15. Janet
JANET
The room is black when his hand finds me.
The silent dark of three or four in the morning, when even the city goes quiet.
My body responds with slow stretches.
I shift toward him without deciding to. His mouth finds my shoulder, and my hand finds his, and then we're kissing, and I still don't know if either of us is fully awake, and it doesn't matter.
He pulls me closer, and I go. No hesitation, no moment where my brain catches up and starts listing reasons. His hands and the dark and the warmth of him and the way he says my name like it means something specific.
I pull him.
His mouth moves down my throat, my collarbone, and I arch into it because I can't help it, because my body stopped asking permission weeks ago.
His hands are slow. Deliberately, frustratingly slow, tracing the curve of my waist, my hip, the inside of my thigh, and I make a sound I didn't intend to make, and he lets me feel it.
"Mike."
He keeps going.
I drag my fingers up his back and he shivers — he actually shivers — and something about that undoes me completely. That I can do that to him. That underneath all that control, he's as wrecked as I am.
He comes back up and I pull him down, and he settles against me, over me, and for a moment we breathe. Foreheads together. His weight familiar now, known, something I've stopped bracing against and started reaching for.
He moves, and I stop thinking entirely.
There's no word for what this is. Not in the dark, not at this hour, not with his mouth at my ear saying things he probably wouldn't say in daylight.
I hold on. Both hands in his hair and at his shoulders and gripping the sheet because I need something to hold on to and he's too much to hold all at once.
He makes a sound against my throat — low, unguarded, nothing like his daytime voice — and I feel it move through me like a current.
"Look at me," he says.
I do.
He's watching my face the way he does, like he needs to see every bit of it, like he's afraid to miss a second. And I let him. I stop hiding from it, and something about being seen that completely, in the dark, in this, is almost more than the rest of it.
I say his name again. Not asking for anything. Needing to say it.
He presses his forehead to mine, and we stay there, moving together, slower now, and I feel it building and building until it breaks open and takes me with it.
I hear myself — something wordless, his name again, I don't know — and he follows, his whole body going tight and loose, and he buries his face in my neck and holds me like I'm something he's not ready to let go of.
We stay like that a long time.
His weight on me. My hands moving slow across his back. Both of us breathing.
Outside, the city makes its low noise. Below us, Nocturne is dark and locked. No bass is coming up through the floor. No voices. The two of us and the dark and the quiet.
He rolls to his side, and I go with him, my head on his chest, his arm around me. His hand traces slow up my back, and I close my eyes.
I don't drift to my side.
I stopped doing that. I'm not sure exactly when.
"Come to Costa Rica with me."
I lift my head.
"What?"
"Santa Teresa. Come with me."
"When?"
"Today. Tomorrow."
I let out a breath. I know what he means, and I know what I'm about to say, and I can feel the gap between those two things even as I'm opening my mouth.
"I have the Delgado sentencing in three weeks."
"Okay."
"And the Abrams trial starts right after. I'm primarily on two open cases, and Peter wants a task force brief by end of month." I push up onto my elbow so I can see him. "I can't just leave."
"You can. We just go to Costa Rica and we don’t comeback.”
"I have a career, Mike. Cases don't pause because I—" I stop. "I can't."
The ceiling fan turns slowly overhead.
"I love you."
The words land in the quiet like something dropped.
I don't move. His hand is still on my back, and I can feel my heartbeat and the city outside and the bass that's no longer coming up through the floor because the club is closed and it's the middle of the night and he said that.
He doesn't take it back.
Doesn't add to it.
Lets it sit there between us, bare, waiting.
I don't say it back.
I lie there for a long time after he falls asleep.
His breathing goes slow and even, and I stay exactly where I am, my cheek against his chest, his arm loose around me. Eyes open in the dark.
“Mike, you were joking, right? About running away together?”
“Yes, I was kidding.”
What’s he running away from?
I turn it over the way you turn something fragile, carefully, checking for cracks.
He loves me and I didn't say it back, and I don't know if that was the right thing or the cowardly thing or both.
I wanted to. That's what scares me. The words were right there, and I swallowed them because saying them out loud makes it real, and really means it can be taken away, and I know exactly how that feels.
I know exactly how that feels.
I watch the ceiling until the dark goes gray at the edges. I slip out from under his arm, get dressed in the quiet, and let myself out.
Rosemary is at her desk when I find her, coffee in hand, reading something on her screen. She takes one look at me and puts the coffee down.
"What happened?"
I shut the door.
"Janet."
I drop into the chair across from her and press my fingers to my eyes. "He said he loves me."
She's quiet for exactly one second. "Wow."
"I didn't say it back."
"Did you want to?"
"That's the problem. I did. But this is crazy; it's been a few weeks. Less than two months."
She leans back in her chair. "That's fast."
"It's moving so fast, Rosemary. I didn't plan for this. I didn't plan for any of this, and now he's asking me to go to Costa Rica."
"So go to Costa Rica; traveling together is a good way to get to know someone."
"He wants to go today."
"Today? Okay, that's crazy."
"Or romantic, I don't know."
She says nothing right away, which is one thing I need from her.
"You know what I think?" she says finally.
"Don't."
"I would say this is when your vacation is. Let's plan it like adults."
I look at the wall. My throat is tight in a way I wasn't expecting.
"Yeah," I say. "Maybe."
She picks up her coffee. "So say it back."
A knock at the door.
We both look up.
Peter McGuire stands in the doorway, and the expression on his face is not his usual one.
"Janet," he says. "We need to talk about the Ryan Keller case."
"What?"
"Now," he says, walking away.