesn't look at me when I get in. Doesn't need to.
The cab fills with her perfume and the silence of two people who have crossed a line together and are not yet sure what's on the other side of it.
Not the line I want to cross next.
But close enough.
I stare straight ahead and I think: she heard exactly what I meant when I said I'm not going to knock.
I'm in trouble that has nothing to do with the investigation.
The trouble is she already knows it.
And she picked up her keys anyway.