The cleaner was supposed to go home, decompress, and disappear. The cleaner didn't drive toward the one person who could undo him with the innocent touch of her fingers.
But I wasn't the cleaner tonight. Hell, honestly, I didn't know what I was. Only that I was driving toward her, and my hands had stopped shaking.
It was past midnight when I parked outside her building.
I sat in my car for ten minutes, staring up at her dark window, and felt the last of the adrenaline burn off, replaced by that thing underneath. The thing that had been building inside of me all of these weeks.
The taste of her that I'd carried on my lips since the first time I kissed her, the fragile softness of her skin beneath my palm…it all replayed a thousand times until I could feel the heat of her body against mine in my sleep.
I got out of the car.
Taking the stairs two at a time, my boots were silent as I climbed to the second floor and walked to the end of the hall. I raised my fist to knock…
The door opened before my knuckles hit wood.
Raven stood in the doorway, dark hair loose around her shoulders, wearing an oversized black t-shirt that hit her mid-thigh. Bare legs. Bare feet. No cane. No armor.
Her head was tilted, those useless blue eyes aimed somewhere past my left ear. But she was seeing me. She was always fucking seeing me.
"I heard you stop at my door," she said. "I recognized your footsteps."
I didn't say anything. My throat was locked.
"You promised you'd wait for me tonight."
"I'm sorry," I told her, and I realized that I actually meant it. "I was unavoidably detained."
She inhaled through her nose. Slowly. Deliberately. The way she cataloged the world. "You showered. But you don't smell right. You used someone else's soap."
"Yes," I whispered.
"Why?"
Jesus Christ.
Tell her. Tell her and maybe she'll put a stop to this before it goes any further.
"Because I killed a man tonight and then I had to clean up the scene and remove the body. I showered at his apartment because I couldn't risk anyone seeing me covered in blood."
My heart stuttered in my chest, then began to beat fast and hard as the seconds ticked by and she didn't react.
"Why?" she finally asked.
"Because he was following you, and he was going to hurt you."
"You don't know that," she argued.
"Yes," I told her. "I do."
She was quiet again, but only for a moment. "Oh."
"Does it scare you?" I asked. "What I did?" I held my breath as I waited for her answer, torn on what I wanted it to be.
She reached for my hand and I gave it to her. Her thumb traced a slow circle on the inside of my wrist, right over my hammering pulse.
"No."
What the hell was she saying? "It should," I told her. "It should scare the fuck out of you, Raven."
