"I'm always proud of you."
"You were standing there looking at me like I'd just---"
"Like you'd done the bravest thing I've ever seen? Yeah."
She crosses the room. Her hands find my jacket, pushing it off my shoulders. Her fingers find my earpiece, pull it free. The radio goes on the nightstand. Then the jacket, the holster, the professional distance I wear like a second skin---all of it, gone. Just Tucker. Just her. Just the cottage and the harbor and the sound of us breathing.
"I want to show you something," she says.
She opens her laptop. A new document, untitled. The first page reads:
Chapter 1
The gravel crunches beneath my rental car's tires like a countdown...
"You're writing our story," I say.
"Someone has to. It's too good not to."
The manuscript starts with her arriving at the retreat. With the suitcase getting stuck in the gravel, and the stranger who carried it for her, and the mortification of learning he wasn't the bellhop. Every moment, refracted through her voice. Every detail, sharper and more alive than memory.
She's turning us into fiction, and fiction into truth, and the line between the two has never mattered less.
"Come here," I say.
She closes the laptop and comes.
This is different from the inn. That night had an edge to it---urgency, the relief of finally, hands that moved fast because neither of us was sure it would last. This is slower. This is knowing.
She reaches for my shirt first, working the buttons from the bottom up, fingers unhurried, and I let her take her time. The dress has a zipper at the back and I find it while she's still on the last button, draw it down one deliberate inch at a time until the fabric loosens and falls. She steps out of it without looking away from me.
"You're staring," she says.
"I know where I want to look."
That earns me a sound halfway between a laugh and something else entirely.
The lamplight catches the line of her collarbone, the curve of her waist, and I take my time with all of it---mouth at her throat, her shoulder, the soft skin below her ear that makes her grip the back of my neck and pull. When I work my way down her body and put my mouth on her, she makes a sound that's nothing like the composed, careful woman who stood at that podium two hours ago. Her hand fists in my hair. She says my name like a warning she doesn't mean.
She comes apart slowly, then all at once, her thighs pressing against my shoulders, her back arching off the sheets. I stay with her through all of it.
"Tucker." Breathless. "Come here. Now."
When I move back up her body she reaches between us and wraps her hand around me, sure and unhurried, and the contact after that much wanting pulls a sound out of me I don't try to suppress. Her eyes are dark and satisfied and she knows exactly what she's doing.
"Kassidy."
"I know," she says. Like she's been waiting for me to lose composure. Like this is the thing she came here for.
When I push inside her the satisfaction is total---the long exhale of finally, the solid, grounding weight of her hips rising to meet mine. She hooks her leg over my lower back and pulls me deeper and I drop my forehead to hers and hold there for a moment, just breathing, just this.
"Look at me," I say.
She does. Dark eyes, lamplight, the flush rising across her chest.
We find the rhythm together the way we find everything---with minor negotiation and no wasted motion. She knows what she wants and she asks for it without apology, with the tilt of her hips and the drag of her nails across my back and the small, sharp sounds that tell me when to slow down and when not to. I learn her the way I learn everything that matters: completely, with full attention.
The moment before she comes she grabs my face with both hands and kisses me, hard, and I feel it when she does---the full-body shudder, the way she exhales my name against my mouth like she can't hold it back anymore.
