13. Not Yet #2
She tracked the movement with her eyes and didn't move herself, and he came around the end of the table the way he'd come around the desk in the main office, not as a decision but as a direction, and he stopped at the near end of the table, at the chair beside hers rather than the one across, and the distance between them was eighteen inches and the charge at eighteen inches was a different register than anything they'd been managing across tables and office widths for seven weeks.
She turned her chair toward him.
The movement was small and entirely deliberate, her body angling from the table to face the direction he was in, and it closed four of the eighteen inches and opened the space between them in a way that was nothing like the closed, guarded positioning she'd held in the early weeks.
He looked at her at fourteen inches and she looked at him and neither of them produced the management that had been running between them since the diner.
He put his hand on the table beside hers.
Not on hers. Beside it, close enough that the sides of their hands were nearly touching, close enough that the warmth was present without contact, and he held that for a moment that had the specific weight of seven weeks of accumulated proximity and held lines and midpoints stopped at and the morning coffee that had become the structure of both their days.
She turned her hand over.
Palm up. On the table. Not reaching for him, not closing the remaining distance, just turning her hand over on the table surface and holding it there with the patient, honest stillness of a person who'd made a decision and was communicating it without performing it.
He covered her hand with his.
The contact was his palm over hers and the warmth of it went up his arm and into his chest and the bleed channel opened at a register that neither of them had been at before, full and bidirectional and running at the specific frequency of two people who'd stopped managing the distance and were in the same place at the same time with nothing between them.
He felt her breath shift. He felt it in the bleed channel and he felt it in the air between them at the close proximity, and he looked at her face at fourteen inches and she was looking at him with the expression that had nothing of the measurement in it, just the direct, open attention of a woman who'd finished working out what she was choosing.
He moved.
Not the full distance, not the claim, but he leaned forward and the fourteen inches became eight and the eight became four and her breath was at his jaw and his hand was still over hers on the table and the charge between them at four inches was everything that had been accumulating since the first beat of awareness in the lodge concentrated into the specific, present weight of this room and this distance and both of them in it without the management.
She leaned forward.
The movement was a fraction, a breath's worth of distance closed on her side, and it brought her close enough that the warmth of her was a specific, detailed thing rather than ambient, close enough that if either of them moved again there was no distance left to speak of, and he felt her there with every part of his field that had been tracking her since the beginning, and the pull in his chest was at a frequency that had nothing managed about it.
He turned his head and his mouth found her jaw, just below the ear, the specific point where her pulse ran fast and present under her skin, and he felt her go still with the specific quality of someone who'd been waiting for exactly this and had stopped pretending otherwise.
Her hand turned over in his and her fingers closed around his.
He pressed his mouth to her jaw and then the line of her throat and she tilted her head to give him the angle and the sound she made was quiet and caught low in her throat and the bleed channel carried it to him in full and his hand that wasn't holding hers came to her hip, the first time he'd held her there, and the warmth of her through the fabric was a specific and disproportionate thing the way every contact between them was specific and disproportionate.
She turned her face toward him and her mouth found his.
The kiss was nothing like the careful, managed approach of the previous weeks.
It was what happened when two people who'd been running maintenance on a frequency for seven weeks stopped running the maintenance simultaneously, full and immediate and carrying the accumulated weight of every near-miss and pulled-back and midpoint-stopped-at and managed-distance since the lodge.
Her free hand came to the front of his jacket and she held it and he held her jaw and her hip and the bleed channel was running at a frequency that made the previous weeks' bandwidth look like a preliminary transmission.
He felt what she wanted in the channel before she moved toward him.