Chapter 5
Kassidy
The pillow barrier is a joke.
Not because Tucker violates it—he stays on his side with military precision, which is annoying in its own way—but because a wall of cushions does nothing to block the awareness.
The room is small. The bed is large. And every molecule of air between us feels charged, like the atmosphere before a lightning strike.
I'm propped against the headboard with my laptop, trying to write. Trying being the operative word. Because Tucker Brennan is on the other side of the bed, reading a book, and the sight of him is doing things to my concentration that should be illegal.
He changed into sweatpants after his last security check.
Gray. Low on the hips. With a white T-shirt that's soft enough to be old and thin enough to outline every plane of his chest. His hair is slightly damp from the rain, and he's wearing reading glasses—actual reading glasses, dark-framed—that transform him from intimidating security operative into something dangerously approachable.
I hate that I noticed the reading glasses. I hate that my brain cataloged them instantly, filed them under dangerous details, and is now building a character sketch around them.
The book in his hands catches my eye. Not a thriller or a tactical manual or any of the things I'd assumed. It's a literary novel—I recognize the cover. The Remains of the Day. Kazuo Ishiguro.
"You read Ishiguro?" The question escapes before I can catch it.
He glances up. The reading glasses make his eyes look larger, and this close—three feet, pillow wall notwithstanding—they're definitely green. With brown. Both. "That surprise you?"
"I don't know what I expected. Tom Clancy, maybe."
"I've read Clancy. Good plots, thin characters." He turns a page. "Ishiguro writes about people who can't say what they mean. That's more interesting."
A Navy SEAL who critiques character development. My brain is short-circuiting.
"Have you read Never Let Me Go?" I ask, because apparently I'm incapable of not engaging.
"Twice. Destroyed me both times."
"Same."
Silence. It should be awkward. It isn't. The wind howls, and the building shudders, and we're two strangers in a bed that smells like clean linen and hotel soap, discussing fiction like this is normal.
"Do you read romance?" I venture. Dangerous territory, but curiosity wins.
Tucker sets the book on his chest, open, spine up. "My sister sends me one every few months. She says they're the only genre that guarantees a happy ending, and I could use more of those."
"Your sister sounds wise."
"She's a pain in my ass. But yeah. She's wise."
"Who does she send? What authors?"
"Roberts. Kleypas. Someone called Talia Hibbert who made me laugh out loud on an airplane, which earned me looks."
He's read Talia Hibbert. A former Navy SEAL has read Talia Hibbert and laughed on an airplane.
"You're staring," he says.
"I am not."
"Your mouth is open."
I close my mouth. "I'm just... recalibrating expectations. You're not what I pictured when I heard 'security detail.'"
"What did you picture?"
"Someone who grunts and stands in corners and doesn't have opinions about Kazuo Ishiguro."
"I can grunt if it helps."
The laugh catches me off guard—sharp and real and a little too loud for the quiet room. His eyes crinkle at the corners, and he looks pleased with himself, and the pillow barrier feels about as effective as a speed bump.
The power flickers. Dies. Comes back. In the two seconds of darkness, my hand finds the edge of the mattress and grips, and my heart slams against my ribs with a violence that has nothing to do with Tucker and everything to do with the storm.
"You okay?" His voice is immediate, tuned to a frequency of calm that feels deliberate.
"Fine. Just—I'm not great with storms."
"Noted."
"It's stupid. I grew up on the coast. I should be used to it."
"Fear doesn't care about geography." He says it flat, factual, the way someone speaks about physics. "In the teams, some of the toughest guys I knew had fears that didn't match their résumés. One guy, combat decorated, terrified of spiders. Another couldn't stand heights. Fear's not rational."
"What are you afraid of?"
The question hangs between us. Outside, something crashes—a tree, maybe, or a section of fencing—and the building groans.
"The quiet," Tucker says after a long pause. "When I was on the teams, everything was loud. Missions, training, the guys. Always something happening, always someone needing something from me. Now..." He trails off, turns a page he hasn't read. "The quiet is harder than any deployment I ever ran."
The confession lands in my chest like a stone—real and unperformed. No movie-moment drama, nothing rehearsed. Just true. A truth that sits inside you and refuses to be processed quickly.
"I know quiet," I say. "Different kind, but I know it. Three months staring at a blank page. No words, no characters, no voice. Just... nothing. Like someone unplugged whatever makes me me."
Tucker shifts on the bed, turning toward me slightly. The pillow wall tilts but holds. "What happened? If it's not too—"
"My ex." The words come out flat, factual.
Like reporting the weather. "Ryan. Three years together.
He left because I was 'too predictable' and 'married to my outlines.
' His words." I stare at the cursor blinking on my screen.
"Which would've been fine—breakups happen—except he said the same thing about my writing.
That my books were as predictable as I was.
And something about that stuck. Like a splinter I can't get out. "
"He's wrong."
"You haven't read my books."
"I don't need to. Anyone who writes the way you were talking on that beach—feeling your way through a scene, arguing with your own characters—that's not someone who writes predictable anything. That's someone who cares too much to be formulaic."
My throat tightens. Not with sadness—something else. Something warmer and more dangerous.
"You don't know me," I say, but the edge is gone from the words.
"I know what I see."
"And what's that?"
He holds my gaze. The lamp flickers in the wind, shadows jumping, and his face is half gold, half dark. "Someone who came to a retreat to find something she thinks she lost. Except it's not lost. It's just scared."
"Are you quoting my own scene back at me?"
"Paraphrasing."
I laugh again—quieter this time, a sound that feels dangerously close to tenderness.
The wind slams against the building, and the lights flicker once more, and this time I don't grab the mattress.
My fingers find the pillow wall instead, testing it, and something in my ribs unclenches—a held breath released, a wall I didn't know I was holding finally giving way.
"Tell me something else," I say. "Something that's not about fear or quiet or exes."
Tucker settles back against the headboard, and the movement shifts the mattress, shifts the air, shifts everything by degrees. "What do you want to know?"
"Why Salt and Steel? Why security?"
"Calder—my boss—he served with me. Built the company, offered me a spot when I got out. Said it would be a bridge."
"A bridge to what?"
"That's the question." He picks up the Ishiguro, turns it over in his hands without opening it.
"On the teams, you don't think about what comes after.
There is no after. There's the mission, and then there's the next mission.
When it stops—when you're the one who stopped it—you realize you don't have a single skill that translates to anything civilians actually need. "
"That's not true."
"It feels true."
"Tucker, you carried my suitcase, evacuated six people through a hurricane, and just told me my writing isn't predictable with more conviction than my agent has managed in a year. Those are transferable skills."
The corner of his mouth lifts. "You should write that up for my résumé."
We talk until the conversation turns to murmurs, and the murmurs turn to half-sentences, and the half-sentences dissolve into the white noise of the storm. At some point the laptop slides off my legs, and Tucker reaches across the pillow wall to catch it before it falls.
His hand brushes my knee. Brief, accidental, electric. We both freeze, and then he sets the laptop on the nightstand with careful precision.
"Goodnight, Kassidy."
"Goodnight, Tucker."
The lamp goes off. The darkness is total except for the faint glow of his phone charging on the floor. The storm rages, but the room feels sealed—a pocket of warmth in the chaos.
Sleep comes slowly, in fragments, between gusts of wind and the creak of the building. Sometime in the night, the pillow wall collapses. Neither of us rebuilds it.
When I finally drift off, the last thing I register is the sound of his breathing—slow, steady, an anchor in the noise—and the realization that for the first time in months, the blank page in my head doesn't feel empty. It feels like it's waiting.
Three feet away, Tucker's breathing has gone deep and even. The Ishiguro sits on his chest, open, spine cracked.
My laptop is dark. My resolve is in worse shape.