Chapter 22
TOMMY
Ilay in the warm dark with Rebecca Lynn against my ribs and decided, with the clarity of a man who'd given up on arguing with himself somewhere over the Atlantic, that I was happy.
That was the word.
I sat with it for a long minute to be sure, because happy was not a word I'd had a lot of working knowledge of in my adult life, and I wanted to make sure I was using it correctly before I made it official.
I ran the diagnostics. Steady pulse. Loose shoulders.
The impulse to grin for no reason. The absence, in my chest, of the constant hum of what's next that had been in there since I was approximately twelve years old.
Yeah.
That was happy.
Pure and unrepentant.
She made a small sound in her sleep and her face moved against my collarbone, and a piece of her hair fell across my throat. I held real still for a second so as not to wake her and ruin how she'd settled.
I thought about my training.
I couldn't help it. The training was a shape I went back to the way some men went back to a chord progression—involuntary, familiar, useful for orienting yourself when the world had moved.
The unit had figured me out in two days.
You're a one-man job, Dane. A maverick. The clipboard guy, the dummy scenario, the words I'd been waiting to hear without knowing it.
They had a category for me, and the category had a name, and the name was lone wolf, and the math of being a lone wolf was the math you ran on a man you were sending into a room without backup.
He decides. He acts. If he doesn't come out, he doesn't come out.
I'd been good at it. I was still good at it.
I had been, just days ago, on a sandstone slab in the Narrows with a sandwich in my hand and a man named Davari working his way up the canyon toward me, and the mathematics of that morning—the angle of the rock, the gap between hiking groups, the weight I'd loaded into my dropping knee—had been the mathematics of a man whose entire professional value sat in his ability to operate inside his own head, alone, on a clock he'd set himself.
Tommy Dane worked alone.
That was the deal.
That had been the deal.
I wondered, lying there with a girl asleep against my chest in a Charleston suite that had been arranged for me by men who'd known my name before I'd known theirs, what my instructors would say if they could see me now.
Bratton, the master sergeant who'd run my selection.
Whitlow, the colonel with the limp and the bad coffee who'd done my final interviews.
The clipboard guy whose name I never got.
They'd watched me come up through the program.
They'd put me in the file marked useful alone.
They'd built the version of me that could be inserted into a foreign city by Tuesday and produce a result by Friday and be eating breakfast in a different country by Saturday morning, and the whole point of building that version of me was that it didn't get attached.
Lone wolves didn't get attached. A lone wolf with attachments was a lone wolf with a hostage taped to his back.
If they could see me now.
I almost laughed.
Bratton, who'd never met a feeling he hadn't run a remedial PT program against. Whitlow, who'd been married three times. The clipboard guy, who'd probably have written concerning lapse in operational distance and stapled it to the front of my folder.
What was this?
I asked it honestly, looking at the dark of the suite ceiling.
Was this a detour? A side bar? A piece of weather I was passing through?
A new road?
I didn't know.
Here was the thing, though.
I'd never been a man who fought the current. That had been the great secret of my work, the part that the men who graded operators tended to miss until they saw it run.
Most of the operators I'd come up with were planners.
They wrote the plan in their heads, they ran the plan, they got mad at the plan when the plan went sideways, and they spent the next twenty-four hours adjusting the plan instead of looking at the river.
I was different. I'd been built different.
I read the river and I went where it was going.
I made decisions inside the going. The current was not my enemy. The current was the thing I rode.
If a current as strong as the one this woman had set off in me had picked me up and started pulling me toward a place I'd never been—a place the men who'd built me would have warned me off in language that would have made my mother frown—
Well.
I was not in the habit of fighting currents.
I was in the habit of going where the river took me, and finding out what it had to offer when I got there.
The river had brought me here.
Here was good.
I fell asleep on the thought, the way I'd fallen asleep on the sound of my mother's voice—involuntary, unguarded, with the pleased surprise of a man who'd discovered a new way to put himself under.
The next time I came up out of sleep, I came up because something good was happening below my waist.
I didn't open my eyes right away.
I lay there with my hand under my head and the warmth of the sheet over me and the slow, building pleasure of a wet mouth on me, working unhurried and patient, and somewhere in the fog of my body the message arrived from the suite that the woman whose mouth this was had decided, sometime in the last few minutes, to wake me up the way she'd decided to wake me up, which was not by speaking.
I made a sound somewhere between a groan and a laugh.
I cracked one eye.
The blanket had been pushed down. The room was still dark.
The faintest gray had started somewhere in the seam of the curtains where the harbor was.
Rebecca Lynn was between my legs with her hair fallen forward in the way it had fallen forward over me last night, and her hand was wrapped around the base of me, and her mouth was working me in a slow, deliberate, attentive rhythm.
She felt me wake up. She slid me out of her mouth. Looked up.
Her face went a little bashful.
"I—" She bit her lower lip. "I wanted to do you, too."
I let my head fall back against the pillow and laughed up at the ceiling.
"Sweetheart."
"What?"
"Keep going."
I felt her smile against me before her mouth came back.
She took her time. She had the same patience with this that she had with everything—the care of a woman who was not in a rush to get to the destination.
Her hand worked me in slow strokes while her mouth worked the head, and every now and then, she'd take me deeper than I'd expected and look up at me through her lashes to see what that did to my face.
What it did to my face was its own answer.
I let her have me.
I lay there with one hand under my head and the other in the loose fall of her hair, not directing, just there. I let myself watch her.
She had the focused attention I'd watched her play with.
Same intent face. Same studious care. The hands of a woman whose hands knew how to do a precise thing and didn't have to think about it.
She made a humming sound around me at one point—pleasure, satisfaction, the sound of a woman doing something she'd been wanting to do—and that nearly ended the proceedings on the spot.
I held myself back.
"Baby," I said. "Slow down a second."
She slowed.
"Look at me."
She looked at me.
I kept my eyes on her face the way she'd kept hers on mine last night when I'd been the one over her. I let her know, with the look, that I was aware of every move she was making and that I appreciated all of them.
She watched me watch her.
Then she went back to it, still watching me.
I let myself go this time. The build came up—not in a rush, but in an accumulation, layer on layer, the kind of build that didn't surprise you when it landed because you'd felt it coming the whole way.
Heat through the hips. Tightness behind the spine.
The reach in the lower belly that was the body deciding it was time.
When I came, I came hard, and she stayed with me through it, taking what I gave her.
She slid me out of her mouth at the end and pressed a slow kiss to my hip.
She rested her cheek against my thigh for a second, eyes closed, breathing.
"Was that okay?"
I dragged a hand over my face. "Sweetheart, you have got to be careful what questions you ask me at five in the morning."
"It's after five?"
"It's something in the neighborhood."
She crawled up the bed, slow, the sheet sliding off her, and tucked herself back under my arm where she'd been before I'd dropped off. She was warm. She smelled like sleep. She smelled, faintly, like me.
I held her there.
"Is this heaven?" I said it softer than I meant to.
"What?"
"Nothing. Talking to myself."
"Tommy?"
"Yeah."
"Go back to sleep."
"Yes, ma'am."
I closed my eyes.
I didn't go back to sleep right away.
I lay there in the gray pre-dawn with her against my ribs again and I thought about home, about my mother.
It came out of nowhere and not out of nowhere.
Heaven had triggered it, probably. Heaven was a word my mother used.
She didn't use it the way preachers used it—she used it conversationally, the way some people used fine or hopefully.
You boys are a heaven on earth when you're being good.
That biscuit is heaven, Tommy. My mother had her own dictionary, and heaven was one of the words in it that she'd used.
I wanted my mother to meet Rebecca Lynn.
I had to take her to Marfa.
I had to take her soon.
I didn't have a logical reason. I had a chest reason.
The chest reason was that some piece of me that did not consult my brain on these things had decided that the only way to make this real—the only way to take Rebecca Lynn from the warm bright temporary thing she was now into the permanent thing some part of me had already started to plan around—was to put her in front of the woman who'd made me.
To watch and see if my mother's face registered Rebecca's face.
To stand in the doorway of a memory care unit in a West Texas town with a girl on my arm and let my mother do the thing my mother did, which was see people, and let her see this one.
I needed it.
I needed it the way I'd needed peace on a roof in Southeast Asia, and I'd waited a long time for that, and I wasn't waiting that long for this.
I had to do it soon.
That was the other piece, and it was the piece that made the gray pre-dawn feel sharper than it should have felt.
There was a clock running.
I didn't know what was on the other end of it.
I knew Craine was on it. I knew the men in the unmarked Tahoes were on it.
I knew whatever Lucas hadn't told me yet—and there was a lot Lucas hadn't told me yet, including whatever was in the grin he'd given me at Dominion Hall when I'd asked if we'd met—was on it.
I knew my brothers were off the board and were going to come back on the board at some point, and the world they came back to was going to be a different world than the one they'd left, and I was going to have to be in fighting shape for it when it happened.
Heaven was a thing on a clock.
I'd known that all my life and pretended otherwise.
I wasn't going to pretend now.
I was going to use the time.
I was going to take her to Marfa.
I was going to do it before whatever was coming for the Danes got close enough that I couldn't.
I tightened my arm around her and felt her settle deeper against me without waking, and I lay there in the gray light and ran the schedule.
We could be in Marfa by tomorrow night.
We could be back in Charleston by the next day.
We could be done with the introduction, done with the recognition, done with whatever piece of me my mother and Rebecca Lynn between them needed to confirm before the next part of my life started, in time for me to come back to this city and take whatever piece of Dominic Craine was going to need taking.
I'd be ready.
I was always ready.
I closed my eyes.
The gray went gold somewhere in the seam of the curtains.
Outside, the harbor began its slow process of becoming morning.
In here, in the warm dark, with the woman I had no business loving asleep against my chest and the clock running on something I couldn't see yet, I let myself have one more minute of the thing I'd never let myself have.
Then I started to plan.