eighteen
Darcy was an early riser as a matter of both habit and preference, but Teagan was up before her. He was already showered and buttoning a white dress shirt before Darcy blinked into alertness and realized he was preparing to leave the house.
Darcy sat bolt upright, startled to be both naked and apparently late, and began to rub her hair out of her face.
“Oh shit, sorry, what time is it?” she asked before she wondered whether she ought to be the one apologizing, actually.
After correctly intuiting that Teagan was the kind of guy who was willing to spoon all night if his world was sufficiently rocked, she’d banked on himalsobeing the kind of guy who got up and made breakfast to butter her up for round two. She’d been looking forward to the morning. She hadn’t expected him to be sneaking out.
Teagan jolted at her voice. He wheeled from the mirror, looked at her, blushed, turned around, realized he could still see her in the mirror, blushed harder, then completed the circuit.
“Sorry,” he matched her words. “I didn’t want to wake you up. I have to go.”
“Then don’t I have to go too?” Darcy said, trying not to sound accusatory.
“You don’t have to come with me,” Teagan said, casting a regretful glance over her mostly bare form, still tangled in the sheets. “It’s a long commute, and I’m going to stay late catching up on work.”
Darcy wrinkled her nose, reorienting herself to what she was doing here. Shore leave was canceled. Back to the boat. Primary mission objective was to keep Teagan from wandering off to a three-martini lunch.
“Ialsohave work,” she retorted, which made him frown. “Wherever you are.”
He sat down next to her, making the mattress dip under his weight. He trailed the back of his knuckles along the curve of her hip, the movement at once tentative and soothing. Darcy leaned into it. If he’d get back into bed, she was sure she could wipe that tight expression off his face.
“You don’t have to do anything today,” he said, voice careful. “I’m just going to be in the office. Mount Beacon is supposed to be a nice hike, or if you drop me off at the station and take the car, you could check out some of the state parks toward the Catskills—”
“We could do that instead of going into the city,” Darcy suggested.
Teagan’s mouth twisted, and he looked away.
Well, she’d tried.
“I can get ready in five minutes,” Darcy promised, pushing them both out of bed.
By the time Darcy had thrown on the clothes at the top of her suitcase and brushed her hair into submission, Teagan was knotting an aggressively boring blue tie in the bathroom mirror, his movements short and tense.
“Do you wear a suit every day?” Darcy asked, curious. She came up behind him and wrapped arms around his torso to take the fabric out of his hands. She pretended to know how to tie it, folding the fabric in a running knot instead.
“Only on days where I have board meetings or I’m coming back from a month at rehab,” he said ruefully. He realized that she was just playing with the tie and pulled it away from her hands to fix it.
In Darcy’s life, she’d only seen men wearing suits for church ceremonies or the senior prom. Teagan’s face said it was a funeral. She leaned her cheek against his broad back and squeezed him before she let him go. He was missing signals again, his head off somewhere other than next to her.
They drove an ancient Mercedes sedan to the station, then took the Hudson line into the city. The sun was just coming up when they pulled away from the platform, but the train was crowded with other commuters in work clothes. Teagan used his shoulders to push through the crowd and get them two seats together, yielding the window seat to Darcy.
It was oddly domestic. Here they were, going to work together, as though this was something they did every day. Darcy had the awkward sensation that she was playing dress-up in someone else’s clothes. That she hadn’t read the mission brief again.
“Do you mind?” Teagan asked, pulling out his laptop as soon as they were underway. “I usually work on the train.”
She shook her head and rummaged in her backpack for her headphones. “I have plenty to do,” she said.
“Not the alcoholism podcast,” he immediately objected.
“Not that one.” She was already up to Step Ten and planned to wait until Teagan caught up a little more before listening to the last few episodes. “I have my reading for class.”
Teagan looked over at her phone. “That must be convenient,” he ventured. “I don’t think they had audio versions of all my textbooks when I was in college.”
Darcy hid her expression. It wasn’t convenient. The audiobooks couldn’t be purchased used, so they were always exorbitantly expensive. And often there wasn’t an audio version available at all now that she was taking very specialized classes for her major, and she’d have to get or make PDFs, then convert them to text, then export the files to a screen reader app, errors and all.
“Sure,” she said, slipping her headphones on and resolving to enjoy the ride as she listened to unmodulated mechanical sentences and bursts of static.
