This was the answer.
I had her by the jaw, soft, the way you held something you'd finally been allowed to put your hands on, and she made a sound against my mouth that I felt down through the floor. Not a moan. Smaller than a moan. The sound a woman made when a held breath finally let go.
I broke the kiss and pulled back just far enough to see her face.
Her eyes opened slow.
"Hi," I said.
"Hi."
"You taste like coffee."
"I just got off a shift."
"It's a compliment."
"You taste like bourbon."
"I just got off something else."
She laughed. Quiet, half against my collarbone, the laugh of a woman who had not been expecting to laugh in this exact secondand was startled into it. It was the laugh I'd gotten in the donut shop and the one I'd gotten on the sidewalk and I was going to do whatever I had to do for the rest of my natural life to keep getting it.
I'd known a lot of women.
I had not known many of them.
Rebecca Lynn was a third thing.
I'd been playing her guitar in her living room with her roommates pretending they weren't watching, and I'd looked up when she walked in and the entire apartment had reorganized itself around the fact that she'd come home.
Devon had stopped lying about the television. Tasha had stopped pretending the chai was the most interesting thing in the room. Geoff had closed his book without finishing his sentence. And Rebecca had stood in the doorway in her work coat and her tip money and read the room with one slow look and walked toward me, anyway. She'd walked toward me when most women in her position would have walked toward the kitchen to give themselves a beat. She hadn't needed the beat. She'd taken the guitar back with her hand all the way around mine this time, and somewhere betweenhiand now we'd burned through everything I'd thought I knew about how this kind of thing went.
I should have been somewhere else.
I knew that all the way down.
Out there in the city, Dominic Craine was sitting on whatever Dominic Craine was sitting on. Lucas was on his way to Paris with a movie star in his lap. Wyatt and Grant were off the board. There was a war coming for my family the size of which I hadn't begun to draw the edges of, and a deputy director of the FBI had eaten breakfast at my expense this morning, and somewhere in Texas my mother was forgetting another word, and the smart play—the move a serious man would have made—was to be backat The Palmetto Rose with my pistol on the nightstand and a plan in my head.
I was not at The Palmetto Rose.
I was in an apartment with aggressively cheerful yellow curtains and a girl with honest eyes and a hand on my chest, and my pulse was in a place pulses didn't go in operators on the clock.
And here was the thing.
I'd learned in this line of work, the hard way, more than once, that you never knew when you'd clock out. You did not get to schedule it. The reaper didn't take appointments. He came on regular days in regular kitchens and on side streets in cities you'd never been to, and the men who'd planned to live forever died next to the men who'd planned to live a week, and the only thing the dead had in common was they'd all run out oflater.
I had anow.
I was going to use it.
I tipped her chin up with my thumb.
"You're hard to read," I said.
"Am I?"
"Mm."
