Page 58 of Duty Preserved

He parked beside the vet facility. The second my boots hit the packed dirt, camp life closed back over me.

The cabins sat thirty feet apart. The mess tent had its sides rolled up so you could see clean through it from either direction. In a camp this small, someone always knew who walked to whose cabin and when they left it. The rest found out by breakfast.

Whatever Donovan and I were now, there was no way to manage it here without giving the whole compound something to talk about. In a hotel room in Nanyuki, we’d had a city full of strangers.

He felt it too. I read it in the careful arm’s length he kept as we came around to the tailgate, the deliberate, ordinary way he reached past me for the first case without letting his hand find the small of my back like it had in that hotel lobby. We stood eight inches apart and performed being strangers, and every one of those eight inches carried a current I had to work not to lean into.

“Where do you want these?” he asked.

“Supply room. Left of the door.”

I carried one case and he carried the other. We walked them into the supply room and locked them in the metal cabinet, and the errand that had detonated my whole life for thirty hours finished itself as the most boring thing on earth.

Alyson was waiting when I came back out.

She’d propped herself against the water tank with her arms crossed and her phone nowhere in sight, which for Alyson was the equivalent of cracking her knuckles. She took one look at my face, and every suspicion she’d been nursing since yesterday morning confirmed itself at once.

“Don’t,” I said.

“I haven’t said a word.”

“You’re about to.”

Donovan stepped out of the supply room behind me. Alyson pushed off the tank and intercepted him before he’d fully cleared the doorway, all brisk cheer and zero subtlety. “Hello. Everyone’s staging for the herd move tomorrow, and Cole’s short on hands. You could be so useful there.” She hooked a thumb toward the far end of camp. “I need Sarah for a while.”

Donovan looked at me over the top of her head. I gave him a small nod, because whatever Alyson was about to put me through was not something he needed to witness. He went.

Alyson waited until he was well out of range, then threaded her arm through mine and towed me around the back of the facility, to the one thin strip of shade where the canvas didn’t have eyes.

“Okay.” She planted herself square in front of me, close enough that I’d have had to shove past her to leave, which we both knew I wouldn’t do. “Talk.”

“There’s nothing to talk about.”

“Sarah Calloway. You spent a night in a hotel with that man, and you came back glowing like a damn lighthouse. Something to talk about is the only thing there is.”

“It’s not like that.”

“It is exactly like that.” She grabbed both my hands. “Did you kiss him?”

I opened my mouth to deflect, and the memory of the second shower arrived instead, uninvited.

Steam, and the tile cold against my shoulder blades. His hands gripped under my thighs, which were wrapped around him, holding me off the floor. The water had gone lukewarm over both of us, and neither of us reached to fix it.

“We kissed,” I said. “A little.”

“A little.”

“Alyson.”

“A little like a peck, or a little like I need to sit down for this?”

“It wasn’t a whole production. Leave it.”

She did not leave it. She never left anything.

“You kissed him a little,” she repeated, tasting each word for the lie in it. “In a hotel. Hours away from anyone who’d tattle. And then you both turned in early, chaste as a pair of nuns, in your two separate rooms?”

She wasn’t buying a syllable of it. She knew me, and she could see the exact spots where my story had already sprung a leak.