It was comfortable. It was normal.
For a man who hadn't done normal in years—who'd lived inside the machine and the mission and the abnormality of a life organized around the management of violence—the normalcy of this was staggering.
Two people in a warm room, drinking good bourbon, talking about horses and the mechanics of staying on something that was trying to throw you. No briefing. No objective. No clock counting down to extraction. Just conversation, and food, and a woman who was easy to be with in the way that the best people were easy—not because she demanded nothing, but because what she demanded was exactly what I wanted to give.
"This is nice," I said. The words came out simple and honest and I didn't try to complicate them. "Just—this. Talking. Eating food I didn't have to unwrap from a foil packet. Sitting in a chair that isn't bolted to the floor of a transport aircraft."
Lou smiled over her glass. "Is that a low bar or a high compliment?"
"Both."
"I'll take it." She set her glass down. "Thank you, Grant."
"For what?"
"For sticking around long enough to let us have this."
The tease was gentle. Almost invisible. The kind that only landed if you'd been paying attention to the whole evening—the walking away, the running, the tactical withdrawals that had brought us here by the longest possible route. She was acknowledging all of it, lightly, without cruelty, the way you tease someone you've decided is worth teasing.
I took it. Gratefully. The way you take something offered in good faith by someone who's earned the right to offer it.
"You're persistent," I said.
"I'm from Kentucky," she said. "We don't quit on things."
"I've noticed."
She held my gaze. I held hers. The fire crackled. The bourbon sat between us, warm and amber and catching the light.
A lull settled in. Not the uncomfortable kind—the kind that happens when two people have run out of the easy words and are standing at the edge of the real ones.
The room was warm. The food was mostly demolished. The bourbon was working its way through both of us, not toward intoxication but toward the loosening that good booze provided—the softening of edges, the lowering of guards, the quiet agreement between body and brain that tonight, the usual rules didn't apply.
Our eyes met.
The fire reflected in the brown of hers—those bourbon-colored eyes that had started this whole thing, that had derailed me at a bread stall and sent me running and then brought meback, twice, because, apparently, I was incapable of staying away from something that looked at me like that.
"Time for dessert," we said.
Both of us. Same words. Same beat. Same meaning that had nothing to do with the strawberries still sitting on the plate.
The synchronicity hung in the air like a struck bell.
Then I was on my feet.
I grabbed her hand. Her fingers laced through mine and she was up, matching my stride, the leather chair left behind, the lounge left behind, the fire and the bourbon and the demolished spread all left behind.
The hallway. The elevator. I hit the button and the doors opened immediately, which was either the universe cooperating or the hotel being very good at its job. We stepped in. The doors closed. The car started to rise.
Lou looked at me in the elevator light. Her hair was wild. Her eyes were bright. The smile on her face wasn't the composed, measured smile she'd worn at the market or the bar or even the rodeo. It was the smile of a woman who'd stopped calculating and started wanting, openly.
I backed her against the elevator wall. Kissed her—deep, slow, the kind of kiss that made promises about what was coming next. She kissed me back with both hands in my hair and a sound against my mouth that the elevator had no business hearing.
The doors opened. Third floor. My floor.
We moved fast. My hand found the key card in my back pocket. The door. The reader. The green light.
The room opened in front of us—dark, the curtains still half-drawn from this morning, the city lights coming through in long pale stripes across the bed I'd slept in for exactly one hour this morning before my internal alarm had kicked me awake.
