"It's not much," she said, and there it was in her voice—pride, trying to pass for apology.
"It's yours," I said. "That's the whole thing about it."
She looked at me quick, like I'd gotten something right she hadn't expected me to.
The tour took about ninety seconds. The sofa, the corner she worked in, the window with the best light. Then we ran out of room and ran out of words at the same time, and the awkward came down over us like a dropped sheet.
"I'd offer you a drink," she said, "but I haven't made it to the grocery store. There's tap water and—" she opened a cabinet, shut it. "Tap water."
"I'm fine."
"Sit, at least. You've been hauling me around the Lowcountry all day."
So, I sat. The sofa took me low, springs long gone. She stayed standing a second, then drifted toward the window, and I let my eyes go around the room again. My mind went where it always goes when my body finally stops—back to the problem.
The Dane brothers.She'd said it in the bar, plain as anything.Are you in Charleston because of the Dane brothers.And I'd had my tell and moved past it, but now, sitting in the quiet with the whiskey wearing thin, the rest of it caught up to me.
I never gave her my last name.
I'd said Brock and nothing after it, on purpose, the way I do. She'd pulledDaneout of the Charleston air on her own—the pier explosion, the careful way people in this town said the name. Which meant the name was loose. Out there. Circulating among people who weren't us, attached to stories about defense companies and things that blew up, common enough that adevelopment director at a Catholic school knew to be careful with it.
My family had spent a long time being a name nobody outside it knew. If that had changed, ifDanewas a thing Charleston whispered now—then whatever Tommy had stepped in was worse than his voice on the phone, worse than him not laughing at the oldest joke we had. The exposure alone.Fuck.
I was halfway down that road, jaw tight, already running the implications when Mary Catherine crossed the room, put a knee on either side of my hips, and sat down in my lap.
Every thought in my head went out at once.
Fuck.
My hands came up to her waist before I'd decided anything, pure reflex, and they settled there and went still, and I had the strangest goddamn feeling that I'd never had before in my life—that this was where my hands were supposed to be. Like they'd been made for the span of her and had spent all my years not knowing it. The thought scared me worse than the FBI.
"Is this okay?" she asked. Quiet. Close. Her face inches off mine.
I looked at her. I looked at her and I made the mistake of breathing her in—warm skin and whiskey and underneath it something clean and her own—and she was every single thing all at once, every want I'd spent the day shoving in a box. The box came apart in my hands.
Fuck.
I had to do the right thing.
That was the only clear line left in me, and I held onto it like a rail. I'd done a lot of things wrong in my life. A lot. There was a whole back corner of a Texas cemetery that knew how wrong. But this—this woman, raw and reeling and hours out from the worst day of her life—this, I was going to get right if it killed me. It felt like it might.
"Hey," I said. Low. Easy. The voice you use to talk somebody down. "It's been a hell of a day. Maybe we?—"
She pressed forward. Settled her weight down into me. And I felt it then, under the bravado: she was shaking. Fine and steady, the same tremor I'd watched come over her outside that blue door. Scared. Pushing, anyway. The bravest, most reckless thing about her, and the exact thing that told me to stop.
Fuck.
And my body—my own traitor body, that I'd trained to lie still under fire, to hold a position past the point of pain, to do what I told it and nothing else—my body did not get the message.
She felt it. I watched her eyes change, go dark and slow, and she rolled her hips against me, once, unhurried. So unhurried, it was almost cruel.
Fuck. Fuck.
I'd wanted her since the alley. Since the water. Sinceno place I'd rather befell out of my mouth and I knew I was already gone. There was no pretending otherwise now, not with her sitting right on the proof of it.
She moved against me again, slower, watching my face the whole time like she was reading the thing she'd suspected all day and finding it confirmed. Then she leaned in and kissed me—on the forehead. Soft. Then the left cheek. Then the right. Like a blessing. Like the gentlest thing in the world laid over the least gentle thing happening between us.
My hands slid from her waist to the curve of her, and I pulled her down into me without deciding to. She rocked against me harder, and a sound came up out of me that I didn't authorize.
