Page 45

“Then don't lose me tonight,” she says. “We'll fight about forever in an hour.”

We go over the gunwale into the old launch, into the open cockpit where somebody's left a wool blanket folded on the bench. She shakes it out across the deck boards with one snap of her wrists, and then we're kneeling on it facing each other in the lantern light. The boat shifts on the water under our weight like a slow heartbeat.

We undress each other with none of the tearing this time. She works my jacket off my shoulders and folds nothing, drops everything, but her hands move slow, like she's memorizing the order of me, the zip, the buttons, the undershirt peeled up and away. I do the same for her, her coat and her dark sweater and the cotton underneath, until we're skin to skin in the cold and goosebumps rise everywhere our hands aren't. Her thumbs trace the bite mark she left on my shoulder a week ago, the bruise gone yellow-faint now, and her breath catches.

“I'll be gone before it fades all the way,” she says.

“Don't.” I press her hand flat over it. “Don't talk about that. Be here.”

She lays me down on the blanket with the deck solid under it and the river moving under that, and she starts at my throat and goes down my body slow, mouth and hands, my collarbone, the swell of my breasts, her tongue circling one nipple until I arch and then the other, unhurried, thorough, reading me in the dark by touch. The cold sharpens all of it. Her mouth is the only warm place in the world, and she moves it down my stomach. My hips lift before I've decided anything as she eases my jeans and underwear down and off then kneels back a second, looking at me bare in the small light. Whatever is on her face has no name in any report I know how to write.

“Zara.” My voice is gone to gravel. “Come here.”

“I am here.” She settles between my thighs, breath warm on me. “I'm not anywhere else ever again.”

Then her mouth is on me, soft at first, broad slow strokes that pull a sound up out of my chest I'd be embarrassed by in any other life, and I get a hand in her hair, not steering, holding, and she takes her time like we have any. She learns me again from the start, lips and tongue, patient circles over my clit that tighten by degrees, two fingers sliding into me and curling right, nothing about it tentative, eleven years of precision spent all in one place on one body, mine. The boat rocks in little nods off the rhythm of it and the water claps under the hull. She keeps working me until her whole hand disappears inside my body and she begins to fuck me with her fist. It feels incredible. Better than anything I’ve ever felt in my life. I go up slow and then all at once, her name and a sob in the same breath, my heel braced on the bench, my hand fisted in the blanket. She works me through the long crest of it and gentles me down the far side, and when I pull her up my face is wet and so is hers.

“I don't go under for anyone.” I say it against her mouth, tasting myself, tasting salt. “I told myself that for twelve years. You're the exception. You're every exception I have.”

“Dani.” She says my name and nothing else, cracked down the middle as she begins to slide her hand out of me.

I roll her under me, blanket dragging, lantern light sliding on her skin, and now it's my turn to memorize. I take her slow, the opposite of every fire between us, my mouth at her breasts until her hips rise begging without words, my hand opening her, two fingers deep and my thumb riding her clit, my teeth set gentle in the side of her throat without closing. She comes apart quietly, which is the loudest she gets, her body bowing up off the boards, her hand clamped on my wrist holding me exactly there, saying my name over and over like she's counting it. Afterward she shakes, not from cold, and I haul the blanket's free edge over us both and hold her against my chest while the boat settles, while the sirens keep talking somewhere north of us.

While the only criminal I've ever loved breathes into my collarbone in a boathouse at the bottom of the city.

“Ask me what happens next,” she says against my skin, “and I'll tell you the truth on the first try. It's a new policy.”

So I ask, and I feel her gather the answer against my ribs before she spends it.

“The ebb runs before dawn. I take the boat out dark, down the south channel, past the breakwater, and after that there's a coast with a thousand small harbors on it and not one of them knows my face.” Her fingers trace the old scar through my eyebrow, the ladder and the ice and twenty-three-year-old me, a story she pulled out of me across eggs a lifetime ago. “Beyond that, nothing decided.”

“Don't tell me which harbor.” I hear her own confession coming back out of my mouth and let it. “What I don't have can't be taken from me. You taught me that one in a warehouse.”

That gets the ghost of a real smile, there and gone against my collarbone.

“Come with me.” She says it there, against my skin, not lifting her head, like the words need somewhere to hide. “I have never once asked anyone for anything. I planned my whole life so I'd never have to. I'm asking. There's a boat thirty feet from this one with room for two, and water past the channel mouth that doesn't belong to anybody. I swear I will spend every year I've got left being a woman you're not ashamed of. Come with me, Dani.”

And God help me, I see it, fully furnished. I see small harbors and her hands going brown on deck lines and coffee in tin mugs, harbors where nobody checks a name, her laugh coming easier each year. I see the other one too, the one where I stay, the pension, the kitchen table, Lena's kids' graduations, thirty years of ceilings that mostly don't fall, the life I built being enough again someday. And then the impossible third one, the one with no architecture at all, a small house somewhere with three cats, her arguing with one of them in the kitchen while I pretend to still be asleep, and that one hurts worst because there's no road to it from this boathouse, none, and my chest knows it before my head finishes the math.

“I can't.” The words come out of me at the grain of a confession. “Quinn ate smoke covering my position once and Lena has lied to exactly nobody in her life except for me. Val is standing in front of a city tonight that's going to want somebody's badge for this, and if I vanish with you, every one of them spends years paying my tab. I run into buildings. It's the only thing I know how to be. I can't be a person who runs out of one.”

She goes still under my hands. Then she nods, once, against my chest, and doesn't ask again, and the not-asking-again breaks me worse than begging would have.

The light through the boathouse's gapped boards changes, goes white, sweeps the wall above us, and is gone.

I'm up on an elbow with my hand over the lantern before I've thought it, and through the gap I watch a flashlight beam walk the fence line at the road end of the yard, then a second one, then the slow crunch of a car easing onto gravel with its headlights off. They found the truck. Eight blocks of riverfront sit between it and this dock, and they're walking all of it, sweeping outward the same as I'd sweep a wall for extension.

“Marshals.” My mouth is at her ear, barely sound. “Two on foot at the gate, a unit on the gravel. They'll walk the yard first, hulls and the office, then the docks. You don't move. Don't take the boat out now, an engine on this water at two in the morning is a flare. You stay dark in here, you wait for your ebb, and you slide out on it with no lights when their backs are north.”

“Why would their backs be north?” she breathes.

“Because I'm about to put them there.” I'm already pulling my clothes on, fast and silent, the order drilled into me by a hundred tones at midnight, and she's dressing beside me in the dark, swifter than I am, soundless. “I walk out to my truck and I'm a heartbroken idiot who came looking for you down the riverfront, and then I give Val a fire she can't ignore on the other side of the city.”

Outside, the beams cross the yard again, closer this time, patient, two pairs of boots taking the gravel in no hurry at all.

“Dani.” Her hand closes on my wrist in the dark. “If she breaks you for it⁠—”

“I know what it might cost. I did that math before I ever left my couch.” I find her mouth one more time, quick and hard, all the goodbye there's time for, and the taste of her goes with me over the gunwale. At the judas gate, I look back once. She's a shape against the water gate, both bags already on her shoulders, one hand raised, not waving, held still in the air like a promise. The last thing the lantern shows me before she thumbs it dead is her face, memorizing me back.