His face pressed against my shoulder. His breath warm against my skin. His body curved into mine like he'd decided sometime in the night that distance wasn't worth keeping. I'd slept beside this man for almost two years at Bragg. But that had been different. Bunks. Barracks. The careful distance oftwo soldiers who wanted something they couldn't name and wouldn't reach for.
This was his arm across my chest. This was his breath on my skin. This was the morning after the night when reaching had finally happened.
The room looked different. Morning light through the window I'd never covered. New shadows. New shapes. The walls were still bare. The weapons rack still mounted. The footlocker still holding position at the end of the bed. But the details had shifted.
Boots by the door that weren't mine. The leather worn at the heels from ranch work.
A flannel shirt draped over the chair beside the bed. Soft. Faded. Neither red nor brown but something warmer than both.
Logan stirred. His arm tightened across my chest—reflexive, unconscious—and his breathing changed. The transition happened the way it happened in men trained to surface fast: one breath asleep, the next aware, the body checking position and surroundings before the eyes opened.
I turned my body slightly in his direction. I looked back at him. His eyes opened. Blue in the morning light. The disorientation lasted half a second. Then recognition flooded in, and his face did something I'd never seen it do.
He smiled. Slowly. Warmly.
"Hey." His voice was rough with sleep.
"Hey yourself."
His hand moved against my chest. He traced the geometric tattoos that ran across my pectorals, the ink he'd explored with fingers and mouth last night.
"You always sleep this light?" His thumb moved along the edge of a pattern near my collarbone. "I felt how you went still the second you woke up. Like you were listening for something."
"Old habit."
"Expecting trouble?"
"Always expecting trouble. Just not from you."
The corner of his mouth lifted higher. "Good to know."
His palm flattened over my heart. I felt the pressure of it, steady and warm, his hand spanning the space between the tattooed geometric lines. The touch was unhurried. The gesture of a man who had time.
We didn't have time. I knew that. The compound was awake—I could hear it through the walls. Boots on concrete. Voices in Spanish and English mixing in the corridor. The morning rhythm of a building at almost double capacity. But the knowing didn't translate into moving.
"You slept," he observed.
"Some." More than I expected. The dreams that usually woke me—my mother's crossing, the bodies in the desert, the brand seared into brown skin—had stayed quiet. "You?"
"Best I've slept in weeks." His hand pressed harder against my chest. "Maybe months."
"The mattress isn't that good."
"The mattress isn't why I slept." His blue eyes held mine. Steady. Open. Showing what the words weren't saying.
Something shifted in my chest. Something unfamiliar. Something not unwelcome.
"Logan—"
The three knocks on the door interrupted him.
My body went tight before my brain caught up—awake, alert, already calculating distance to the Ka-Bar on the nightstand. Then Hawk's low, rough voice came through the door, and the tension released.
"Blade. Nolan's finished. Church in thirty."
"Copy."
We listened to Hawk's footsteps retreat down the corridor.
