Chapter 17 #2
“Vesper knows about us.” I hold up a palm in a gesture of fuck it. “Linc suspects, which means Linc has told Eden, which means Eden is asking me pointed questions in the elevator about how I’m getting along with you. Eden typically asks questions she already knows the answer to.”
“Callen—”
“So what if we just told everyone?” The words come out fast now.
“Rip the Band-Aid off. Then we could do this for real. No more parking a block away. No more hotel bouncing, no more four a.m., no more me lying to your sister’s face.
” I pat her thigh, growing warm under my touch.
“Move in with me, Sylvie. Let me keep you safe.”
Her lips part.
“Or you keep me safe.” I laugh, and it comes out wrong, too loud in the small space. “Honestly I’m not sure which way it goes.”
“You’re serious?”
“Very.”
She turns to look at me for a long time. Long enough that the fog on the windows creeps another inch inward, closing us in.
“Yeah,” she says softly. “I’d like that very much.” But something moves across her face. Not joy. It’s something with a weight to it in the realm of sorrow or regret.
“We don’t have to rush, I mean—”
“Just give me a few weeks. Okay?”
“A few weeks?”
“I need to work some things out with Vesper.” She reaches over and takes my hand off her thigh and holds it in both of hers. She looks down at it while she says the rest. “I want to wrap up a few loose ends. And then yeah. Let’s do this for real. A clean slate.”
She brings my hand up and presses it to her mouth. Her breath is warm across the back of it as she kisses each of my knuckles, one by one. Her lips move, shaping the words she doesn’t say out loud.
“A clean slate,” I repeat.
“Beaches and all.”
Maybe I should have asked what loose ends. But maybe I don’t want the answer. Just do what you need to, Sylvie, to be mine.
“Good,” I say. We fall back into an uncomfortable silence, and once again, I have the urge to fill it. I clear my throat. “You know what I’ve never done?”
“What?”
“Made out in a car. Like a horny teenager at a drive-in movie.”
Sylvie’s eyebrows go all the way up. “Really?” She drags the word out into several syllables. “You should try it. It’s fun. I did it just last week.”
“Oh, I—” My whole chest drops through the floor of the car. “Wait.”
And she loses it.
She absolutely doubles over, cackling, one hand slapping the dash, laughing so hard she has to gasp for it, and the sound fills the car and fogs the last clear inch of the windshield, and every muscle in her finally, finally lets go.
I’ve been trying to get that laugh out of her all of last night and all this morning. I’m so finally fucking relieved.
“You’re a monster,” I tell her.
“Your face.” She wipes her eye. “Your face, Callen. As if that could even be possible. You have no idea how much I like you. What I’d be willing to do for you.”
“Do for me? What do you mean? You don’t have to do anything for me, Sylvie. Other than be here.”
She drops her legs and sits up in a hurry. “Hey, we’re early today. Plus, Cricket said she was planning to sleep in this morning.” Her eyes come over to mine. The mischief dances in her green irises. “We might have time to do more than make out.”
“I thought we were giving my dick a break?” But I hit the button, and my seat glides back. I roll up the windows fully for privacy. “Get over here.”
She comes over the console like she’s done it a hundred times, one knee on either side of me, settling down onto my lap with her hands framing my jaw. I get both hands on her waist, and I brace for the collision of heat and sparks, and her usual ferocious need.
It doesn’t come.
She kisses me slow.
Softly. Languid. Her thumb traces my cheekbone.
Her mouth is warm and careful, and it isn’t a prelude to anything.
It isn’t strategy or a means to an end. This isn’t the woman who bit her own arm raw on my desk so I could fuck her harder and she could control the sound.
It’s just her, in the dark, kissing me like she’s got all the time in the world and she’d like to spend it here.
Her hair falls forward and curtains us in. The kiss is anchoring, reminding me that intimacy is an actual place you can go: soft crashing waves, the smell of fresh salt…pink skies.
I don’t know how long we’re there. Long enough that the windshield is a cloud. Long enough that I have entirely lost the thread of the street outside.
Long enough, I forget to track time.
Bang. Bang. Bang. Against my car door.
Sylvie goes rigid in my embrace. My hand is already moving to the console where my gun sits, before my brain catches up.
I scrub my palm across the fogged window, revealing a petite blonde, angry eyebrows, wearing the thickest scowl you could ever paint on a person’s mouth.
Cricket. In flannel pajama pants and one of Lance’s T-shirts, arms folded, hair a catastrophe, standing on the sidewalk under the glow of the streetlamp with an expression that indicates she’s craving blood.
I roll the window down four inches.
The sound comes through like a busted valve.
“—are you fucking kidding me? I knew it. I knew it, you liars, I have been saying it for two weeks and Lance kept telling me I was paranoid, and you”—she jabs a finger past me toward her sister—“you have been eating my cereal and sleeping in my guest room and coming home at five in the morning smelling like him, and you tell me I’m imagining things.
” The finger swings to me. “You. You’re defiling my sister?
Callen, I will actually slit your throat, and stand in the drainage—”
Oh, shit. She’s big mad.
I roll the window back up, making it worse.
But bless the muffled silence. Because Cricket’s mouth continues to move on the other side of the glass, and I know I don’t want to hear what she’s saying.
Sylvie sucks her lips between her teeth. Her shoulders are vibrating.
“Remember how I told you I’m a coward?” I ask.
“Yes.” She can barely get it out. “Multiple times.”
I point past her, at the passenger door.
“Get out, baby. I’m going to let you deal with your sister on your own.”
Sylvie howls in laughter. “You’re pathetic,” she answers, somehow making the insult sound endearing.
She collapses forward, her forehead dropping onto my chest, her whole body convulsing with it, and outside the window Cricket’s conniption fit has escalated to open-palmed slapping of the glass and is threatening me in what I’m fairly sure is a mix of English, Irish, and something else she picked up in Brooklyn.
“I’ll handle it,” Sylvie says into my shirt. “I’ll handle it. Just give me a second.”
She burrows into me, cheek against my sternum, one hand fisting the fabric over my heart, and she nestles there like I’m her safe place.
The rampage goes on. The sky over Cricket’s building has begun to lift to sapphire blue, the sun awakens, its mind made up. The bakery smell is coming through the car vents again, and I put my hand on the back of Sylvie’s head and hold her there.
She murmurs into me, “Just a little more quiet before shit officially hits the fan.”
I nod in agreement. She asks me for one precious moment of us.
And I give it to her.