Page 61 of The Drifter

That got the corner of his mouth, but there was no smile waiting behind it. Just a man who had to be somewhere and did not want to be, which was a thing I had never once seen on him, because he had never once had anywhere to be.

That was what frightened me. Not the pistol. Not the stillness. It was that Clint Dane, the man who is the traveling, who has nowhere to be and has made a whole religion out of it—that man had somewhere to be. Something had reached into the one life on earth that nothing could reach, and put a hand on him, and now he had to go, and he didn't have the shape of it yet either. I could see that much. He was walking toward something he couldn't see, and he was doing it, anyway, and he was doing it fast.

"Will you come back?" I asked.

And there it was. The real one. The question under all the other questions, out of my mouth before I could dress it in anything, in the voice I was born with.

He put both hands on my face, then, and he tipped it up. He looked at me from about four inches away for a long, long moment. Long enough that I stopped breathing.

"I don't make promises I can't keep," he said.

"That's not a yes."

"No."

"Clint—"

"I want to," he said. Rough. Fast. Like it got out before the guard came down on it. "I want to come back to this. I haven’t wanted to come back to anything in years, and I want to come back to this. I won’t stand in your bedroom and promise you a thing I can't see the far side of. You wouldn't respect me, if I did. You'd know I was doing the thing you do at the desk. And I'm not going to do it to you."

I stood there with his hands on my face and my eyes went hot. I didn’t let them go over, because I don't, because I always get it back.

"That's the most romantic, terrible thing anybody's ever said to me," I said.

He almost smiled. Almost.

"I know."

He kissed me. Once. Not a leaving kiss—leaving kisses I've had, and they're desperate, they grab. This one was slow and deliberate and complete, a man closing an account in full so he wouldn't owe it later. I understood exactly what it was, and I hated it. I kissed him back like I could keep him in the room by doing it well enough.

Then, he stepped back into the three feet.

He put the whole distance back between us, on purpose, the way he'd handed it to me every time since the lobby. I understood that too, standing there. He was giving it back to me one more time. He was setting the whole thing down where I could see it and stepping away from it so that whatever happened next, I'd know it had been mine. That I'd chosen it with my eyes open. That nobody had taken anything from me that I hadn't handed over.

Even leaving, he wouldn't crowd me.

"Lock the door behind me," he said. "Both locks."

"I always lock the door."

"Lock it, anyway. And—" He stopped. Something worked in his jaw. He looked at the window once, fast, a flick, and back to me, and if I hadn't been reading him I'd have missed it. I caught it and didn’t understand it. "Stay away from the glass. The balcony. Today. Just today. Do that for me."

"Clint. You're scaring me."

"I know. I'm sorry. It's probably nothing." And for one second he was exactly the man who'd walked into my lobby—boots, no car, nowhere to be—except the bag was across town in a suite that belonged to the people he was walking toward, and the two days in between looked like something I'd dreamed. “But I'd rather be a fool about it than be right and have said nothing. That's all."

He opened my door.

The hallway light came in, ordinary and fluorescent, the world out there going about its day. He stood in it a second with his hand on the frame, and he looked back at me, wet-haired in a towel. Whatever was on my face put something on his that I will keep.

"Sasha Benning," he said.

"What?”

“You couldn't walk to your own kitchen without a shirt." He said it quiet. "Look at you now."

And then, he was gone, the door pulled shut soft behind him. I stood in the sudden silence of my own home and listened to his boots go down the hall, unhurried even now, even leaving, even walking toward whatever it was—that maddening, level, ground-eating walk, going away from me, getting quieter, gone.

I locked both locks.