She hadn't gone.
Not because she didn't want to. She wanted to with a ferocity that startled her, a physical pull she felt in her hands and her ribs and the base of her spine. She wanted to climb those stairs and find his room and press herself against the solid mass of him and stop pretending she was a woman who made decisions with her head.
She hadn't gone because she wanted it to be special when she did.
Not tonight, when the glow of a perfect day might be doing the deciding for her. Not because she was comfortable and half-asleep and high on a good day. When she went to him, and she would go to him, she wanted to be awake for every second of it. Wanted to choose it in the full, sober light of knowing what it meant.
So she'd stayed on the couch. Let Ranger's breathing anchor her. Let the wanting sit in her body like a low, constant hum and didn't try to silence it.
Now it was morning, and the wanting was still there, and she was done pretending it wasn't.
Footsteps on the stairs. Jake's voice, low and clipped, the cadence of someone receiving information rather than making conversation.
"Yeah. When did they confirm that?"
Emily sat up, pulling the blanket around her shoulders. Ranger lifted his head, ears forward, tracking the same sounds she was.
"And Daniels has eyes on it?" A pause. "That's not enough yet. He needs to sit on it until it's actionable."
Jake came down the last few steps and turned the corner into the living room, and Emily's brain went somewhere it had never been.
He was in UF shorts and nothing else, phone pressed to his ear, already moving toward the kitchen counter where a pen and notepad lived beside the coffee maker. His hair was pushed in directions sleep had chosen, and his feet were bare on the hardwood, and the morning light through the kitchen window was catching the planes of his chest and shoulders in ways Emily had no professional framework for processing. But it wasn't that. It wasn't the way he looked, though he was a problem a sculptor would spend years arguing about.
It was what his body carried.
A raised scar ran along his left rib cage, four inches of healed tissue that didn't match the skin around it. She knew that shape. She'd seen it in evidence photos, in medical examiner reports, in the clinical language of case files she'd reviewed a hundred times. Knife wound. Close quarters. Someone had been near enough to put a blade between his ribs, and he'd survived it, and the evidence was written on him in a line that caught the light when he turned.
Higher, on his left shoulder, a different kind of damage. Rounder, cratered, the landscape of tissue that had been torn and rebuilt. Bullet wound. Entry and exit, she guessed, from the way the scar on the front lined up with a similar mark she could see when he angled toward the counter. Through and through she supposed.
She'd known. At least, theoretically, in the way she knew about crime scenes before she visited one. She'd understood that seven years in special operations meant real proximity to violence, meant the body absorbed what the mission required. She'd cataloged it alongside everything else she knew about him,another data point in the profile she'd been building since the bullpen.
This wasn't data.
This was the man she was falling in love with, standing in his kitchen with the morning sun on his skin, and the proof of what his service had cost him was right there, visible, a record written in scar tissue that saidsomeone tried to kill me and it wasn't theoretical and it wasn't that long ago and it was real.
Fear came first. Brief and bright, the way a match flares before you shake it out. She saw the knife wound and her mind produced the scenario, the close quarters, the speed at which it must have happened, the margin between the scar he carried and the death he didn't. She saw the bullet wound and thought about angles and trajectories and the distance between his shoulder and his heart.
Then he saw her. His expression shifted mid-sentence, the professional focus giving way to a more complicated pleasure. He covered the phone's mic with his palm.
"Morning." Low. Pleased. The smile of a man who'd woken up knowing she was downstairs and was glad to see the evidence.
The fear burned off like fog. What replaced it had no name she could find. Not attraction, though that was there, an ambient condition she'd stopped trying to manage days ago. Not pity, because pity would have insulted him. Closer to recognition. He'd walked into places where those scars were possible. He'd walked back out. And instead of becoming hard or closed or ruined by it, he was standing in his kitchen smiling at her like Sunday morning was the best thing that had ever happened to him.
She wanted to know who had done that to him. Not clinically, not as a prosecutor assembling facts. She wanted to know so she could understand what he'd survived. What he'd carried. Whatthe cost of showing up had looked like for a man who never stopped showing up.
"Coffee's about to happen." He lifted his palm from the mic. "Yeah, I'm here. Go ahead."
He turned toward the counter, pulled the notepad closer, and started writing. Emily followed the muscles in his back as he wrote, the scar on his shoulder shifting with the motion, and felt a stillness settle in her that had been restless for a very long time.
She folded the blanket. Set it on the arm of the couch the way she'd found it. Ranger stood and stretched beside her, a full-body extension that ended with a yawn and a shake.
"That's DeMarcus." Jake covered the mic again. "DEA. He's got some movement on Costa's network."
She nodded. Padded to the kitchen in bare feet, found the coffee mugs by instinct or luck, and started the pour from the pot he'd set before coming downstairs. Of course he'd set the coffee before taking the call. Of course he'd thought about her waking up to the smell of it, even while his mind was somewhere else entirely.
She set a mug near his writing hand. He glanced at her, and his expression was so full of casual gratitude, so absent of performance, that she had to look away before her face betrayed her.
"Tomorrow works." Jake's pen moved across the notepad. "I'll loop in Ray. Yeah. Yeah, I know. Thanks, D."
