“Tell me.” I realize I’m crossing another line even as I say it.
He turns his glass in his hands. “Four years ago, my employer needed a message sent. There was a building involved. I was told it would be empty.”
My stomach goes tight. I keep my face neutral, but I’m a Kozlov, and I know what “a message sent” means, and I know what kind of employer sends those kinds of messages. And he’s sitting on my couch telling me, and we’ve been pretending for weeks that I don’t know anything about who he is.
“It wasn’t empty,” I surmise.
“No. Four confirmed dead. Maybe more. I stopped trying to get the number because knowing it didn’t change anything, and not knowing was the only way I found to keep functioning.”
He’s not trying to make me feel better or drawing a parallel. He’s telling me because he knows what it’s like to carry faces you didn’t choose, and the fact that he’s telling me at all sits in my chest like an anvil.
“Does it get easier?” I ask.
“No. You just get better at carrying it.”
As we talk, the whiskey gets lower, and with every sip, I become even more aware of his hands, shoulders, and mouth, which I’ve thought about more than I’ll admit. After the night I’ve had, I want to pull him on top of me and stop thinking for a few hours. This has been building for weeks, and tonight, I’ve got very little left to fight it with.
But I stay where I am for now.
“Every job I’ve been sent on,” he begins, “there was a reason for why it had to be that way. I believed it for a long time.”
“What changed?”
He shrugs lazily. “The reasons kept sounding the same, and the faces kept looking different.”
I’m not sure when it happened, but his knee is almost touching mine. He’s watching me in that calming way of his, and then he reaches over and rests his hand on my knee. He just settles it there and drags his thumb in a slow line back and forth. It sends heat zipping up my inner thigh, and I forget what I was going to say.
“I spent ten years building something very specific,” I manage through the lump in my throat. “I was sure about all of it. And then recently—” I stop. We both know how that sentence ends.
He doesn’t move his hand, and I don’t ask him to.
We sit there with his palm on my knee and the whiskey nearly gone. I think about why this is a terrible idea, and I don’t care.
We stay like that until our glasses are empty, and the building goes quiet around us. And I realize if I don’t send him home now, I’m not going to.
“It’s late,” I say finally. “You should go.”
He lifts his hand off my knee, and I feel the loss of it right away. He sets his glass down and stands, and I follow him to the door. He takes his coat off the hook, and I lean against the doorframe and watch him, and I’ve already decided. If I’m honest, I made it the second he walked through the door.
He turns back, and we’re close the way we keep ending up close, and his eyes drop to my mouth for a second before they come back up.
Before I can talk myself out of it, I push up onto my toes and kiss him. Soft and quick, just my mouth against his for a few seconds. He sucks in a breath and then kisses me back, barely anything but just enough, and I feel it everywhere. My nipples go tight, heat floods to my core, and my body wants to close the six inches between us and find out what he does when someone doesn’t make him stop.
I’m not ready for what comes after that, and I know it, so I step back.
“Goodnight,” I breathe.
He looks at me for a long moment, like he’s waiting for me to change my mind. Then he nods once, and I close the door.
I stand with my back against it and my heart beating twice the speed it should for a four-second kiss. I kissed him and shut the door in his face right afterward, but I started it, and I knew what I was doing.
I knew who he was before he ever hit my table. We’ve just been playing dumb.
Tonight, we stopped for a minute, and he didn’t push.
I don’t regret kissing him until my phone vibrates on the counter.
I look down to see my sister’s name on the screen. She’d hear it in my voice in thirty seconds, and she’d want to talk about it, and I’m not ready to talk about it. I don’t even know what to say.
So, I silence it and walk away.
