Then I get up and go upstairs.
Judge's light is off when I knock.
He says come in, and when I open the door the room is dark except for the ambient light from the compound outside the window. Just enough to see the outline of him sitting on the edge of the bed.
Tonight he's not carrying the same weight I saw on him after the shooting. Tonight he's coiled differently. Not weighted, just alert. Waiting.
I close the door behind me, lean against it, and look at him in the low light.
"You're not sleeping," I say.
"No."
"Are you going to?"
"Eventually." He looks at me across the room. "Come here."
I cross to the bed. He reaches up, takes my hand, and pulls me down beside him. Not urgently, just with the specificdeliberateness that means he's thought about this, knows what he wants, and has decided.
I sit beside him with his hand still in mine, and neither of us says anything for a moment.
The compound is quiet around us. Outside the window, Recon's perimeter check moves through the lot, a flashlight crossing the grass, and then it's gone and the dark settles back.
I turn to look at him. In the low light his face is still. He's looking at me with the full force of his attention, which is what this man's attention feels like when he gives it to you entirely. It’s like being seen by something that doesn't miss anything.
I reach up and put my hand against his jaw.
He turns his head into it, just slightly, and closes his eyes. He lets me have that. Of all the things I've watched him hold onto and carry, this is the one he puts down willingly. He turns his face into my hand like a man who is tired of only taking things from other people and is willing, tonight, to take something given freely.
I kiss him.
Slowly. Nothing urgent in it, nothing that needs anything in return yet. Just my mouth on his, my hand still at his jaw, feeling the day leave him in the specific way tension leaves a body when the right thing touches it.
His hands come up to my waist and rest there, holding rather than pulling, and he kisses me back in the same slow register. Like we have all night. Like neither of us is going anywhere.
We have all night.
He leans back and takes me with him. We settle onto the bed, lying face to face in the dark, and he looks at me for a long moment with his hand in my hair.
"I want to look at you," he says.
"Then look."
He does. He looks at me in the low light with the same attention he brings to everything, and I let him. I don't look away.
I've been photographed by strangers and by people who loved me and by people who wanted something from me, and none of them have ever looked at me the way this man does. Like he's trying to store it, like he wants to keep it.
He undresses me slowly. Not efficiently. Every piece of clothing is treated as something worth taking time with, his hands reading my skin the way I read a frame for everything that might be in it.
My shirt. Then his. He presses his mouth to my collarbone and drags it across my shoulder and I feel it all the way down my spine. His hands map the shape of me without hurrying — waist, hip, the inside of my wrist when he takes my hand and presses his mouth to my palm.
He turns my hand over and presses his mouth to the inside of my wrist where my pulse lives, and he keeps it there for a moment like he's taking the measure of me, like my heartbeat against his lips tells him something.
I get my hands on him and he lets me take my time too.
His shirt is already gone. I press my palms flat to his chest and feel his heartbeat under them, faster than it sounds when I'm sleeping with my head there. I drag my hands down the planes of his stomach and feel the muscles tighten under my palms.
He pulls in a slow breath through his nose and stays very still, letting me learn him, and I take my time about it. I've been watching this man move through a compound for a while now. I know the shape of his shoulders under his cut, the way he carries himself when he's on alert versus when he's at ease, but knowing the shape of someone dressed and knowing the shape of them in the dark in your hands are different kinds of knowing.
