She lied to you.
She was going to?—
The water shuts off.
I take a step back, trying to arrange my face into something neutral, trying to will away the evidence of how affected I am.
The door opens.
She’s wrapped in a towel, water still beading on her shoulders, and the sight of her is like a gut punch. Small and fierce and so fucking beautiful it makes every part of me ache.
“I left you new clothes,” I manage to say, gesturing to where I laid them out on the bed. Then I lock her back in the room, go to the kitchen and pour another drink and try to remember a time when my life made sense.
Night falls like a curtain, no twilight, the way it seems to when the clocks fall back and winter is on the way.
I bring her dinner. She eats without complaint this time, which feels like a victory even though it isn’t.
I ask more questions. She gives me more silence.
The pattern is thus established—I push, she resists, we orbit each other like binary stars caught in a gravity well neither of us can escape.
At eleven p.m., I leave her alone and retreat to my bedroom.
At midnight, I’m still staring at the ceiling.
At one a.m., I give up on sleep and find myself in the hallway again, hand on her door, that magnetic pull dragging me toward her like I’m caught in a current that’s threatening to drown me if I don’t do something about it soon.
Stay away.
I open the door anyway.
She’s awake. Sitting up in bed, blanket pooled around her waist, my T-shirt slipping off one shoulder. The city lights paint her in silver and shadow. She is a vision of light in all this darkness.
“Can’t sleep?” she asks quietly.
“No.”
“Neither can I.”
Turn around, walk away, lock yourself in your room until morning.
I cross to the bed and sit on the edge, not touching her but close enough to feel the warmth radiating off her body.
“Why did you protect me?” The question comes out before I can stop it. “When your fellow agents asked how you got out of the warehouse, you lied. You didn’t tell them about me.”
She’s quiet for a long moment, staring out the window at the stars
“I don’t know.”
“Bullshit.”
“I don’tknow.” There’s frustration in her voice now. “I should have told them. Protocol says I should have reported everything. But when Kat asked…” She shakes her head. “I just couldn’t do it.”
“Why not?”
“Because.” She meets my eyes, and there’s something grave in her expression. “Because telling them would have put you at risk. And I couldn’t do that. Because even after everything, I couldn’t make myself betray you. I’d already betrayed you so much.”
The words hang between us.
