Page 73 of You, Only You

She stopped in front of me. Close enough to touch. Close enough that I could see the slight redness around her eyes that meant she hadn't been sleeping well either, and the small scar on her temple that was still healing, a souvenir from a car accident that never should have happened.

"I'm not going to stop being the person who checks," she said. "I can't promise that. My brain is wired to look for the discrepancy. The thing that doesn't add up. That's not going to go away because we're..." She gestured between us.

"Together?"

"I was going to say whatever this is, but together works."

"Together works for me too."

She reached up and touched my face. Not the way she'd touched it during the tracking app confrontation, which had been a kind of claiming. This was different. Lighter. Her thumb traced my cheekbone, and I leaned into it without deciding to, just gravity pulling me toward the one thing in the room that felt warm.

"Will."

"Yeah?"

"The indictment. The fact that you feel empty instead of victorious. I think that's actually good."

"It doesn't feel good."

"I know. But it means you weren't doing this for the feeling. You weren't hunting for the rush or the vindication. You were doing it because it needed doing. And now it's done, and there's no high because there was never supposed to be a high. It was just work. Necessary, ugly, important work." Her hand stayed on my face. "The emptiness isn't failure. It's the sound a purpose makes when it's been fulfilled."

I covered her hand with mine, pressing it against my cheek. Her palm was warm.

"When you say things like that," I said, "I don't know what to do with them. I don't have a system for processing someone understanding me that well."

"You could try just feeling it."

"That's Nicole's advice. She says I should sit with feelings instead of converting them to action items."

"Nicole is smarter than both of us combined."

"Don't tell her that. She'll be insufferable."

She laughed, and the sound broke something open in the room, the heaviness, the flatness, the strange grey emptiness of a victory that didn't feel like one. I pulled her toward me by the hand that was still on my face, and she came, stepping into the space between us like it was a doorway she'd been waiting to walk through.

I kissed her. Not desperately, the way I had in the hallway with blood on my hands. Not tentatively, the way I'd wanted to on a hundred occasions and hadn't. This was something else. Slow. Deliberate. The kind of kiss that said I'm here and I'm staying and I know what this is.

She kissed me back with the same quality. Not gentle exactly. Present. Her fingers curled into my collar and held on, and I felt the warmth of her body through the thin fabric of her shirt, and my hands found her waist and pulled her closer, and it was nothing like the first time, which had been adrenaline and reliefand two people grabbing at each other in the dark. This was a choice. Made in full light. With open eyes.

"Your ribs," I murmured.

"Healed."

"They were cracked three weeks ago."

"They're healed, Will. I have it on medical authority." She pulled back just enough to look at me, and the heat in her eyes was matched by something steadier underneath. "Stop trying to protect me from what I want."

"Old habit."

"I know. Break it."

I picked her up. Carefully, despite her assurances, one arm behind her back, the other under her knees. She wrapped her arms around my neck and her face pressed against my chest and I felt her breath through my shirt, warm and real, and I carried her down the hallway with the kind of deliberate care I usually reserved for evidence that couldn't be replaced.

Much later. The city glittered beyond the windows, doing its indifferent thing. Lindsey was curled against me, her head on my chest, her finger tracing absent patterns on my skin. The room was dark except for the ambient glow from outside, and the silence was the good kind. The kind that exists between people who've stopped performing.

"Tell me about this one." Her fingertip found a scar on my knuckle, old and faded. "I've been wanting to ask about it for weeks."

"College. Before law school." I watched her trace the raised line. "Bar fight."