He just disappears.
Give it time. Whatever you do, don't push the issue. That's something they need to sort out on their own.
I let go of the keyboard.
Ten minutes later, the door opens again. The team filters out. Wyatt comes last. He doesn't look at me.
He moves to the window. Stands there for a moment with his back to the room.
Then he picks up his jacket and goes back out to check the perimeter.
I turn back to my screen and say nothing.
I push backfrom the terminal just after 1400, shoulders tight, and head for the supply hall. The operations room is quiet. Frost and the team are in the back running a tactical brief. I grab my mug — cold and empty — and go.
The supply hall is narrow and dim, stacked with gear and provisions, a battered coffee rig on a shelf beside a box of instant oatmeal packets and a case of MREs. I'm pouring the last of the coffee when footsteps land in the doorway behind me.
His gait.
He doesn't speak.
He closes his hand around the doorframe beside my head. Not touching me. Just there — his body filling the entrance, cutting off the light from the hall, that wall of barely-contained stillness at my back.
My pulse kicks.
Three days of professional distance and my body reacts to his proximity like a switch being thrown — the same immediate, involuntary heat that started in the dark of the cabin and has been running at a low, maddening burn ever since. He didn'ttouch me like a man who was being careful. He touched me like a man who had run out of reasons not to, and there is no unknowing that. The body remembers what the mind can't afford to keep thinking about.
"Wyatt." My voice comes out low. Careful. "Please, I need?—"
"Don't." The word is gravel. "Don't say my name like that in here, or I'm going to do something Frost is going to notice."
I set the mug down.
"Three days." His voice drops further, the rough scrape of a man past the outer edge of his control. "Three days of watching you work and sleeping on the other side of a hallway and not—" He stops. His hand tightens on the doorframe.
"I can't stand it." I turn around, gripping his shirt, pulling him closer. "Can't we?—"
"Not here." He steps back. My hand falls. "Not now. We finish the mission. Then we figure out what the hell we're going to do about this."
He's right there. Dark eyes, jaw tight, every line of him locked down hard. He used to look at me the same way through the scope — I understand that now — the same absolute, annihilating focus, except the scope is gone and there's nothing between us but three feet of dim air and Frost's voice, muffled through two walls.
"The override will be ready tonight." I make it a statement. Not a comfort. "Then this part is over."
"And what about the part that isn't?" The rough scrape is back in his voice. "You don't know what you do to me. I don't know if I can stay away from you once this is over?—"
"That's not what I'm asking for."
"Then what do you want?" He takes one step closer. "Because I'm about to lose it."
"I want what started in the cabin. I want more of that."
His eyes go dark. For one thunderous heartbeat I think he's going to do it — pull me into the supply closet and take what he wants right there, with Frost and the team in the next room. It's that close. The heat of him is already against my skin.
Then he inhales, sharp and ragged, and steps back. The moment doesn't disappear. It just shifts — from something about to break into something that sits there, heavy and unavoidable, waiting.
We stand in the supply hall, the coffee going cold, Frost's voice carrying faint and muffled from the back room, and the full weight of everything between us takes up all the space.
He reaches out. His thumb moves once along my jaw — just that, nothing more, the barest edge of contact — and then he steps back.
