Chapter 24 Heat In The
Supply Room
Delilah
The dinner was fine.
Cole's friends are easy people the kind who ask questions and mean them, who laugh at the right moments and don't require anything performed. I sat between Jenna and Marcus and ate pasta and answered questions about the marina job and felt, for the first time in longer than I can track, like a person at a table rather than a role being filled.
Bishop didn't come.
Cole didn't say anything about it. Just pulled out the chair next to his and said more pasta for us, then, and moved on. But I noticed the empty chair the way you notice the specific absence of something you've been trying not to think about.
Saturday morning, I come in early.
The marina is quiet at this hour dock crew not yet arrived, Margo's car not in the lot, the lake doing its flat silver thing in the early light. I like this hour. It belongs to nobody and nothing is required of me except the work. I'm in the supply room pulling the inventory count when I hear the staff entrance.
The specific weight of his footsteps. Seven-fifteen on a Saturday when he has no operational reason to be here.
I keep counting.
He finds me between the shelving units with a clipboard and a flashlight because the overhead bulb burned out three weeks ago and I've been meaning to replace it. He stops in the doorway. Takes in the clipboard, the flashlight, the fact that I've clearly been here for a while.
"You're in early," he says.
"So are you."
He leans against the doorframe. Crosses his arms. The supply room is small two narrow aisles between floor-to-ceiling shelving, barely enough room to turn around without touching something. With him in the doorway it's smaller still.
I set the clipboard on the shelf.
"I've been thinking," I say.
"Delilah"
"Let me finish." I turn to face him. "I've been thinking about the way we've been operating. The professional distance. The careful management. The pretending that July didn't happen and September didn't happen and we are just two colleagues who happen to have a complicated history."
"We are two colleagues"
"Don't." I take a step toward him. "Don't use the accurate description to avoid the true one."
He goes quiet.
"Something happened between us," I say. "Twice. And I'm not asking you to turn it into something it isn't. I'm not asking for promises or timelines." I hold his gaze. "I'm asking you to stop pretending it didn't happen. Because every time you route something through email instead of walking twelve feet to my desk, I feel it. Every time you look through me in a briefing I feel it." I pause. "I'm tired of feeling it."
"What do you want me to do?" Low. Rough at the edges already, just from standing in this doorway.
"I want you to stop punishing us both for something that wasn't a mistake."
The aisle between us is maybe four feet.
He's looking at me the way he looked at me on the dock in July the inventory, the deciding, the moment before the decision lands. Except this time there's no open lake and no morning light. There are a supply room and a burned-out bulb and a flashlight casting shadows up the shelving units and four weeks of distance that has cost us both more than either of us has said.
"If I stop managing the distance" he starts.
"Then we deal with what's actually there." I don't look away. "Instead of pretending it isn't."
He moves.
Two steps and he's in front of me close enough that I have to tilt my chin up and his hand comes to my jaw the way it always does, certain and careful, and he kisses me.
Not like the dock.
Not slow and deliberate, the kind that takes its time because it knows where it's going. This is four weeks of managed distance igniting all at once. His mouth is urgent and certain and I grab the front of his shirt with both hands and pull him closer and feel him make a sound against my lips that he didn't plan on making.
My back meets the shelving unit.
He doesn't stop.
His hands move from my jaw to my waist, pulling me against him, and I feel the full solid weight of him and the particular way his control is already slipping faster than it did in July, because July was the first time and this is the fourth week of twelve feet and we have both apparently run out of patience at exactly the same moment.
The clipboard hits the floor.
Neither of us registers the sound.
His mouth moves to my jaw. My throat. That place below my ear he found in July and hasn't forgotten and I haven't forgotten him finding. I arch into it and stop managing the sounds I'm making because he told me once not to muffle them and I remember everything he told me.
"Bishop"
"I know." Against my throat. His hands pushing up under the hem of my shirt, warm and certain against my skin, and I pull at his shirt in return because fair is fair.
He pulls back just far enough to look at me. Eyes darker than usual. Breathing not controlled at all.
"We don't have much time," he says.
"I know." I pull him back down.
What follows is fast and risky and completely aware of itself the dock crew at eight, Margo's car potentially in the lot at any moment, a supply room with a broken lock and a flashlight on the shelf. We work within the constraints and they don't feel like constraints. They feel like the only honest thing that's happened between us in four weeks.
He is thorough even fast. Deliberate even urgent. The contradiction of Bishop Morgan in every situation controlled until he isn't, and when he isn't the lack of control is its own kind of precision.
I bite down on his shoulder to stay quiet.
He makes a sound low in his chest that I feel everywhere.
After, we stand in the narrow aisle with our foreheads together. My hands are still in his hair. His are at my waist, holding on with the particular grip of a man who isn't ready to let go and knows he has to.
Our breathing is uneven.
The clipboard is on the floor.
It's seven twenty-three.
"Bishop." I say it quietly.
"Yeah."
"I need you to hear something."
He pulls back enough to see my face. Whatever he finds there he doesn't look away from.
"No more pushing me away for my own good." I keep my voice even. "Not after this. Not after July." I hold his gaze. "If you decide the complications are too much Cole, the club, whatever is on your list you tell me directly. Like an adult. Like someone who respects me." A pause. "You don't get to decide what's good for me and act on it without asking."
He looks at me.
The long look. The one that has weight in it.
"Okay," he says.
No qualification. No but. No gentle redirect toward the responsible choice. Just okay, in the voice of a man who means it and knows what it's going to cost him and means it anyway.
Something loosens in my chest.
"Okay," I say back.
He picks up the clipboard. Hands it to me. Straightens his shirt with the particular efficiency of a man reassembling himself under time pressure. I smooth my hair. Check the flashlight is back on the shelf.
Two colleagues. Supply room inventory. Seven twenty-five.
He looks at me when he's done.
Not the professional neutral. Not the careful distance. Something more open than either the specific expression of a man who has made a decision and is still deciding whether to trust it and has decided to trust it anyway.
He moves to the door.
Opens it.
Cole is standing in the hallway.