Chapter Six #3
Anja walked her bag down the hall in front of him, and he watched her enter the guest room and perform a habitual sweep of the room’s corners she had personally cleared ninety minutes ago.
It was fitted with a king bed, two nightstands, a reading chair under the window, and the watercolor his mother had bought him at an art fair in Soulard, because she believed grown men needed at least one piece of art in every room of their homes.
Anja set her bag at the foot of the bed and turned back to him.
“De Luca.”
“Yeah?”
“Get some sleep.”
“You too.”
Her mouth did that dry line thing he’d watched her wear three times tonight, the one he’d been trying very hard not to read anything into. “I sleep light when I’m working. Don’t take it personally if I come down the hall at four.”
“I’ll leave the bedroom door open.”
The pause that followed was a second longer than the conversation called for.
She broke it. “Goodnight, Leo.”
“Goodnight, Anja.”
He left the door partially open and trudged down the hall to his own bedroom. Then he stood there for a second with one hand on the frame.
Leo had made the bed this morning because his mother had raised him right. And because Mariella, his housekeeper, only came on Tuesdays and Thursdays. He killed the overhead, crossed to the bed in the dark, peeled back the duvet, and executed a flawless face plant.
He’d meant to think, to lie there for ten or fifteen minutes and run the day.
To decide what version of normal he was going to wear into the ballroom later today, and remind himself sixteen ways that the woman sleeping in his guest room wasn’t here for any of the reasons his body kept trying to suggest.
What he did instead was flip onto his back and drape an arm over his eyes.
Down the hall, water ran in the guest bathroom.
He heard it through two walls, and he tracked it without meaning to.
It took everything he had not to picture Anja naked below the stream.
The shower ran for about six minutes and stopped.
A drawer in the guest room opened and closed.
Bare feet padded on hardwood. The guest room door creaked, pulling to within an inch of being latched, the same way he’d left his own.
He dropped his arm with a sigh.
She was twenty feet away through two walls.
Leo was thirty-two years old. He’d dug in at the plate at the bottom of the ninth in the seventh game of the World Series with a count of three and two, down one run, and cranked a walk-off two-run dinger to win the game in front of seventy-eight thousand people.
He had stood in front of a panel of NFL general managers in his best suit and pitched a kid who couldn’t read a defense and gotten him drafted in the third round.
He had walked away from a woman’s bed at six in the morning five months ago with his shoes in his hand because he was a coward.
And here he was, a grown man in his own bed in his own condo, lying perfectly still in the dark because if he turned his head toward the door, he would picture her in his guest room.
He turned his head toward the door.
And pictured her in his guest room.
The image arrived with vivid detail. Anja in the king bed with her braid undone and her hair loose across the pillow.
The blanket pushed down to the small of her back because she ran hot when she slept, a detail he should not have remembered and absolutely did.
The Sig would be within arm’s reach on the nightstand, because she didn’t sleep anywhere a weapon couldn’t.
He closed his eyes.
The picture didn’t go anywhere.
He tried, briefly, to imagine her with the gun instead of without and discovered that this somehow made it worse.
Sleep, De Luca.
A sentence formed in the dark above him. Ask her to come in here.
He let himself look at it.
If he got out of this bed, walked down the hall, and knocked on the guest room door, she would open it and wouldn’t pretend she didn’t know what he was asking.
She wouldn’t make him explain. She’d look at him with her light-blue eyes and her hair down, and she would either say yes or no, but whatever her answer, it would be honest.
Leo thought she might say yes.
He would walk her back to his bed, put his hands on her for the first time in five months, and within ninety seconds, he would fall asleep on top of her like a drunk frat boy.
His laugh was soundless in the dark.
On the first night they would have together since their encounter in Bloomington, he was going to deliver it unconscious.
No. Not like this, after the worst day of his professional life and the most physically exhausting one. And not because a dead man had told him to call her. Whatever this was between them, it deserved a version of him that could stay awake for it.
He pulled the duvet up to his chin and rolled away from the door.
The decision settled inside him with exhausted relief, and he was halfway gone before he registered the second thing it had concluded.
He wasn’t, it turned out, going to be capable of letting her drive back to Bloomington when this was over.
Leo didn’t have the energy to examine that tonight.
He set it on the nightstand of his mind, beside the burner phone and the dead man’s note, the eight names on the drive, and the woman sleeping two rooms down the hall, and he closed his eyes. The city hummed outside his window, and Leo finally, mercifully, slept.