My heart rate, my breathing, the tension in my shoulders.
She's a nurse. She reads bodies the way I read rooms.
"Your heart's racing," she says.
"Adrenaline."
"You're wound tight."
"Hours on the radio listening to your brothers on a run will do that."
She looks up at me. Those Mercer eyes, steady and searching. "Are you going to tell me the long story?"
"Tomorrow." I put my hands over hers, pressing them against my chest. "Tonight I just want to be here."
Something shifts in her face.
The concern softens into something warmer, darker, and I recognize it because I'm feeling the same thing—the post-adrenaline hum, the raw, electric awareness that happens when your body has been on high alert for hours and suddenly drops into safety.
Into warmth. Into the presence of someone who makes the danger feel far away even when it isn't.
"The girls are asleep," she says.
"I know."
"Rookie’s on the porch."
"I know."
She pulls my shirt—her shirt, mine, ours, whatever it is now—over her head in one motion and she's bare underneath and the adrenaline that's been coursing through me all night finds a new channel to pour into.
"Leah—"
"Stop talking." She reaches for my belt. "You just came home from something I can't ask about, and you're standing in your own living room shaking, and I know you won't tell me what happened out there, and I don't need you to. I just need you here. With me. Right now."
I'm on her before she finishes the sentence.
My mouth on hers, my hands around her waist, lifting her off the floor.
She wraps her legs around me and I carry her—not to the bedroom, not past the girls' doors, not tonight.
The couch.
I sit down with her in my lap, straddling me, her hair falling around both of us like a curtain.
She pulls my shirt over my head and puts her mouth on my neck.
I can still smell the smoke on my skin and she doesn't care.
Her teeth find the spot below my ear and I grip her hips so hard I know I'll leave marks, and I don't care either.
This isn't gentle.
It isn't rough like the dresser.
It's something else—hungry, possessive, alive.
The adrenaline turning into heat, the fear turning into need, every hour I spent listening to that radio while my brothers were in danger converting into the desperate, all-consuming need to touch this woman and feel her touch me back and know that we're both here, both breathing, both real.
