Chapter 13 #3
"And the arguments keep getting thinner.
" He moved to the railing, leaned against it, and for once he wasn't looking at me.
He was looking at the skyline and I could see his profile in the amber light and the tension in his jaw and the way his hands gripped the railing like he needed something solid to hold onto.
"I run the logic every night. The case. Your career.
The tactical exposure. And every night the logic makes perfect sense and I still can't sleep because the logic doesn't..." He stopped.
"It doesn't account for the part where not being near you feels like a problem I can't solve. "
My heart did something that I would describe clinically as an arrhythmic event and emotionally as a catastrophe.
"So your solution is to just... suffer in silence? Let both of us be miserable because the spreadsheet says it's optimal?"
"I don't have a spreadsheet."
"You absolutely have a spreadsheet. It's just in your head.
You've got a whole cost-benefit analysis running, and the benefits column is full and the costs column is full and you keep staring at both of them and choosing the one that hurts more because you think pain means you're being responsible. "
He turned his head and looked at me, and the expression on his face was one I hadn't seen from him before.
Not the mask. Not the cracks in the mask.
Something underneath both of those things, something exposed and uncertain, like a man who'd been navigating by map and just realized he was holding it upside down.
"How do you do that?" he said quietly.
"Do what?"
"See... all of it. The parts I don't say." He shook his head slowly. "I have spent years making sure nobody can read me. You do it like you're reading a menu."
"You're not as opaque as you think," I said, and my voice had gone soft without my permission.
"You think the mask works because most people don't push past it.
But I grew up watching someone perform normalcy every day for twenty-four years.
I know what the performance looks like from inside.
And Will..." I stepped closer. Not much.
Enough. "You're performing right now. Right this second.
You're standing there wanting to reach for me and deciding not to, and I can see the decision happening, and it's the same decision you've been making for four days, and I need you to stop making it. "
"If I stop making it..." He looked at me, and the want in his eyes was so naked and so raw that my breath caught.
"Lindsey, if I stop holding this back, I don't know how to do it halfway.
I don't know how to..." His hand came off the railing and moved toward me, then stopped, suspended in the air between us like a question he couldn't finish asking.
"I do everything at full volume. You know that.
The hunting. The control. The way I... if I let myself want this, I will want it with everything I have, and everything I have is a lot, and it's not all good. "
"I know."
"It will be suffocating sometimes. I'll make decisions I shouldn't. I'll try to protect you from things you don't need protecting from."
"I know that too."
"And when I get scared, and I will get scared, my instinct is going to be to grab tighter, not let go. That's not a tendency I've fixed. It's a tendency I've managed, badly, and I'll probably keep managing it badly, and you deserve someone who..."
"Stop." I closed the last of the distance between us.
His hand was still hanging in the air. I took it.
His fingers were freezing. "Stop telling me what I deserve.
I've been hearing that my whole life. You deserve better than a father who's a criminal.
You deserve better than a life defined by someone else's mistakes.
Everyone has an opinion on what I deserve except me.
" I held his hand between both of mine, warming his cold fingers, and looked up at him.
"I want this. I want you. The messy, overwhelming, probably-going-to-drive-me-crazy version.
Not because I think it'll be easy. Because I think it'll be real.
And I have been so tired of things that aren't real. "
His breath left him in a rush that might have been a laugh or a surrender or both.
"I'm going to mess this up," he said.
"Obviously."
"Multiple times."
"I'd be disappointed if you didn't. What kind of boring relationship never has a catastrophic argument?" I squeezed his hand. "You mess up, I call you out. I mess up, you tell me. We fight about it like adults and then eat takeout and figure it out. That's the deal."
"That's the deal?"
"That's the deal."
He looked at our joined hands. Then at my face.
And the thing that happened to his expression was something I wanted to describe precisely, because precision was what I did, but the truth was that it defied my vocabulary.
The mask didn't so much fall as dissolve, and what was underneath wasn't any single emotion but a whole landscape of them, relief and fear and want and something achingly tender that made the backs of my eyes sting.
"Okay," he said.
One word. But he said it the way people say things that are changing their lives. Quietly. With their whole self.
"Okay," I echoed.
He pulled me toward him by our joined hands, slowly, giving me time to change my mind, as if there were any universe in which I was going to change my mind about this, and then his arms were around me and my face was against his chest and he was warm and solid and real, and I held on.
We stood there for a long time. Not kissing. Not talking. Just holding each other on a cold balcony in Virginia with an anonymous skyline glittering below us and the sound of each other's breathing filling the space where all the careful silence had been.
His chin rested on top of my head. My hands fisted in the back of his shirt. I could feel his heartbeat against my cheek, fast and uneven, the heartbeat of a man who'd just done something terrifying.
"This doesn't fix everything," I said into his chest.
"I know."
"The trust thing. That's going to take a while. I'm going to be... watching. Checking. Not because I don't believe you but because my brain is wired that way and I can't just rewire it because we had a moment on a balcony."
"I understand."
"And if you pull the walking-away thing again, the kissing me and then going cold, I need you to know that I can survive it.
I've survived worse. But I don't want to.
I shouldn't have to." My voice got thick on the last part and I pressed my face harder against his shirt like I could hide from it.
"I'm asking you to not make me survive you. "
His arms tightened. Not the constricting, desperate hold from the hallway. This was different. Careful. The hold of someone who'd been told they squeezed too hard and was trying to learn a different pressure.
"I'm not going to get this right," he said into my hair. "The... learning a different pressure thing. I'll overcorrect. Go too far the other way. Stand there paralyzed trying to figure out the right amount of..."
"I know."
"It's going to be frustrating."
"I eat lo mein from restaurants with C hygiene ratings for fun. My tolerance for frustration is higher than you think."
The sound he made was almost a laugh. I felt it vibrate through his chest and into mine, and something in me unclenched for the first time in four days.
We went inside eventually. It was freezing, and my ribs were aching, and standing on a balcony forever wasn't a sustainable life plan no matter how good it felt.
He held the door open and I walked through, and the apartment looked different.
Exactly the same, objectively. The grey furniture, the meaningless art, the two laptops at opposite ends of a table designed for avoidance.
But the air had changed. The ceasefire had become something else.
He paused in the living room. Looked at me with an expression that was working hard to be casual and failing spectacularly.
"Are you hungry?"
"Starving. I've been stress-not-eating for four days."
"I noticed." Then, before I could respond to that: "The kitchen here is terrible but I can probably make eggs."
"You can make eggs in any kitchen. It's your superpower."
"Everyone should have one."
He went to the kitchen and I sat on the counter and watched him cook eggs at midnight, which was ridiculous and domestic and nothing like the adrenaline-soaked drama of storage units and car crashes and men with guns.
He scrambled them because the safe house didn't have a proper pan for omelets, and he was visibly bothered by this, and I ate them straight from the skillet with a fork because we couldn't find clean plates.
"These are adequate," I said, stealing his word.
"They're subpar. The pan is warped."
"They're perfect."
He looked at me over the rim of his coffee mug, and his eyes were tired and blue and unguarded in a way that made my chest hurt, and for a moment we were just two people eating scrambled eggs in a kitchen at midnight, and it was the best I'd felt in weeks.
"Lindsey," he said.
"Hmm?"
"I'm sorry. For the hallway. For the four days. For..." He set the mug down. "For being so afraid of losing you that I lost you on purpose. I know that doesn't make any kind of sense."
"It makes perfect sense," I said. "It's stupid, but it makes sense. People do stupid things that make sense all the time. My father embezzled twelve million dollars because he was afraid of being ordinary. That's profoundly stupid and it makes complete sense."
He stared at me. "Did you just compare my emotional avoidance to your father's federal crime?"
"I compared the psychological architecture. The acts are not equivalent. Obviously."
"Obviously." He was almost smiling. "I feel very reassured."
"You should. I've contextualized your dysfunction within a framework. That's basically therapy."
"That's basically terrifying."
"Same thing."
We sat in the kitchen and didn't touch and didn't need to, because something had shifted and the not-touching was different now. Not the careful avoidance of before. More like two people who knew they could touch and were choosing to sit in the knowing for a while. Letting it be enough.
My phone buzzed around one in the morning. A text from an unknown number that turned out to be Bates using a new secure line:
File received. Strong work. Grand jury timeline accelerating. Will brief you both tomorrow.
I showed Will. He nodded. We cleaned up the kitchen in companionable silence, moving around each other with the easy awareness that had been there since the storage unit, the unconscious choreography that had somehow survived four days of deliberate distance.
At my bedroom door, I stopped. He was a few feet down the hallway, heading to his own room, and he stopped too.
"Goodnight, Will."
"Goodnight."
Neither of us moved. The hallway light hummed.
This was the same geography as four nights ago, two doors, a stretch of carpet, the architecture of separation.
But it felt completely different. Not because anything had been resolved.
Because we'd agreed that unresolved was a place we could stand in together instead of hiding from separately.
"For the record," I said. "The kiss. The one in the hallway."
He went very still.
"It was..." I searched for the right word.
My whole vocabulary was available to me, thousands of words, precisely organized, and the one I needed wasn't in any of them.
"It was the first time in a long time that I forgot to be careful.
And I don't... I'm not someone who forgets to be careful.
Ever. About anything." I looked at the carpet because looking at him was too much.
"I just wanted you to know that it mattered.
In case you were doing that thing where you convince yourself it didn't."
"I was doing exactly that thing."
"I know. You're very predictable for someone who thinks he's mysterious."
"Goodnight, Lindsey."
"Goodnight, Will."
I went into my room. Closed the door. Leaned against it and pressed my hand against my chest where my heart was doing its arrhythmic thing again.
Nothing was fixed. The trial was coming.
Reeves was still out there. The professional complications hadn't vanished because we'd held each other on a balcony and eaten scrambled eggs at midnight.
Tomorrow I'd probably catch him making contingency plans and he'd probably catch me running background checks on my own emotional state, and we'd have to navigate all of it, the trust and the fear and the control and the letting go, one day at a time.
But I could sleep tonight. For the first time in four days, I could feel the exhaustion settling into my bones like something that would actually lead to unconsciousness rather than just lying in the dark cataloguing the exact pitch of Will Steele's voice when he said my name.
I got into bed. Pulled the covers up. Stared at the ceiling, which was still white and featureless and offering nothing.
My phone buzzed. A text from Will:
For the record. It mattered. More than I know how to say, which is apparently a recurring problem.
I stared at the message. Then typed back:
Maybe we just need a bigger vocabulary.
His reply:
Or fewer words.
That sat on the screen for a moment. Then, before I could respond:
Goodnight. For real this time.
Goodnight for real.
I typed. Then added:
The eggs were actually perfect. Don't tell the pan I said that.
I put the phone down. Smiled at the ceiling and wondered what the future would bring.
Tomorrow would be hard. Tomorrow was always hard. But tonight, for the first time in a long time, hard felt like something I could carry. Not because it weighed less, but because I wasn't carrying it alone.
And that, my therapist would probably say if I still had one, was the whole point.