Chapter 13
Time Moves On
Gary's body filed its formal complaints the moment consciousness arrived Saturday morning.
He lay still for a moment taking inventory — jaw on the left side, two specific points in his midsection where Brett's boots had found their marks, the shoulder he'd landed on when he hit the path.
Nothing structural, as he'd assessed the night before, but the kind of thorough soreness that comes from impact rather than exertion, the kind that worsens overnight while you sleep and presents its full accounting in the morning.
He grimaced. The sound came out louder than intended.
Beside him, Belle stirred.
She looked up at him from the pillow with the specific expression of a woman who has slept unexpectedly well after a night that hadn't earned it — loose-faced, slightly rumpled, the careful composure she carried during the day entirely absent.
She looked younger, more tired, more real than any version of her he'd seen yet.
She looked, he thought, like a woman who had set something down the night before and hadn't picked it back up.
"I'm sorry," she said, reading his face.
"For Brett or for waking you up?"
"Both." She pushed herself up onto one elbow and studied his jaw with the focused assessment of a woman who has been around enough physical reality to know how to read it. "For what it's worth, I think it looks better than it feels."
"That's the lowest possible bar."
She reached out and touched the left side of his face lightly, fingertips only. "Does this hurt?"
"No."
She moved slightly. "This?"
"No."
She pressed with two fingers on the precise point where the bruise was deepest.
"Ow."
"Okay." She moved her hand away with the satisfied expression of a woman who has located what they were looking for. "Found it." She leaned in and kissed him deliberately on the right side of his jaw — the side that worked — her hand moving to his chest. "Does this hurt?"
"No."
She spread her hand flat and pressed gently. "Here?"
"No."
She moved it lower. "Here?"
"No."
A little further. "Here?"
"Yes."
She lifted her hand. "Found that one too.
" She shifted her weight, moving carefully to his right side, away from the injuries, looked at him with the expression of a woman who has made a decision and is implementing it.
She swung one leg over and settled astride him on the undamaged side, her weight barely there, both hands braced on his chest. "And here? "
"No," Gary said. "That doesn't hurt at all."
She smiled — the real version, the unguarded one. "Good."
? ? ?
She kept everything gentle and deliberate, both hands reading his chest and sides as she moved — not out of caution exactly, more the attentiveness of a woman who was paying close attention and adjusting accordingly.
When she found a tender spot she moved around it.
When she found one that didn't hurt she stayed.
Gary let her set the pace entirely, which suited him and clearly suited her — there was something in the way she moved that suggested this was the first time in a long time that she was doing something exactly the way she wanted to do it, without negotiating any of it with anyone.
She was unhurried and specific and entirely present in a way that made the previous night's conversation make sense from a different angle.
He put his hands on her hips, loosely, not directing anything, just there.
She leaned down and kissed him carefully, finding the right side of his jaw, his throat, his collarbone. He made a sound somewhere in his chest and she smiled against his skin and kept going.
It built the way things build when there's no agenda behind it — gradually, without pressure, each thing following naturally from the last. She knew what she was doing and did it without performance, which was the version of confidence Gary found most compelling in every context.
When she finally moved to let him in she did it with the same unhurried intention she'd brought to everything else, and they both went still for a moment at the contact.
"Okay?" she said.
"Very okay," Gary said.
She started to move.
Slow circles at first, the same reading attentiveness she'd brought to the beginning, learning the rhythm of it.
Gary kept his hands on her hips and let her run the whole thing, watching her face in the morning light from the window — the small furrow between her brows when something landed exactly right, the way her eyes closed briefly, then opened again.
She picked up the pace gradually, finding what worked; Gary moved with her when he found the timing, steady and deep.
Her breath changed. Her hands pressed harder against his chest.
"Gary—"
He drove up to meet her harder and she came apart around him with a sound that was quiet and then less quiet, shaking through it with her hands locked against his chest and her head dropped forward, her hair falling loose around both of them.
He followed close behind — the whole morning catching up with him at once, releasing in a long, unhurried shudder that he let himself have completely, his hands pulling her in closer as it moved through him.
She lowered herself onto him afterward, careful of his side, and lay there while both of them caught their breath. The morning was quiet around them — Marv's slow breathing from the doorway, the campus outside still largely asleep on a Saturday.
Belle pressed a single kiss to the side of his chest that didn't hurt.
"Better than ice," Gary said.
She laughed into his skin.
? ? ?
She got up after a few minutes, efficiently and without drama — poured Marv's food and water, brought a bag of ice wrapped in a cloth back from the kitchen, returned to the bed. She handed Gary the ice for his jaw, settled in beside him, let him pull her in against his good side.
"Alright," Gary said, to the ceiling. "I have something that resembles a plan."
Belle turned her head toward him. "I'm listening."
"You keep doing what you've been doing — keep your head down, keep track of every detail you can remember about what Jed and Brett have moved and when.
Dates, quantities, anything you have. Write it down somewhere he won't find it.
" He shifted the ice on his jaw. "I met someone last night, before the situation on the bench.
Someone who can help with the legal architecture of what comes next. I need to talk to her."
"Sue," Belle said, without inflection.
He looked at her. She looked back.
"I figured," she said. "Her husband's the DA. Everyone in Renton knows that, they just don't say it out loud." She was quiet for a moment. "She can protect my grandmother and my dad? From the exposure? They genuinely didn't know."
"That's the goal," Gary said. "The operation they have to bring down is Jed and Brett's. Your family is the victim here, not the source. But we need to document it carefully and move it through the right channels or it gets messy for everyone."
Belle nodded slowly.
"What about Bill?" she said.
"Bill knows you're here. Probably knew before the door closed last night.
" He adjusted the ice pack. "Which means we need to keep some version of normal visible.
You coming and going from campus isn't suspicious — you're a student.
Me working at the distillery on Thursdays isn't suspicious — Lou knows about it and pays me for it.
What we don't do is meet anywhere that looks like planning. "
"And Jed?"
Gary was quiet for a moment. "How long until he's back from the circuit?"
"Unsure. A month maybe more depends on how well he does at each event." She paused. "He's going to know I've been here."
"Let him. You've been here twice now. The first time was dinner, the second time you found someone unconscious on the campus path and helped them home. Both of those are things a person does." He met her eyes. "What Jed doesn't know is what's been said in here."
Belle considered this with the focused seriousness of a woman working through implications rather than accepting reassurance. Then she nodded.
Gary kissed her — properly, the full version, jaw be damned — and pulled her back in.
"Today isn't the day for any of that," he said. "Today we stay here."
She settled back against his good side. "And Marv?"
From the doorway, Marv lifted his head, confirmed the situation was under control, and dropped it back down with a sigh.
"He approves of the plan," Gary said.
? ? ?
They stayed in bed until ten, which Gary couldn't remember doing since sometime before Rosetown.
Belle made coffee at some point, standing in his kitchen in one of his shirts, and brought it back, and they drank it in the particular comfortable quiet of a morning that had nowhere it urgently needed to be.
Around ten-thirty she gathered her things — the butterfly wings from the coffee table, her bag, her shoes — and kissed him at the door with the direct, unhurried ease that was becoming her signature.
"Text me," she said.
"I will."
She looked at him once more — taking in the jaw, the careful way he was holding his side, the whole Saturday morning condition of him — and shook her head slightly with something between exasperation and affection.
"Be more careful," she said.
"I didn't start it."
"You never do," she said, and she wasn't wrong, and she was gone.
Gary texted Sue: Sorry — night went sideways. Couldn't make class this morning. See you Thursday. I have things to tell you.
Her response came back in under a minute: I heard. Are you okay?
He stared at that for a moment.
Getting there, he wrote back. Thursday.