Chapter 12 #3
"What did you feel," she said, "when you thought about going back? Before Japan. Before the Scroll. What did you actually feel?"
He looked up from his tablet.
The question had come from somewhere she hadn't planned. She wanted to know what he felt because she was over treading water against the currents of her own imagination.
"About us or about going back in general?" he asked.
She shrugged her shoulder, "About any of it."
He was quiet for a moment. "When I knew I had to contact you, I felt like someone had handed me back something I'd convinced myself I didn't need anymore," he said. "And now I can't figure out how I survived without it."
She looked at him, then glanced at her file and his. Kuro's clinical documentation of two children who'd loved each other and been used because of it.
And here, on the other side of all of that, the same man. Older. Scarred. Still, impossibly, stubbornly, the same and yet not.
"Dan."
"Yes."
She reached across the table. Not reaching for anything.
Just extending her arm. Her hand was open on the table between them.
This was her offering. One that was chosen and deliberate.
It wasn’t offered from the girl she'd been but from the woman she was now, with full knowledge of the cost and the history and the complication.
She was choosing him anyway. He looked at her hand. Then he put his over it. The spark was still there.
She'd half expected it to be gone. Everything had been broken and now was being rebuilt.
She'd thought maybe it had been a young thing, a product of proximity and training and the hothouse intensity of Kuro's compound.
But what she felt for him … It wasn't gone.
It had never been gone. She knew it the moment she saw him in Niger.
But it was different. It was deeper. The spark had always been there. But underneath it now was something else. Something that hadn't existed when they were twenty-one and twenty-two and terrifyingly, recklessly in love.
There was a weight attached to this spark. The weight of everything they'd survived. The choices they made, the costs they paid, and the years of carrying each other's absence.
The spark was the same. But the grounding beneath it was solid now in a way it had never been when they were young. Because they'd both learned in separate, painful experiences what it felt like when it was gone.
She knew what this was worth now, and that was the difference.
She didn't look for the escape route. She didn’t calculate the risk or remind herself of all the reasons this was complicated and unresolved …
She just let the moment be what it was. His hand over hers at thirty thousand feet. Right now, it was enough. Tomorrow she’d take another step. A step she could tell he wanted her to take right now, but she was going as fast as she could.
* * *
They landed at Langley in the early morning.
The aircraft taxied to the private hangar, where the familiar logistics awaited them.
Two vehicles were waiting, no drivers, and the keys were in the sun visors.
Her small Honda and Dan’s rental. She noticed the plates had been changed.
Guardian’s doing, no doubt. Dan stepped off the plane and looked at the base around him, and she watched him take it in.
He looked different from the man who'd appeared on her doorstep.
Still contained. Still careful. But something had altered in how he held himself.
She wasn’t sure what it was. Time, maturity, and the fact that they were working toward something more personal. A healing, perhaps? She felt the wounds getting smaller, the future feeling lighter. Even with the mission, the weight of what had been between them was much lighter.
She briefed him on the immediate protocol, including the temporary quarters Guardian had arranged for him, check-in procedures, and what came next operationally.
Then she gave him a map of the base with the exit route clearly indicated.
“Don’t deviate. People on this installation have guns and will use them if you show up in the wrong place.
” He listened. Nodded. Asked two precise questions and accepted her answers.
They stood beside her car. She'd been thinking about what to say to him … personally, not professionally, for the last hour of the flight. Everything she'd considered had been too much or not enough.
She looked at him.
"Dan."
"Yes."
"The stone is still on my doorstep," she said.
He went very still.
"I haven't moved it," she said. "I'm not going to." Which meant she would always welcome and accept him. Always. She’d told him in the most basic way she knew that there would be an always for them. Soon.
There was a moment of time that passed as she watched him doing that thing. As if he were holding her words carefully again. As if they were fragile and irreplaceable.
"Okay," he said very quietly.
"Okay," she agreed.
She got in her vehicle.
He stood on the tarmac and watched her go.
She didn't look back.
But she was smiling.