"Shit." She exhales. Pushes her hair back. Her fingers are shaking. "Shit. I'm sorry. Did I hit you?"
"Yes."
"Hard?"
"Not as hard as you think."
She laughs. Short, loud, the laugh of a woman who's still half in the nightmare and trying to claw her way out. "I have a mean right hook. My therapist said it was a trauma response. I said it was self-defence."
"Your therapist was probably right."
"My therapist was a fifty-year-old woman who'd never been punched in her life. She was guessing." Charlotte pulls her knees up and wraps her arms around them. Small. Contained. The posture of a woman making herself into the smallest possible target.
I should leave. I should go back to the couch and give her space and let her rebuild the walls that keep her safe. That's the smart play. The tactical play. The play that keeps the mission clean and the asset stable and my head where it needs to be.
I don't leave.
"Move over," I say.
She looks at me. I can't read her expression in the dark. Just the shape of her face and the glint of her eyes and the pale column of her throat where my shirt has slipped off one shoulder.
"I'm not going to touch you," I say. "I'm going to sit here until you fall back asleep, and then I'm going back to the couch."
"You don't have to do that."
"I know."
"No."
"Move over, Charlotte."
She moves.
I sit against the headboard with my legs stretched out and my back against the wood. She's beside me, knees still drawn up, arms still wrapped tight. The space between us is maybe six inches. Her body heat radiates across the gap.
The room is quiet. Wind outside, pushing through the pines. The last pop of the embers through the wall. Her breathing, slowing now, dropping from the ragged gasps of the nightmare into something approaching normal.
"I dream about him sometimes," she says. Quiet. Not looking at me. Looking at the window where the dark presses against the glass.
I don't ask who. I just listen.
"Not the bad parts. That's what's fucked up about it. I don't dream about the hitting or the screaming or the night I left. I dream about the good parts. The beginning, when he was kind. When he'd cook dinner and pour me wine and tell me I was the best thing that ever happened to him." She pauses. "And then Iwake up and I can't tell which version was real. The man who held my hand or the man who broke it."
My fingers curl against the sheets. Tight. The fabric strains.
"Both," I say. "Both were real. That's what makes it dangerous."
She turns her head and looks at me. In the dark, her eyes are almost black.
"How do you know that?"
"Because the most dangerous people aren't the ones who are always cruel. They're the ones who know exactly when to be kind."
She's quiet. I feel her processing that. Running it through whatever system she uses to sort the world.
"You're kind sometimes," she says. "The coffee. The lighter. Sitting here right now."
"I'm not kind. I'm strategic."
