Chapter 12 #2
I waited. For the inevitable. The step backward, the careful rearrangement of her face into something that meant I need some space.
The moment she looked at me, really looked, and finally saw what everyone else saw when they got past the suits and the reputation.
I'd braced for it with Nicole, years ago.
With my mother, who'd found the notebooks and looked at me like a stranger had walked into her kitchen. It always came eventually.
The silence went on long enough that I started counting seconds, the way I counted everything, because counting was control and control was the only thing keeping me upright.
She moved.
Not away. She turned to face me, her body shifting on the cold floor, and her hands reached out and took mine.
Both of them. Lifted them into her lap like they were something that needed holding rather than hiding.
Her fingers, cool and steady now, wrapped around my wrecked knuckles, and her thumbs traced slow circles across the insides of my wrists.
She didn't say it's okay. She didn't say I understand. She didn't say anything that would have required me to respond with words I didn't have.
"I'm still here," she said.
Something broke. Not dramatically, not with sound or movement. Just a structural failure somewhere deep in the architecture I'd spent seven years building, a load-bearing wall that had been holding up everything and was suddenly, quietly, not.
I don't know who moved first. Maybe both of us. Maybe neither. Maybe it was just the distance between us finally collapsing under its own weight, because there'd been too much of it for too long and neither of us had the strength left to maintain it.
I kissed her.
Not carefully. Not with the precision I brought to everything else in my life.
This was graceless and desperate and tasted like blood and adrenaline and something underneath both of those things that I didn't have a name for.
Her mouth was warm and she made a sound against my lips that went through me like voltage, and my hands, my bloody, shaking hands, found her face and held it like it was the last solid thing in a world that had come apart.
She kissed me back. Not gentle either. Her fingers twisted in my shirt and pulled, and the force of it surprised me, the urgency, like she'd been waiting and was done with waiting. A small sound escaped her, tight and pained, and the part of my brain that was still functioning remembered her ribs.
"Sorry." I started to pull back. "Your..."
"Don't." She pulled me closer. Kissed me harder.
Her hand slid to the back of my neck and held on, and I stopped thinking about her ribs.
Stopped thinking about anything except the taste of her and the warmth of her and the impossible fact that she'd seen the worst thing about me and her response was this.
For a span of time that I couldn't measure and didn't try to, there was nothing else. No case. No Reeves. No blood on the marble or gunpowder in the air. Just her breath and mine and the silence of a hallway that had become the only room in the world.
Then the rest of it came flooding back. All of it.
The case. The trial. Her testimony. Her career.
The defense attorneys who would pick apart every weakness they could find, and right now I was handing them the biggest one.
I could already hear it: the auditor and her subject, romantically entangled, every piece of evidence she'd gathered now tainted by association.
I broke the kiss. Pulled back so fast we both gasped. Got to my feet and put three steps between us, then four, my chest heaving, my heart doing something violent and uncontrolled against it.
"Will?" She was breathless. Confused. Her lips were damp and her eyes were searching my face and I had to look away because looking at her made the distance feel like a physical injury.
"That was..." I started. Stopped. Tried again. "We can't."
"What?"
"This. What just. We can't do this." My hand found my lips, rubbed hard, like I could scrub the taste of her off my mouth. I couldn't. "The case. Your testimony. If the defense finds out, they'll use it to..."
"I don't care about the..."
"I care." Too sharp. Too loud in the quiet hallway. I made myself lower my voice but the words still came out wrong, all edges. "I care about you walking out of this with something. A career. A reputation. Something that isn't destroyed because you got tangled up with..."
I almost said me. Caught it. Rerouted.
"With the case," I finished. But she heard the detour. I saw it in her face.
She stood slowly. Her arms came up, wrapping around herself the way people do when the temperature drops suddenly and without warning.
"You're doing it again," she said.
"Doing what?"
"Deciding. What's best for me. What I should care about.
What I'm allowed to..." She stopped. Pressed her lips together.
When she spoke again her voice was quieter, and the quiet was worse than the anger.
"You just kissed me like the world was ending.
And now you're standing over there telling me it was a mistake because you've decided what it costs. "
"It's not about..."
"Did you ask me? Whether I think my career matters more than this?" She gestured between us, a sharp motion in the dim hallway. "Did you even consider that I might have already done that math? That maybe I've been doing it for weeks?"
I opened my mouth. Closed it. She was right and I knew she was right and the knowing didn't change anything because the image of her on the witness stand with a defense attorney saying And isn't it true that you were sleeping with the subject of your investigation was playing on a loop in my head and I couldn't make it stop.
"I can't be the thing that ruins this for you," I said.
"And I can't be the thing you keep at arm's length because you're scared of what happens if you don't." Her voice broke on the word scared, just slightly, just enough.
"You want to know what ruins things, Will?
This. Exactly this. Getting close and then slamming the door because it's safer on your side of it. "
"It is safer."
"For who?"
I didn't answer. She waited. The hallway light hummed overhead and neither of us moved and the answer sat between us, obvious and terrible: for me. Safer for me. Because if I kept her at a distance, I controlled the loss. I chose it before it chose me.
I turned. Walked down the hall to my room. Put my hand on the door.
"Will."
I stopped. Didn't turn around.
"I held a gun tonight." Her voice came from behind me, small and stripped. "My hands were shaking so hard I couldn't feel my fingers. But I held it. Because you were out there. Because I heard the fighting and I thought..." A breath. "I thought I was going to open that door and find you dead."
My hand tightened on the doorframe until the wood bit into my palm.
"So don't stand there and tell me this is about protecting my career." The words were thick now, weighted. "We both know what this is about."
I should have turned around. Should have crossed the hallway and taken her face in my hands and told her she was right about all of it, every word.
Instead I said, "Get some rest. We're moving to the safe house tomorrow."
The silence that followed was the kind that leaves a mark.
Then I heard it. A single breath, drawn in sharply through her nose. The sound of someone swallowing something they'd decided not to say.
The click of the guest room door closing. Quiet. Final.
I went into my room and shut my own door, but I didn't lock it because I couldn't bring myself to lock her out completely, even though I'd just done exactly that in every way that actually mattered.
I pressed my palm flat against the wood. On the other side, silence. But I could feel her there. The way you feel a storm approaching, the drop in pressure, the charge in the air.
The taste of her was still on my lips. The feel of her hands on my wrecked knuckles still ghosted across my skin, and the place where she'd held me felt warmer than the rest, like she'd left a handprint only I could feel.
I stood there with my forehead against the door and the first grey light of dawn leaking through the windows, and the thing I kept telling myself was that I'd made the right call.
The professional call. The call that kept the case intact, kept her credibility untouchable, kept us from becoming the vulnerability Reeves could exploit.
But the arguments were already going hollow, losing air, the way a tire goes flat slowly enough that you don't notice until you're driving on the rim.
I'd kissed her like she was oxygen and then told her we couldn't breathe.
Somewhere outside, the city was waking up.
Cars and sirens and garbage trucks and all the ordinary machinery of a world that kept turning regardless of what happened in hallways at three in the morning.
Tomorrow, the safe house. Tomorrow, the Mendez operation.
Tomorrow, back to being partners who happened to have a case between them like a wall.
My hand was still on the door. I could feel the grain of the wood against my palm, every ridge and groove, and the door was two inches thick and she was on the other side of it and two inches had never felt like a distance I couldn't cross.
I'd built my whole life around calculated decisions. Cost-benefit analysis. Threat assessment. Risk mitigation. I was good at it. The best, probably. And right now every calculation was telling me I'd made the correct choice.
The calculations didn't explain why correct felt exactly like a word for something broken.
I dropped my hand. Stepped back. Sat on the edge of my bed and stared at the far wall and waited for morning to come and tell me what to do next.
It didn't. Morning just came, the way it always did, without instructions.
And I sat there in the grey light with blood still drying on my knuckles and the ghost of her mouth on mine, and I didn't know how to fix what I'd just done, and I didn't know if I should try, and not knowing was the worst part, because I always knew.
That was the whole point of me. I always, always knew.
Except with her. With her, I was lost.
And sitting alone in that room while she sat alone in hers, separated by a door and a decision I was already starting to regret, I couldn't tell if being lost was the problem or if it was the first honest thing that had happened to me in seven years.