Page 68 of Presumed Dead

“Hi.”

“I’m going to kiss you, Ethan, unless you tell me not to.”

He could feel his heart against her hand. She could feel it too. He saw her notice.

“I’m not going to tell you not to,” he said.

She lifted up onto her toes and kissed him.

It was not a careful kiss. It was a kiss a woman gave when she had stopped being careful for one specific reason and was going to be careful again tomorrow, and it had the warmth and the deliberate weight of something decided in advance and committed to in the moment. Her mouth was warm and a little dry from the wind, and she tasted faintly of coffee, and her hand was steady against his chest now, and he understood, somewhere distant in himself, that she had been bracing for him to pull back and was discovering by inches that he wasn’t going to.

He didn’t pull back.

He put one hand against the side of her face, the way he’d wanted to at her counter yesterday and hadn’t let himself, and the other low against her back where the soft gray shirt was warm with the heat of her, and he kissed her like a man who’d been undercover for three years and had not been touched by a person who knew his real name in any of them. He kissed her like he’d been thinking about it every minute since she’d laughed at a sandwich on a sunny bench. He kissed her like it counted, because it did.

She made a small sound against his mouth, half breath and half something else, and he felt it go straight through him.

Neither of them was quick about it. They had years of restraint between them, hers for grief and his for cover, and a kiss earned on that much restraint did not turn into something else inside thirty seconds. He took his time. She let him. He learned the shape of her mouth and the way her free hand came up to fist lightly in the fabric of his shirt over his heart and the way her breath caught when he brushed his thumb along her jaw, and she learned the shape of his shoulder under her palm and the small involuntary movement he made when she rose up the half inch she had to rise to meet him.

It was the most honest thing he had done in three years.

She broke the kiss first, gently, the way she’d done everything since she’d arrived at his pylon, and she didn’t step back. She stayed where she was, with her forehead against the line of his collarbone, breathing, and he kept his hand at the side of her face and rested his cheek against the top of her head, and they stood like that on the cockpit of his boat in the going light with the marina quiet around them and his pulse loud in his own ears.

“Ethan,” she said, into his shirt.

“Yes.”

“I have been very careful for a long time.”

“I know.”

“I’m not careful right now. I want you to know I’m not careful right now and I will not pretend I am.”

He held her a moment longer before he answered. He wanted to get the sentence right.

“I’m being careful with you,” he said, “because I have to be, and I’m going to keep being careful with you until I can stop. But I'm not being careful about how I feel. I’m not. You should know that.”

She lifted her head. Her eyes were close to his and very blue, and there was something in them he hadn’t seen before in any woman’s face, which was a person looking at him as if she was deciding she was going to count on him, and the decision was visibly costing her, and she was visibly going to make it anyway.

“Two weeks,” she said.

“Two weeks.”

“When you tell me the rest, I want it sitting in this kiss. Not after it. Inside it. I want to be able to look back at this moment and know you kissed me knowing what you knew.”

He thought about Caleb on the phone at one o’clock and the window narrowing and the piece of the file that was going to land on her like the end of the world, and he thought, with a clarity he hadn’t had since the day he’d signed onto this operation, that the only way to honor what she’d just asked was to mean what he’d just done.

“It’s in it,” he said. “All of it. I knew what I knew, and I kissed you anyway.”

“Good.”

She put her hand over his on the side of her face, and held it there, and closed her eyes for the count of a breath.

Then she opened them and stepped back.

She didn’t go right away.

She stood at the rail of the cockpit and looked at the water for a while with her arms folded and a small smile at the corner of her mouth that wasn’t for him to see, and he didn’t look at it directly because he had a sense it belonged to her alone.