9. Asking #3
"How?" I crossed toward the mats. My voice came out steady for exactly one word, and then the dam went, and everything behind it came through at speed.
"You want the how. Okay. Here's the how.
I'm the best stealth operator this club has ever had.
That's not bragging, ask anybody, ask Blade, he built me, years of him drilling angles and rooms into my body, Irish sharpening my eyes on top of it, I can cross a floor of two hundred drunks and nobody's eyes stick.
It's the one thing that's mine. And five nights ago I stood in that crowd and watched you say no to a monster with your brother's name in his mouth, and I held the look too long, and the best stealth operator this club has ever had got made by the one man in Nevada he cannot afford to be made by.
Because of a look, Caleb. I burned my own cover with my eyes. "
He'd gone still by the bag, the wrap half-unwound and forgotten in his hand.
"And it didn't stop." My feet were moving, a short line, back and forth at the edge of the mat, because standing still had left the building.
"Five days. You've been here five days, and I can't map a room if you're in it.
I count exits and I lose count. I gave a Church report with my thumbnails buried in my palms so my face wouldn't do anything, and tonight I stood up in front of thirty-four patches to deliver four calm tactical sentences and instead I—you heard what came out.
Everybody heard. Irish is never going to let me die in peace.
My whole life runs on a fast brain and quiet feet, and since you got on the back of my bike I have neither, I'm loud everywhere, I'm sloppy, Blade had to physically look at me twice during one briefing, and I keep waiting for it to settle and it doesn't settle, it gets worse, and I don't—" My hands were doing something in the air, I have no idea what, sign language for a word that doesn't exist. "I couldn't vote to send you back in there.
I know the plan is right. I know the odds.
Hawk's odds are always right. But my hand wouldn't leave the table, because the footage won't stop playing, you inside, the chains going on, and me stuck outside being useless at the exact thing I exist to be good at, and I'm confused, okay, that's the how, I've been confused for five straight days and I don't get confused, my brain doesn't do confused, it does fast and it does quiet and around you it does neither?—"
He crossed the mat.
I felt it the way you feel weather changing, a pressure shift, and my mouth kept going, "—and I don't know what that means, I keep trying to file it and there's no folder, there's no?—"
His hand came up and closed around the back of my neck, and he kissed me.
Every channel in my head went dark at once.
Darker than quiet. The casino floor gone to dead silence between one heartbeat and the next, and the entire world narrowed down to the pressure of his mouth on mine and the heat of his palm on my neck and the fact that Caleb, Caleb, was kissing me, which was impossible, which was a thing I had filed under never on day one and nailed the drawer shut, and the drawer was open and his lips were slightly chapped and he tasted like salt and water and his thumb was resting against the hinge of my jaw like he'd planned where to put it.
I froze for the length of one held breath. Long enough that he started to ease back.
Then my hands made the decision my head was too dark to make, and I dug them into the front of his bare shoulders, skin and muscle hot under my palms, and pulled him back in.
A sound moved through him, low, felt more than heard, humming through his mouth into mine, and the kiss went from careful to something with intent behind it.
His other arm wrapped my waist and hauled me flush against him, sweat-damp chest to hoodie, and I could feel every hard inch of his chest and stomach through the cotton, the heat coming off his skin like off pavement in July.
My fingers left his shoulders and found better work, one hand sliding up the back of his neck into short damp hair, the other flat between his shoulder blades, pressing, keeping, and he tilted his head and the kiss opened and his tongue touched mine and my knees went loose.
We staggered. One step, two, my back met the cold concrete wall beside the bag and the shock of it through my hoodie made me gasp into his mouth, and he swallowed the sound and pressed in, one wrapped hand braced flat on the wall beside my head, the other still burning a handprint into the small of my back.
His stubble scraped mine. My pulse was in my ears, my fingertips, the backs of my knees, everywhere except wherever it usually lived.
I could feel him hard against my hip through two layers of gym shorts and there was zero ambiguity about what he could feel of me, and neither of us pretended otherwise, and neither of us pushed it further, and somehow the not-further was the hottest thing that had ever happened to me in my entire loud, fast life.
He broke the kiss by a half inch. Held there. His breath came rough against my lips, and mine came rougher, and we stood in the cone of light with the bag chain still ticking faintly beside us and the desert cold pressed against the windows.
"Five days," he murmured, and his mouth was close enough that I felt the words as much as heard them. "You're not the only one who's been confused."
"You—" My voice came out wrecked. I tried again. "I had you filed under never…"
"Refile me."
His forehead came down and rested against mine, and I stood there with my hands full of him and my head empty of everything, and for the first time in my life, the silence didn't scare me at all.