Chapter 12 #3
"You going to take the salt or just stand there generating body heat?" she says without turning around.
"Considering my options."
"Your options are salt or move. Pick one."
I set the salt on the counter beside her hand. My fingers graze her wrist, and neither of us pretends it was an accident.
She heats the beans and seasons the rice, and I lean against the counter and pretend I'm not cataloging every movement.
The way she tastes from the spoon and frowns.
The way she adjusts the burner with the same precision she brings to a spreadsheet.
The way she rolls her sleeves up and exposes the tendons in her forearms, and I think about my forearms and her forearms and the way they looked tangled together in motel sheets, and the thought is a sucker punch I walk straight into.
We eat standing at the counter because sitting across from each other at a kitchen table feels too much like something we used to do before the lie blew it apart.
"This is actually good," I say.
"Don't sound so surprised. Grant taught me." She takes another bite. "Well, Grant taught me what not to do. He was a terrible cook. We ate a lot of burned rice and undercooked chicken until I took over the kitchen out of self-preservation."
"Sounds about right. That man burns water."
"Burned," she says, and the word lands between us like a stone dropped into still water.
I set my plate down. She sets hers down.
"He'd have liked this, though," I say, because somebody has to say something before the silence swallows us whole. "You cooking in a stranger's kitchen in New Mexico. He'd have said something about you finally putting your stubbornness to practical use."
"He'd have stolen the last of the rice and blamed it on you."
"He'd have been right to. I'd have let him."
The kitchen is quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator and the weight of a man who isn't here filling the space where the laughter should be.
I wash the plates because it gives my hands something to do that isn't grabbing her. She dries them because she needs the same excuse.
When she reaches past me to put a glass in the upper cabinet, her arm presses against my shoulder, and the contact sends heat racing down my side.
She doesn't pull away immediately. She holds the position, the glass in the cabinet and her arm against my shoulder, and I can feel her pulse through the point of contact, fast and hard.
Then she steps back, and the loss of contact is worse than the contact was.
"Colt." She says my name, and the way it sounds in her mouth is stripped raw. No journalist. No cover. Just Kenna.
I turn around and lean against the counter and look at her.
"I know you don't want to hear this," she says.
"And I know the timing is terrible, and I know you have every right to hate me for what I did.
But watching you in that studio with Rainey, the way you crouched beside her chair and told her that what she and Grant built was going to put his killer in a cage.
" She pauses, and the mask slips just enough for me to see everything underneath.
"Grant was right about you. You're the person he trusted to finish this. And I'm glad he was right."
I stand at the counter and look at her across the kitchen. The distance between us is a few feet of tile. Two steps. I could cover it in two steps, and my hands would be in her hair and my mouth would be on hers and I'd have her backed against the refrigerator before she finished her next breath.
The image is so clear it's practically a memory. Her back against cold steel, her legs around my waist, her hands fisting in my shirt the way they did the first night, the way they did every night, the way her body says yes in a language her mouth hasn't learned to lie in.
She's looking at me the way she looked at me in that Albuquerque motel.
Eyes steady. Chin lifted. That infuriating combination of challenge and surrender that makes my blood go hot and my brain go quiet.
She knows what I'm thinking. She's thinking it too.
I can see it in the flush climbing her neck, in the way her breathing has gone shallow, in the way her fingers are curled at her sides like she's physically holding herself back.
"Get some sleep," I say. "We can be at the bank when it opens."
Turning around takes everything I have. Every muscle fights it. My body pulls toward her the way it pulls toward the center of a spin, and I override the pull with the same stubborn discipline that keeps me on a bull when gravity says I should be in the dirt.
I close the bedroom door and lean against it. My pulse is hammering, and the back of my neck is hot, and the taste of bourbon and the smell of her are fused together on my tongue.
I lie in a borrowed bed and stare at the ceiling and think about the way Kenna laughed in the truck, and the way she pressed her arm against my shoulder and held it there, and the way she looked at me across that kitchen with her chin up and her eyes daring me to close the distance.
Two steps. I replay them until dawn.