Page 52 of The Drifter

"Clint." She had my face in both hands now. "Clint. With me. This time, with me."

"With you," I said.

We went together.

She came clenching and crying out with her forehead pressed to mine. It pulled me straight over the edge and out into the wide open. I held her hard against the cold steel and buried myself deep and let go, everything, all of it, her name and the last of my breath, pulsing into her while she shook around me, both of us gripping on like the floor had quit.

Then, quiet.

The refrigerator hummed against her back. The harbor had gone from copper to blue-dark out the window. She stayed wrapped around me, and I stayed holding her, her heartbeat coming down against my chest and mine coming down against hers. She pressed her face into my neck and breathed.

"I have never once done that in this kitchen," she said, into my skin. "For the record."

"It's a good kitchen."

"It is now."

I carried her back down the hall—she didn't ask to be carried and didn't ask to be put down, just rode with her cheek on my shoulder like it was a thing we'd always done. I laid her in the wrecked bed, and pulled the sheet over the both of us. She fit herself into my side like she'd surveyed the spot in advance.

The dark came down outside.

I lay there with her breath going slow and even against my ribs, and my hand in her hair, and my whole body rung out and easy in a way I couldn’t remember being. Somewhere across town, there was a suite with my pack in it, and brothers, and questions, and whatever was coming.

It could all wait for morning.

Everything I needed was already in my hands.

15

SASHA

The next morning, I called in again.

I did it before I was all the way awake, which was the only way it was ever going to happen. I reached over the sleeping bulk of the man in my bed and got my phone off the nightstand and typed it with one thumb, face still half in the pillow.

Going to take today, too. Missy and Devon can hold. Call if it's real.

Then, I put the phone face-down on my chest and lay there and waited to be struck by lightning.

Nothing happened.

The man beside me breathed. The light was coming up gray-gold at the edges of the blinds, early, the harbor just starting to say something out past the glass. My heart was going, but it was going the way it goes at the top of a staircase you've decided to walk down, anyway.

The phone buzzed.

take it!! take the week if you want honestly. everything's fine here. YOU good??

I looked at that for a while.

Two question marks. That was Izzy leaning in.

She'd let the first day go by without a word, the way you let a strange dog cross the road—you don't move, you don't spook it. But two days was a pattern, and Izzy Harper had run that front desk beside me once upon a time, and she could read this. A woman who has not taken a day in fifteen years does not take two in a row over nothing. She knew that. She was already working it.

I'm good, I wrote. Better than good. Talk soon.

I put the phone in the drawer of the nightstand and slid it shut.

"That your work?" Clint said, into the pillow.