"I'm staying, and not because of you." I turn my head to look at him. "It's not despite you either. Tidewater needs what I do, and the work is important, and I've built something here that matters beyond the contract."
"The loft has a second bedroom we could convert into a proper office," he says, "so I can have my kitchen island back before your monitors permanently fuse to the granite. There's also terrible country music, and you're welcome to keep complaining about both for as long as you want."
"That is the least romantic offer I have ever received."
"You want romance, date someone who doesn't defuse bombs for a living."
"Point taken. The last man I dated was an investment banker. He alphabetized his spice rack and cried during commercials."I press my foot against his shin under the sheet. "You're an improvement."
His hand slides from my hip to my waist and pulls me flush against him. "Damn right I am."
We end up on the couch when the sheets get too warm and the room gets too still. The bay is flat and dark through the windows and the pier lamps dot the waterline in amber, and the loft is cool enough after the heat of the bedroom that the air feels good against bare skin.
My laptop is open on my knees, the monitoring framework running its passive sweep across the restored network, and my feet are in Griff's lap the way they've been on dozens of evenings that I told myself were temporary. His hands rest on my ankles, his thumb making absent circles on the bone he's been touching every night as though confirming a measurement he already knows.
"This isn't temporary," I say, and the words come out steady and sure and without a trace of the accent I use as a blade or the sarcasm I use as a wall.
"No," he says. "It's not."
The code scrolls. His hand is warm on my ankle, and mine is steady on the keyboard.
15
GRIFF
Two weeks since the malware, the shaped charge, the arrest. Two weeks since the woman who saved the base decided to stay.
I trip over a cable in my own hallway and nearly put my head through the drywall.
The cable runs from Nox's new office, which used to be the guest bedroom, through the bedroom doorway, across the hall, and into the kitchen where her monitoring framework is running a passive sweep on the secondary laptop she's parked next to the coffee maker. It's taped to the baseboard in some places and not in others, creating a pattern that follows no logic I can identify and no building code that has ever been written.
"That cable is a safety hazard," I tell her from the hallway, rubbing the spot on my shin where the connector housing caught me.
"That cable is load-bearing infrastructure." Her voice carries from the office without a pause in the typing. "If you move it, the latency on the secondary monitoring feed doubles."
"If I move it, I stop breaking my shins at zero-five-thirty."
"Those are acceptable losses."
The loft has changed. The bare brick walls, the windows framing the bay, the couch facing the flat-screen, all of that is the same, but the spaces between are occupied now in ways they never were. Her monitors are mounted on the office wall where my tactical vests used to hang, arranged in a semicircle above a proper desk I assembled over a weekend while Rowe held pieces level and didn't comment on dimensions matching the measurements Nox had taped to the fridge.
A modern seascape hangs above the couch, all storm-grey water and fractured light, which she ordered without consulting me and hung while I was at the EOD bay. I don't want to know what it cost. I also haven't stopped looking at it.
My kitchen island is clear for the first time in weeks, which should feel like a victory except that she's already colonized the end of the counter nearest the outlet with a charging station, a mug tree, and a shortbread tin that never seems to empty because I've learned to restock it before she notices it's running low.
Her rings sit next to the coffee maker every morning, smallest to largest. That hasn't changed. What's different is that they sit next to my watch now, because at some point I started leaving it there too, and the counter that used to hold nothing but a coffee maker and empty granite now has two people's worth of daily routine stacked on it.
I pull on my running shoes and head for the door. "I'm meeting Holden for PT. I'll be back in an hour."
"Make me tea when you get back."
"What kind?"
"You know what kind."
I do. Loose leaf, brewed in the teapot she bought for my kitchen because not owning one was, in her words, a humanitarian crisis. I know how she takes it the way I know theblast radius of C-4 at standard density: with complete certainty and no room for improvisation.
The morning is overcast, the bay flat and grey under cloud cover that sits low enough to blur the line between water and sky. Holden is waiting at the beach access point in running gear, and him being early tells me this isn't just PT.
