"I would have argued with her about everything."
"That's why she'd have loved you."
The song ends. Another one starts---the jukebox cycling through its catalog---and neither of us moves to separate. Her head drops to my chest, and I feel the tension in her body release like a held breath. My chin rests on top of her hair, and the smell of her shampoo---something floral, something warm---mixes with salt air and candle smoke.
"Tell me a story," she says.
So I do. Not a war story---she doesn't need another person's darkness. Instead, I tell her about the time Riggs tried to cook Thanksgiving dinner for the team and set a kitchen on fire. About Decker rescuing a stray dog on a training exercise and hiding it in the barracks for three weeks. About Calder's wedding, where twelve SEALs in dress whites lined up to shake his wife's hand and she told each of them that if they got her husband killed, she'd come for them personally.
Kassidy laughs against my chest, and the vibration of it travels through me like a current. "They're your family."
"They are."
"You miss them. The team. The real team."
"Every day."
"But you found a new one. Salt and Steel."
"I found something. I'm still figuring out what to call it."
She lifts her head. Her eyes are serious now, the laughter faded to something deeper. "What about this? What do you call this?"
I look at her---this woman who writes love stories and can't believe one is happening to her, who outlines her feelings and plays Scrabble like a gladiator, who talks to invisible characters on beaches and fights harder with words than most people fight with anything.
"I call this the beginning," I say.
She kisses me. Not like the library---not careful, not exploratory. This kiss is decisive. The kiss of a woman who has made a decision and is done processing it. Her hands grip my collar and pull me down to her, and her mouth is warm and open and certain, and the restaurant, the jukebox, the storm-washed world outside all dissolve into the simple, overwhelming fact of her.
We leave the restaurant hand in hand. The hallway is quiet---most of the inn has turned in, and the lights are dimmed to conserve generator power. The walk to room 312 takes sixty seconds. The longest sixty seconds of my life.
At the door, she stops. Turns. Looks at me with those dark eyes, her lips still faintly swollen from the restaurant, and whatever composure I've been maintaining for the last sixty seconds evaporates completely.
"Kassidy. I'm going to kiss you again. Tell me to stop."
"Don't stop."
I press her back against the door and kiss her hard, one hand braced against the wood beside her head, the other finding the curve of her waist and pulling her flush against me. She makes a sound low in her throat that I feel more than hear, and her fingers curl into my shirt, twisting the fabric like she needs something to hold onto. I reach behind her, find the handle, and we stumble into the room together. The door swings shut. The lock clicks.
She reaches for my shirt before my eyes adjust to the dark.
Her fingers work the buttons fast---not frantic, deliberate, the focused efficiency of a woman who has decided something and is done reconsidering it. I let her. The shirt drops. Her palms flatten against my chest, tracing the planes of it slowly, and the expression on her face---intent, unguarded, no sarcasm left in it---does more damage than the touch itself.
"Research?" I manage.
"Shut up."
She hooks a finger into my belt and walks backward toward the bed, pulling me with her, and there is nothing in eight years of training that prepared me for this woman looking at me like that.
The back of her knees hit the mattress and she sits, which puts her mouth at my abdomen. She presses a kiss there, open and warm, and then looks up at me from under her lashes with an expression that short-circuits my higher reasoning entirely.
I reach down and find the zipper at the back of her dress. Draw it down slowly---spine by spine, the sound of it swallowed by the dark---and she shivers as the fabric separates. The dress pools at her waist. I push it the rest of the way, and she lifts her hips to help, and then it's gone.
The sight of her in the dim light stops me cold.
"Don't stop now," she says, which is when I realize I've gone still.
"I'm not stopping. I'm appreciating."
