CHAPTER 9
Sloane
◆
Sleep was a contract I couldn't get anyone to sign.
I built the timeline and tore it down and built it again, and every version ended the same way, with a column that didn't balance, and the unbalanced column had my name at the top of it.
And beneath the math, in the place I refused to inspect, was the other thing.
The way Grant Holloway had kissed me like he was furious at himself for needing to, and then walked out so he wouldn't do it again.
Next time you kiss me, you'd better mean it.
I'd been lying here cataloguing that too, the way I catalogue everything, filing it where it couldn't reach me, and the file kept springing open on its own.
At some point the wanting got louder than the storm, and I gave up.
The loft was dark except for the runway string bleeding amber through the high window, a single dotted line strung across the black, the only warm thing for miles.
Grant's bunk was empty. Julian's door was shut.
Below, the generator ran its low rationed hum, and I could feel through the floor that the heat had been pulled back; the hangar had gone from cold to the kind of cold that means a clock is running down somewhere.
There was light in the galley below.
Omar was at the farm table with the paper map unfolded in front of him, the soft-worn corridor map he wouldn't digitize, its creases furred white, and he kept his hands flat on it the way some people keep a hand on a sleeping dog, reading it with his palms more than his eyes.
He'd pulled a sweater on over nothing and his sandy hair was falling forward and he was humming, barely, that tuneless under-the-breath thing he did, and when I came off the bottom stair he didn't startle.
"Couldn't sleep," he said, "or wouldn't?"
"Is there a difference."
"For you? Probably not. " He pushed the chair across from him out with his foot.
"Sit. The percolator's dead, I'm sorry to report.
Cold and ticking like a guilty conscience.
I keep meaning to dump it and I keep not, because pouring out coffee at one in the morning feels like admitting the night's not going to improve. "
I sat. The pot sat between us on the cooling range, and I could hear it, faint, the little metal tick-tick of it surrendering the last of its heat, slower and slower, counting down to nothing.
My own pulse was doing the opposite, climbing while the metal cooled, and I filed that contradiction away and said nothing about it.
"You should sleep," I said.
"So should you, trouble, and yet. " He spread his hands over the map.
"I don't sleep great in storms. Old habit.
When I was a kid you learned to stay up the night before a placement ended, because if you were awake you got some say in how it happened.
Where you sat in the car. Whether you got to grab your own bag.
" He said it lightly, the way he said everything that cost him. "Anyway. Maps don't mind the hour."
I looked at the map. Roads I'd never driven, towns I'd never stop in, all of it inked over and softened and held. "Why won't you put it on a phone?"
"A phone wants a tower, a charge, a server somewhere doing me a favor.
" He traced a corridor with one finger, slow.
"This wants nothing. It's the one thing in my life that's never let me down yet, and believe me, I've audited the field.
People are the variable. " Then, quieter, the joke gone out of it: "And the coven can't hack a thing made out of a tree and a stubborn man. There's that too."
The honesty of it loosened something in my chest, and before I could decide whether to let it, I was talking.
"My grandmother believed in paperwork," I heard myself say.
"Ruth. Paralegal, forty years. Her whole faith fit on an index card: read it, sign in the right place, keep your copy, and the copy will keep you.
" I rolled her pen between my fingers, the brushed-steel one I press when I'm calculating, and set it flat on the table before my thumb could find the button, because the click would have spelled out more than I was ready to hand him.
"Then her firm went through one of those words that sound like nothing.
Restructured. By the time the dust cleared the pension was gone, and the documents she'd trusted her whole life were the instrument they'd used to take it.
She spent her last years in a room I couldn't afford to make any kinder, certain the system would correct itself if she just located the right form. "
Omar had gone very still across the table, a different stillness than Grant's, the warm kind instead of the granite kind. He'd laid his hand flat on the map and stopped moving it entirely.
"So that's the origin story," I said, and dragged the dryness back into my voice because the alternative was unacceptable.
"I went to law school to become the person who catches the clause everybody else skims past, and somewhere around the week we buried her I drew my own conclusion from it.
The only safe position in any room is the one nobody can afford to lose and nobody can afford to need.
Stay essential, stay unattached. That's how I read the room they took her apart in, and I've been reading every room that way since. "
The storm leaned on the steel. The pot ticked.
"Counselor," he said. Just that.
"Don't. " I lifted a hand. "I'm not telling you so you'll do something about it. I'm telling you because it's one in the morning and you told me a true thing and I have terrible judgment when I'm tired."
"You have excellent judgment. " He came around the table at the same unhurried pace he'd kept all day, telegraphing every inch, giving me a hundred chances to say no, and he crouched beside my chair so he was looking up at me instead of down, and that undid me more than anything else he could have done.
"You read the room in one breath, same as me. You just decided the smart play was to stand in the doorway. I get it. I've been standing in a lot of doorways my whole life. " His mouth tilted. "Difference is, I'm tired of doorways. Aren't you tired, sweetheart? You look so tired."
"That's a terrible pickup line."
"It's not a line. " His eyes searched my face, hazel-green and far too warm, a few degrees too warm like all of them, heat coming off his skin where his knee touched mine.
"It's an offer. I'm going to make it real plain, because you're a lawyer and you like plain.
I want to put my hands on you. I want to make you feel good and ask for nothing.
And you get to say no to any of it, all of it, at any point, and nothing changes, I still make you breakfast in the morning, I still plot us a clean corridor out of here.
Nothing about you owes me anything. That's the whole deal.
You want to read it again before you sign? "
Nothing about you owes me anything. He couldn't have known what that sentence did to me. Or maybe he did. Maybe he read it in one breath like he read everything.
"This is a very strange contract," I said, and my voice came out lower than I meant it.
"It's the best one I've got. " He waited. "Sloane. Tell me yes or tell me no. I'll be thrilled either way, but I'm not moving until you say a word."
Every instinct I had said run the numbers first, the way I always do before I commit to anything. My hands came together at the knuckles the way they do right before I close a deal across a table, and then I let them fall open in my lap, because closing was the last thing I wanted to do here.
"Yes," I said.
He let out a breath like he'd been holding it longer than the moment accounted for. "Yeah?"
"Yes, Omar."
"There she is. " He rose, slow, and drew me up out of the chair by my hands, and the height of him surprised me again, the lean whip-strength of him, the way he turned me with both hands at my waist until my back was against the cool steel edge of the counter and he was a wall of too-warm in front of me.
"Okay. New rule. Before we go one more inch. This is for all of us, not just tonight, you understand? It's the most important thing I'm going to say, so I need your lawyer ears on."
"I'm listening."
"The word is red. " His thumbs moved once at my hips, settling.
"You say red, everything stops. Not slows.
Stops. No questions, no 'are you sure,' no negotiating, no me deciding I know better.
You don't have to explain it, you don't have to be hurt, you don't have to be anything.
You can say it because you changed your mind about the weather.
Red means stop and it gets honored every single time, by me, by Grant, by Julian, by anybody who ever puts a hand on you in this club, forever.
That's not a suggestion. That's law. " His eyes held mine, and all the sunshine had gone quiet and serious underneath. "Say it back to me."
"Red," I said.
"Again. So your mouth knows the shape of it in the dark."
"Red."
"Good. " Something eased in his face. "Good girl. And the check-in word, when I want to know where you're at, I'll say color. You tell me green, you're good, keep going. Yellow, ease up, talk to me. Red, we stop. You with me?"
"I'm with you, Counsel. " I couldn't help it. "You'd have made a hell of a contracts attorney. That was cleaner consideration language than half the partners at my firm."
He laughed, low and delighted, his forehead dropping to mine. "God, you're a menace. Okay. " And then he stopped laughing and put his mouth on my throat, and I forgot every clause I'd ever read.
It landed more like a claim filed gently than a kiss.
His lips at the side of my neck, then the hinge of my jaw, then back to the soft place above my collarbone where my pulse hammered out everything I wasn't saying, and he found it and stayed, humming low against my skin, and I felt the sound more than heard it, that thing the wolf made too deep for the ear, felt it travel down through my sternum and pool low.