Page 54 of Duty Preserved

I slowed the kiss. Eased my lips back but kept my forehead against hers.

“Hey.” I said it low. “You’re okay.”

Her eyes were wet. She blinked and looked at me, trying to read what I thought of her after everything she’d just said.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to⁠—”

“Don’t apologize for that.”

“I’m a mess, Donovan.”

She was. Red-eyed, still in her field clothes. But we were all always in field clothes out here. Those were the same clothes she’d been wearing two weeks ago when she’d knelt beside a sedated three-thousand-pound rhino and worked on it with all the calm of someone pouring a cup of coffee. Steady hands and smooth composure, the inverse of her frazzled self, standing in front of me now.

Both versions were her, and what I hadn’t expected was that the falling-apart version charmed me just as much as the competent one. Even her meltdown had been all in.

“Come here,” I said and pulled her away from the door. She let me steer her toward the edge of the bed. She sat down, put her hands between her knees, and looked at the carpet.

“What if you took a shower?” I said. “Hot water. Ten minutes. You’ll feel better.”

She looked up. “You’re not⁠—”

“I’m not going anywhere. I’ll be right here when you get out.”

The tension in her face cracked. Just barely.

She stood up and went to the bag by the door, dug around for a minute, then walked into the bathroom and closed the door. The water started a minute later.

I sat on the edge of the bed, put my elbows on my knees, and breathed.

I wanted her. No ambiguity about it. I’d wanted her since the first time those green eyes peered up at me. For the first time in years, I had cursed myself for being on a mission.

But she’d just emptied herself out in front of me. Moving on that would make me someone I wasn’t willing to be. Whatever happened between us happened when she was steady, not when she was shaking.

I heard the water running and the muffled sounds of her moving around in the small bathroom. I sat there and waited and didn’t let myself think about what she looked like in that shower.

She came out fifteen minutes later in spare clothes from the bag I’d grabbed out of the truck. Plain T-shirt two sizes too big, cotton shorts, damp hair, face scrubbed clean. She looked younger without the dust and sunscreen and field grime. She looked lighter.

“Better?” I asked.

“Yeah.” She sat on the bed, cross-legged, and pulled a pillow into her lap. “A lot better. Thank you.”

“Nothing to thank me for.”

I took my turn in the shower. It didn’t take me long to wash off the dirt of the day. When I came back out, she was still on the bed, picking at the edge of the pillowcase. Now that we were each clean, some of the tension seemed to ease on both of us.

“I should off turn my phone. I meant to do it before,” she said. “Alyson won’t stop with the messages.”

“My buddies are similarly vulgar, and besides, who doesn’t appreciate some raunchy humor here and there.”

She retrieved her phone from her bag and unlocked it. The screen lit up with a wall of notifications. Alyson’s name, over and over. Sarah scrolled through them, and her face went through about six shades of red in the span of three seconds.

“Oh God.” She covered her eyes with one hand. “She sent— Donovan, she sent a whole— I can’t even⁠—”

“How bad?”

She shook her head, still scrolling, and I caught a glimpse of the screen over her shoulder. A stick-figure drawing that Alyson had clearly made in a notes app, anatomically creative and labeled with arrows.

The laugh came out before I could catch it. A real one, the kind I hadn’t produced in longer than I could remember.