She stirs. Her hand finds my arm. Her fingers trace along my forearm, feeling for me in the dark the way you feel for something you expect to be there.
"You're back," she murmurs. Sleep-heavy. Warm.
"I'm back."
"How did it go?"
"We got everything. Hard drives, documents, the network map. Kreiss isn't there. Geneva. But the Maryland cell is done."
"Emilio?"
"He's got Savannah. She's safe."
"Good." She shifts in my arms. Turns. Faces me. Her eyes are half-open, heavy-lidded, the deep blue barely visible in the low light from the window. "I'm in your bed."
"I noticed."
"It's very you. Minimalist. Clean. The bookshelf is a nice touch. I didn't expect books."
"What did you expect?"
"Weapons. More weapons. A shrine to ammunition."
"The ammunition shrine is in the closet."
She laughs. Soft. The sound hums against my chest. Her hand comes up and touches my cheek, traces the line of it, finds the bruise that's faded to yellow and green.
"I missed you," she says. "Which is stupid because you were gone for eight hours and I've spent three years not missing anyone."
"It's not stupid."
"It feels stupid."
"That's because you're not used to it. Missing someone requires caring, and you've been rationing that for a long time."
She's quiet. Her thumb traces my lower lip. The cut from the corridor is healed. A faint scar, barely visible, but she finds it with the care of a woman who has mapped every mark on my face.
"I want to be in your room," she says. "Not tonight. Every night. I want this to be where I sleep."
"Okay."
"You don't have to think about it?"
"I've been thinking about it for days. The answer has been the same since the farmhouse."
She kisses me. The slow kind, two in the morning, slow of a woman who's been asleep in your bed and is waking up against your body. The slow of a kiss that doesn't need to rush because nobody is running and nobody is being chased and the door is locked and the war, for tonight, is paused.
I kiss her back and bite her bottom lip, sucking as I release. My hand slides under the shirt she's wearing, my shirt, and finds bare skin. Her waist. The curve of her hip. The dip at the small of her back where her spine begins. She's warm from sleep. The heat of her seeps into my palm like a remedy for something I didn't know was cold.
She deepens the kiss. Her tongue against mine, her hand in my hair, her body pressing into me with a slow insistence that isn't demanding. It's asking. She's asking, the way she's learned to ask, not with words but with her body, with the shift of her hips and the arch of her back and the small sound she makes when my hand slides lower and cups her ass and pulls her against me.
"I want you," she says against my mouth. "Slow. I want it slow tonight."
"We can do slow."
"No condom."
"No condom."
