Chapter 17
Slow
~
He showed up at her door three nights later with a grocery bag in one hand and an expression that suggested he wasn't fully sure of his welcome, which struck her as absurd given everything that had already passed between them, and also exactly like him.
"You didn't have to bring anything," she said, stepping back to let him in.
"Wasn't sure what you had in the house. Figured I'd rather show up prepared than assume.
" He set the bag on her kitchen counter, and she watched him take in the space with the quiet, careful attention he brought to everything — her father's coffee mugs still in the cabinet, the calendar by the phone with three-year-old appointments still penciled in, the graduation photo propped against the lamp in the next room where he could just make it out through the doorway.
He didn't comment on any of it. She got the sense he was cataloguing it anyway, filing away the shape of a life he was being let into for the first time.
He'd brought the ingredients for the kind of dinner that took time rather than skill — a roast, vegetables, a bottle of wine he set aside without opening — and she found herself sitting on the counter while he cooked, unable to remember the last time she'd let herself do something this ordinary with another person in this house.
He moved around her kitchen like he'd already mapped it, asking where things were only when he genuinely didn't know, and somewhere between the roast going in the oven and the wine finally getting poured, she realized she'd stopped bracing for the evening to go sideways the way she'd braced for every quiet moment since her father died.
She caught him, at one point, pausing in front of the calendar by the phone, looking at her father's handwriting on a dentist appointment three years gone without saying anything about it, and something in the careful, respectful way he looked at it — not lingering, not making it a moment, just acknowledging it and moving on — told her more about how he intended to handle the rest of her father's presence in this house than any conversation could have.
"You're staring," he said, without turning around.
"I'm allowed to stare. You're in my kitchen."
"Fair." He glanced back at her, something easy in his face that she hadn't seen from him even at his most unguarded — not the weight of a confession, not the tension before a threat, just a man comfortable enough to let himself be looked at. "What are you thinking?"
"That I don't know how to do this part." She said it honestly, because that had become the only way that worked between them.
"The ordinary part. I've had exactly one relationship since my father died, and it lasted four months because I kept treating every quiet evening like something I didn't deserve to enjoy. "
"You deserve it." He crossed the kitchen and stood in front of her, close enough that she had to tip her head back slightly to hold his eyes, his hands coming to rest careful and warm on either side of her on the counter.
"You've spent three years carrying something that wasn't fully yours to carry.
Doesn't mean you owe the rest of your life the same weight. "
"That's easy to say."
"Never said it was easy. Said it was true.
" His thumb traced along her jaw, the same slow, careful gesture she remembered from the night of the kiss, and she felt her pulse pick up in a way that had nothing to do with grief at all.
"I remember you take your coffee black except on bad days, when you add too much sugar and pretend you don't. I remember you touch the corner of your badge when you're nervous and don't realize you're doing it.
I've been paying attention, Briar. Not because I had to. Because I wanted to know you."
She kissed him then, slow and unhurried in a way their first kiss hadn't had room to be, both of them finally without a crisis pressing in from every side to cut it short.
He kissed her back like he had all the time in the world to give her, one hand sliding up into her hair, and when they finally broke apart, breathless, his forehead resting against hers, she felt something settle deeper than it had even after the note.
"Stay tonight," she said.
"That what you want?"
"That's what I want."
He was careful with her, unhurried in the way he was unhurried about most things, checking in with a look, with a soft question murmured against her skin, giving her every chance to change her mind at every step and clearly meaning it — and later, in the quiet after, tangled together in the dark with her head on his uninjured shoulder, she felt something in her that had been braced and guarded for three straight years finally, fully let go.
"Tell me something true," she said, tracing an idle line along one of the tattoos on his forearm. "Something you've never told anyone."
He was quiet a moment, and she felt him breathe, slow and even, before he answered.
"I used to think loving someone was the most dangerous thing a man in my position could do.
That it made you soft in exactly the spot somebody smarter than you would learn to aim for.
" His hand came up to cover hers, stilling it against his arm.
"I don't think that anymore. Lying here, I'm having a hard time remembering why I ever did. "
She fell asleep before she meant to, warm and certain in a way she hadn't let herself feel in longer than she could measure, and woke sometime past three to the sound of her phone buzzing insistently on the nightstand.
She almost let it go. She'd almost let calls go before and regretted it every single time since pinning on the badge, so she reached for it instead, squinting against the light, and felt whatever peace the night had built start to crack the second she saw Deputy Park's name on the screen.
"Doyle."
"Sheriff, sorry to wake you — I know it's late.
" Park's voice was tight, fast, the sound of someone who'd been awake working when she should have been asleep.
"I ran a follow-up patrol past the Public Works annex, standard after an incident report.
The whole place is empty. Not just cleared out — stripped.
Whatever was behind that second door, it's gone, racking and all, like it was never there. "
Briar sat up, feeling Silas stir beside her, already reading the shift in her posture before she'd said a word.
"When," she said.
"Sometime in the last forty-eight hours, best I can tell.
Which means somebody knew we'd found that door before we ever filed the incident report.
" Park's voice had gone grim. "Sheriff, I don't think this was bad luck.
I think somebody inside this department, or close enough to it, told them we were coming. "
Briar looked over at Silas in the dark, watched him already reaching for his jeans, the warmth of the last few hours giving way fast to the old, familiar cold clarity of a threat closing in, and felt the two halves of her life — the one she'd just let herself have and the one that never fully stopped watching the door — collide all at once.
"I'll be there in twenty minutes," she said, and started to get dressed.