He walks around the end of the table and stops in front of me, close enough that I have to look up to hold his eyes, and I don't step back.
I don't step back because stepping back would concede something I'm not willing to concede. And because the honest truth is that his proximity has been doing something to my thinking for eleven days, and I am done pretending it isn't.
He looks at me for a long moment.
"You're right," he says. "The lead is real and it needs to be confirmed. And we'll confirm it." His eyes don't move from mine. "With cover. With me. Not you alone on a road where Delacroix's face is on the other side of any vehicle that comes around the bend."
That's not a refusal. That's a plan with the shape of a plan, and it costs him something to say it, and I can see it costing him.
"Okay," I say.
"Okay?"
"Okay. Together. Not alone." I hold his gaze. "But soon. The window on this won't stay open."
"I know." He's very close. The Mississippi night is coming through the open windows and the compound is empty and quiet around us. "Soon."
He steps in and his hand finds my jaw and he kisses me — not like the porch, not slow and deliberate and tender. The porch was tender.
This is something else, his mouth hard against mine from the first second, his hands going to my hips and pulling me against him, my hands going to his shirt and gripping it because I need something to hold onto.
He walks me backward. My back hits the wall and I don't fight it.
I want the wall behind me with all of this bearing down. He gets his hands under my thighs and lifts me. I lock my legs around him and we are immediately, urgently close in a way that makes all the arguing feel like foreplay, which maybe it was.
He gets my jeans open. I get my hands into his. He pushes inside me against the wall and I pull in a breath so sharp it scrapes my throat, both of us still fully feeling where we just were in that argument, all the friction of it now running a different direction.
He moves and I move with him. My hips roll to meet every thrust, his mouth at my throat biting down soft and then not so soft, finding the exact place that makes my grip on his shoulders turn into something more like clawing.
I drag my nails down his back and feel him shudder and drive deeper in answer. I do it again because the sound he makes when I do it is the most honest thing I've heard from him yet; that low broken sound that he can't manage, that he doesn't try to manage.
He shifts the angle, my head goes back against the wall, and I stop being quiet about it. His name comes out of me in pieces. The sound bounces off the empty walls and I don't care.
His thumb finds me where we're joined and presses in slow circles and my whole body pulls tight.
"Look at me," he says, low — the same instruction as the shower, the same specific thing he needs from me.
I look at him. His eyes are dark, his jaw is set, and he's watching my face with the same focused attention he brings to everything. He’s reading me, adjusting, using what he learns.
His thumb keeps working. His hips don't stop. He holds my gaze and keeps going, and I feel stripped down to something very simple, something with no composure left in it. Just his name in my mouth and his hands on me and the Mississippi dark pouring through the open windows.
I come hard, my whole body clenching around him, his name out of me loud and unmanaged. The orgasm rolls through me in long waves while he drives through every one of them without slowing.
He follows me over with his forehead against mine, his grip on my hips tightening past careful, going deep and staying there and shuddering through it, a sound against my throat that I feel in my chest.
We stay like that against the wall. His weight on me. My legs still locked around him. Both of us breathing, coming back down from it.
We end up on the couch in the corner, his arm around me, both windows open to the warm dark. My head is on his chest. His heartbeat is slow and steady now.
I've been thinking about whether to say this. Whether it's the kind of thing you offer or keep, and what each costs.
"I'm from Lacombe," I say.
He doesn't say anything. He waits and gives the space for what's coming without filling it.
"Small town on the north shore. Forty-five minutes from New Orleans on a good day. My mother's family has been there for four generations, which in a town like that means everyone knows everyone and everything, or they think they do."
I look at the ceiling. "My mother got pregnant with me at seventeen. The man wasn't from there. He wasn't from anywhere, just passing through, gone before she knew she was pregnant. In a town like Lacombe, in a family like ours, that kind of thing doesn't go away. It settles in. It becomes part of the story people tell about you and about her and by extension about me."
