He wraps a towel around me before he reaches for one himself.
18 - Logan
She pulls on my shirt.
We came back to bed after the shower — damp-haired and quiet, the towels abandoned on the bathroom floor, neither of us deciding to leave. She must have found the shirt on the bathroom floor. She buttons three, leaves the rest. The hem hits mid-thigh. She pads toward the kitchen on bare feet and doesn't look back.
I lie in bed and watch her go.
The collar slips off one shoulder. Nothing underneath. She disappears around the corner and I stay where I am another moment, looking at the ceiling, because moving would mean deciding what to do with what's happening in my chest.
The word that forms there doesn't make it to my mouth.
I put a knife at this woman's throat three weeks ago. I drove her across the city in the back of a van with her wrists bound. I watched her scream in the dark and felt it move through me like current. Now she's in my shirt, in the kitchen, barefoot on marble I bought because I didn't like the lock on her motel room door. The distance between those two facts is so enormous I could live in it.
She stayed. I stayed.
Neither of those things belongs to any pattern I've built in thirty years. I don't do mornings-after. I don't wake beside people. The arrangement was designed specifically to prevent this — daylight intimacy, someone else's breathing in the room, the weight of another person before the machinery starts up. Ibuilt walls around the dark thing and told myself the walls kept everyone safe.
She is the most dangerous thing I've ever let into my life. Not because she could hurt me physically. Because she has access to places no one else has reached, and she got there while I was still telling myself she didn't.
The possessive claim arrives first:my shirt, my woman.
The dangerous part is that I want her to stay.
I get up and follow her.
The fridge in her penthouse holds a lot of food that I ordered for her and have delivered every few days. She has the door open, assessing her options.
"Well," she says.
"Yes?"
"Do I own a pan?"
I snort. “You haven’t cooked anything yet?”
She shrugs. “I’m not much of a chef.”
“No kidding. You’ve owned this place for three weeks and you still haven’t even figured out where you keep your cookware.”
She closes the fridge and looks at me.
I pick up my phone, scroll to a number, and call. The woman who answers knows my voice. I order in Spanish — easy and unhurried, the cadence of a language I grew up around — and she doesn't ask questions, just reads back what I've said and tells me an hour.
I hang up.
Wren is watching me from across the kitchen. “What did you order?”
“Breakfast from Pequeño Sol.”
"That place just down the road? God, I love their turkey brie benedict.”
“I know. That’s what I ordered for you.”
She frowns at the revelation that I know her order. “But they don't do delivery. I begged them. Practically promised them my first-born child if they would just send up a plate of food."
"They do for me."
