Page 66 of Dominion's Guard
He drives with one hand on the wheel. The other rests on the console between us, and I track the position of his fingers the way I've been tracking them for weeks, measuring proximity and intent with the precision of a woman who has spent her career reading the distance between where someone's hands are and where they want to be. His knuckles are loose. His thumb taps once against the leather, then stills. The space between his hand and my thigh is a few inches of charged air that neither of us closes.
My arm aches. The stitches pull with every bump, and the road has plenty of them, because this is New Orleans and the infrastructure is a collaborative project between the city engineers and the Mississippi River, and the river has been winning that argument for three centuries.
"Stop."
I look at him. "Stop what?"
"Flexing your hand. You've been pulling those stitches since the ER."
"I wasn't aware you'd been monitoring my hand movements while giving a federal statement in a separate room."
"I'm monitoring them now." He glances over, and the look is the one I know from across the bar, the one that says he's seen the thing I'm doing and he's deciding whether to let me keep doing it. "Stop."
I stop. The compliance is automatic, and the ease of it should alarm me, and it doesn't, and the fact that it doesn't alarms me more.
The city slides past in the predawn dark, streetlights casting amber pools on asphalt. Andy's overshirt is in an evidence bag at the federal building, logged and tagged because the blood on it belongs to two people. The blouse I wore is in a separate evidence bag, torn at the sleeve and stiff with dried blood that turned the fabric into cardboard. The scrub top makes me look like a medical student who lost a fight with a cadaver, and the man driving me home looks like he hasn't slept since yesterday because he hasn't, and the two of us together in this car at this hour would make a photograph that tells a story neither of us has said out loud yet.
The Craftsman appears in the headlights. Andy pulls into the driveway and kills the engine, and the sudden absence of road noise leaves a hum between us like a wire pulled taut.
He comes around to my side and opens the door. His hand is already extended, not offered so much as presented, palm up, with the patient expectation of someone who has decided this is how the next part goes.
I take it. His fingers close around mine, firm and unhurried, and the grip is a statement rather than a gesture. He helps me down and keeps my hand through the front steps, unlocking the door one-handed, and the ease of that tells me he's practiced the motion, or thought about it, or both.
The house is dark and still and smells like coffee and the lemon oil he uses on the dining room table, and the familiarity catches me somewhere behind the sternum. I've been sleepingin this house for weeks. I know where the creaky board is in the hallway and which cabinet holds the mugs and how the light falls through the kitchen window in the early afternoon. I've rearranged his spice rack and judged his reading material and left my things scattered through the guest bathroom with the territorial creep of a woman who is losing the argument with temporary.
The guest room is to the left. I turn toward it, the pull automatic, the same way I've moved through this house every night since the first one.
Andy's hand is still holding mine. The turn toward the guest room pulls the length of our arms taut, and he doesn't let go. The resistance is silent and immovable.
The strength behind it is the same strength that pinned my wrists above my head the night before the wire and held them there while I arched against him and forgot every exit I'd ever memorized.
"You don't have to be alone tonight."
I turn back. He's watching me with the focused stillness that I've learned to read over the time I’ve been serving him bourbon he barely drinks, the look that means he's already decided and he's giving me the space to catch up. The hallway is dark. The streetlight through the front window paints him in amber and shadow, and the lines of his face in this light are harder than they are in daylight, the jaw sharper, the eyes darker, the patience more visible for what it costs him to hold.
"Is that an order, Detective?"
"Does it need to be?"
The question hits the exact place where my bravado is thinnest. He knows me. He knows that an order would be easier, that compliance is a door I know how to walk through, that obedience to a command is simpler than choosing for myself,because obedience is a transaction and choosing is a surrender and I have been confusing the two for my entire adult life.
"I don't know how to do this." The deflection I reach for dissolves before it forms, and what comes out instead is raw and graceless. "Trust someone. Let someone see all of it. I've spent my whole life building exits into every room I walk into, and you keep standing in all of them."
"I know where the exits are." His free hand comes up, and his thumb traces the line of my jaw with the slow, deliberate pressure that matches the way he interrogates, patient and thorough, unwilling to let go before he's gotten what he came for. "I also know you haven't used one in weeks."
The observation is surgical. He's right. I haven't run. I've been standing in his kitchen and sleeping in his guest room and leaving my things in his house and not running, and the fact that he's tracked that, noted it, added it to whatever mental notebook he keeps alongside the case notes and the evidence logs, sends heat through me that the exhaustion can't suppress.
"If you were holding me here I'd know what to do," I tell him, and my voice cracks on the honesty of it. "I'd fight. I'd pick the lock. I'd find the angle. You're asking me to choose to stay, and that is the hardest thing anyone has ever asked me."
"I know." His thumb presses once against the pulse point under my jaw, and the possession in the touch is so precise, so controlled, that my breath catches and holds. "Start small. Stay with me tonight. Just sleep."
He says it the way he saysstopandsit downandgive me your arm: low and certain, leaving no room for negotiation while offering every room to refuse. The command and the choice exist in the same breath, and the tension between them is the thing that has been pulling me toward this man since the first night he sat at my bar and watched me with the patience of someone who intended to wait as long as it took.
"Just sleep," I repeat, and the words taste like a dare, because we both know what his bed means, what his sheets will smell like, what the proximity will do, how thin the line is between lying next to him in the dark and the thing we did the night before the wire, when his hands were in my hair and his voice was in my ear and the distance between us was measured in skin rather than air.
"Just sleep." His eyes hold mine, and the banked heat behind the calm is visible if you know where to look, and I have been looking at this man for some time. "I didn't say it would be easy."
The honesty in that disarms me more thoroughly than gentleness would have. He's not pretending this is simple. He's not pretending he's going to lie next to me and feel nothing. He's telling me he wants what he wants and he's choosing to wait, and the restraint is a gift and a provocation, and the fact that it's both at once is the most Andy Broussard thing I've ever encountered.
