Chapter 7 #3
"I couldn't do a damn thing except show up and stay.
" My hand tightens on the railing. "I'd do it again, every night.
But the cost is that I learned what it looks like when love goes to war with grief.
" I lift my head and look at the dark line where the water meets the sky. "Grief wins most of the rounds."
She shifts beside me, her shoulder pressing against my arm, and the contact runs warm through the cold air in a way I feel all the way down.
"So I figured out a system. Keep it shallow. You can walk away from shallow without leaving skin behind." I flex my fingers against the cold steel. "Deep is where the damage lives."
She's quiet for a long time, long enough that the silence fills the space between us and becomes its own kind of answer.
"My family would say I'm shallow," she says finally.
"They'd say I left because connection was too much work, because I'd rather be brilliant alone than be ordinary together.
And they'd be wrong, because what I did wasn't avoidance.
It was triage." Her fingers curl against the railing near mine.
"But I understand the system. I've been running the same one from a different direction. "
She isn't trying to fix a damn thing, and the relief of that hits harder than the cold.
Holden offers perspective, Thatcher offers solidarity, and both of them mean well, but both come loaded with something I'm supposed to respond to.
Nox just stays, her shoulder warm against my arm, and the silence is the first one I haven't had to hold together for someone else's benefit.
I reach over and cover her hand on the railing.
Her fingers are cold from the night air, and for a moment she goes still, the way she does when she's calculating whether to let something in or shut it down.
Then she turns her palm up under mine and laces our fingers together.
Her pulse is fast against my wrist. So the composure is a performance, and I'd hate to be the only one standing out here with my walls down.
We stay like that, shoulder to shoulder at the railing, hands locked together over cold steel, while the bay goes full dark below us.
I can feel her breathing against my arm, steady and deliberate in a way that tells me she's controlling it.
Our hands are laced together on a balcony railing, and that alone is enough to change her breathing.
It does more damage than anything I disarmed today.
The cold eventually wins, driving us inside.
The loft feels warmer than it should after the night air, and the deadbolt slides home behind us with the solid sound of a perimeter closing.
We end up on the couch. She sits at one end with her laptop and I sit at the other with a tactical manual I'm pretending to read, and at some point her feet end up in my lap because the couch isn't long enough for both of us to stretch out and she got there first.
Her socks are mismatched, one grey and one navy with a pattern that might be tiny anchors. Lennox Bradshaw is wearing novelty socks, and that detail alone rearranges something in my chest and tells me more about where I am than any conversation on a balcony ever could.
She's reviewing Garrick's access logs, the screen reflected in her glasses when the angle is right. Every few minutes her typing pauses, she reaches for the tea on the coffee table, finds it cold, and goes back to typing without drinking.
The third time it happens, I take the mug to the kitchen and make a fresh cup. When I set it down, she picks it up and drinks without looking away from her screen, and her hand finding the mug in the spot I placed it tells me she's tracking my movements more closely than she'd admit.
"You didn't have to do that," she says to her screen.
"You were going to drink cold tea. That's a crime against your country."
"Bold words from a man whose kitchen didn't own a kettle."
My hand finds her ankle when I sit back down, and this time I'm aware of deciding to put it there.
Her skin is warm through the sock, the bone sharp and delicate under my palm.
This is not accidental proximity. My hand is on her body because I want it there, and the want is a lit fuse I'm choosing not to cut.
She doesn't look up from her screen. The typing continues without a break. But the rhythm of her breathing shifts, a slight hitch that she smooths over in a beat. The recovery is quick, but not quick enough.
I think about it the way I think about a device I can't disarm, because the wires are all connected and cutting any one of them changes the circuit, and the problem isn't the complexity.
The problem is that I don't want to cut anything.
I want to leave this the way it is, her feet in my lap and her terrible socks and the steady click of keys and the bay gone dark outside the windows, and that should scare me because it means there's something to lose.
It doesn't scare me. That's what scares me.
Bombs I understand. Loss I've studied. This, her skin warm under my hand and the sound of her typing filling the loft like it belongs here, is the one thing my training didn't cover.
Her typing stops. "You're staring at me."
"I'm reading."
"You haven't turned a page in twenty minutes."
"It's a dense manual."
She looks at me over the top of her laptop, and the expression on her face is knowing and unguarded and carries absolutely no sympathy, which is right because sympathy would be an insult and Nox Bradshaw doesn't do insults.
She does precision. Her eyes drop to my hand on her ankle, then come back up, and the look she gives me is a dare she won't say out loud.
"Read your manual, Holland."
I look at the page. The words don't register. Her ankle is warm under my hand, and the loft smells like thyme and tea and something that's just her, and the joint training exercise is days away, and the cold anger from this morning is gone.
It broke the moment she turned her hand under mine and laced her fingers through.