I love the pink flush of her cheeks, the way I flustered her. Soflustered, in fact, that her nonstop verbal dialogue has completely stopped. I made her speechless, and I fucking love that.
My arm slides around her lower back, pulling her closer against me.
“What are you doing?” she whispers.
“Just because I’m not kissing you doesn’t mean we can’t look like a couple riding the train. We’re going for camouflage.”
“Cooper, about what happened earlier?—”
“Not now.”
“When you kissed me?—”
I lean in close to her ear. “Eliza. That was an order. What do you do with my orders?”
“Obey them,” she responds, sarcasm dripping from her voice.
“That’s right. You obey my orders. You do as I say. Our number one priority is staying alive. Everything else takes a backseat to that. If I need to hold you close, I’m gonna hold you close. If I need to kiss you, I’m gonna kiss you. I’m gonna do whatever the hell it takes to keep you alive.”
Her eyes widen at my unusually long speech. “Wow. If I knew that talking about that kiss would make you say more than one or two words, I would’ve done it earlier.”
She opens her mouth with another question, but the train slows for the next station. Rosslyn. I evaluate the platform through the windows—normal foot traffic, no obvious surveillance.
“We’re getting off,” I announce.
“But we just got on.”
“Random routing, remember?”
I take her hand again and guide her through the doors onto the Rosslyn platform. The train pulls away, carrying our previous location into the tunnel. Anyone tracking our movement has lost the trail.
The blue line platform. It’s a different direction withdifferent destinations. The crowd here is thinner. It’s late morning weekend traffic rather than rush hour chaos. Perfect time to change our clothes.
“This way.” I steer her toward the restrooms.
“What are we doing?”
“Clothing change number two.”
I guide her past the separate men’s and women’s restrooms to the family restroom at the end of the corridor. Single occupancy, lockable door, private space.
“What the hell are we doing in here?” she asks as I shut the door behind us and engage the lock.
“Changing clothes.”
I pull out one of the other shirts from the convenience store and strip off the black T-shirt, replacing it with a gray one. When I turn around, she’s standing frozen by the door, clutching her bag of clothes.
“I’m not going to change with you looking at me.”
“Look, I can stare at the door, I can stare at the mirror, I can look at you—whatever you want. Change your shirt and let’s get going. We don’t have time to argue.”
She starts removing the blue T-shirt from the convenience store, then pauses. “You know, it’s kind of a shame about all these clothes. That Georgetown hoodie—I would’ve liked to have kept it. You spent $200 on it.”
“Technically, it was $200 for everything. Anyway, it’s gone.”
“Now what do I do with this shirt?”
“Put it in the trash.”
