Page 78 of The Drifter

We lay tangled on her rug, breathing like we'd run somewhere far.

Her fingers moved slow through my hair. My face was in her neck and her heartbeat was coming down under my mouth. The whole day—the courtyard, the doorway, the war room, the platoon of brothers, the father—settled over me at once, and settled into something, into place, into a shape with her at the center of it.

I lifted my head and looked at her.

Her face in the low light. Wrecked and soft and open, hair everywhere, eyes finding mine and staying.

"I love you," I said.

It came out the way true things come out of me—plain, level, no running start. I hadn't planned it and I didn't dress it. A man who has spent his life leaving knows better than to sit on the one thing worth saying.

Her breath caught. Her eyes went over, finally, after all the times she'd pulled them back from the edge—one tear, sliding sideways into her hair, and she let it go. She let me see it.

"I love you, too," she said.

Then, her mouth curved, slow and wicked, and her hand slid down between us.

"And if that's the case," she said, wrapping her fingers around me, working me slow, and I was already stirring for her, already coming back to life in her hand like there'd never been a finish, "then I'm going to get my fill of you. Whenever I can. Starting now."

She stroked me hard again with the harbor lights on her skin and her eyes never leaving mine.

Then, she guided me back inside her, and pulled me down, and took her fill.

23

SASHA

We didn't sleep much.

That was the plain fact of the night—we came together on the rug and then in the bed and then, somewhere in the smallest hours, standing in my kitchen again with the whole harbor gone black outside and the city lights laid out across the water like something spilled.

We talked in the gaps. We laughed more than a woman my age has any business laughing at three in the morning. We wore each other out and then found we weren't worn out, and did it again, greedy, both of us, like two people who had each spent a private lifetime not letting themselves have a thing and had finally set the rule down at the same time.

I fell asleep on him near dawn with his heart doing its slow, absurd thing under my ear. I slept hard, and I didn’t dream.

When I woke, the light was high and gold and he was still there.

That was the thing I kept catching on, all through the early part of that morning. He was still there. I'd spent the whole of my life waking up alone in that condo, in that big bed I'd bought so I wouldn't have to feel the emptiness of a small one, and now there was a man in it, warm and awake, watching me come up out of sleep like it was a thing worth watching.

"Morning," he said.

"Morning."

"You slept."

"I slept like the dead." I stretched against him and felt every honest ache of the night. "I never sleep like that."

"I know."

He always knew. It should have annoyed me more than it did.

I reached over him for my phone, out of habit, the old reflex, and I typed the message before I was even properly awake. This time, it didn't cost me a thing.

Taking today, too. I know. I've got the time, Izzy, God knows, I've got the time. Don't worry.

She wrote back a single row of hearts, and then, a beat later: I'm not worried. take a month.

I put the phone down.