Page 54 of You, Only You

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.

13.Lindsey

Iused to think the worst kind of silence was the one that followed my father's arrest. The hollow, ringing quiet of a house that had once been full of lies dressed up as love. Plates still in the dishwasher. His coffee mug still on the counter. Everything exactly where it had been the morning before, except the man who lived there had been escorted out in handcuffs and the silence had moved in like it owned the place.

I was wrong. That silence was a beginner. An amateur.

The worst kind of silence was the one currently living in a safe house in Virginia, stretched between two people who had kissed like the world was collapsing and then spent four days pretending it hadn't happened.