Page 67 of Dominion's Guard
"Okay."
He leads me down the hallway. His bedroom is his in every detail: the dark wood of the bed frame, the navy sheets, the case files he thinks I don't notice him relocating from the nightstand to the dresser.
He pulls a T-shirt from a drawer and holds it out, and when I take it, our fingers overlap on the fabric, and he lets the contact hold for a beat longer than the transfer requires. The look he gives me over the stretched cotton is unhurried and thorough: the one that says he is aware of exactly how much of me is about to be undressed on the other side of the bathroom door, and the awareness is costing him, and he's choosing to pay.
I change in the bathroom. The hospital scrub comes off and his T-shirt goes on, and the cotton is worn soft and smells like his detergent and his skin, and the hem falls to mid-thigh.
I stand there for a moment with my hands braced on the counter looking at a woman in his shirt who has stitches in her arm and no more defenses left that are worth maintaining.
When I come out, he's stripped down to a T-shirt and shorts, the badge and the holster and the notebook set on the dresser with the precision of someone who respects his tools. He's propped against the headboard, and the covers on my side are turned back, as though the bed has already decided what I'm still negotiating.
I cross the room and slide in beside him, and the sheets are cool against my bare legs and the mattress shifts under my weight, tilting me toward the heated center of him. He reaches over and turns off the lamp. The room drops into darkness softened by streetlight and the glow of a clock, and in the dark the awareness of his body next to mine sharpens until I can feel the heat radiating off his skin from inches away, can hear the slow draw of his breathing, can sense the exact position of his arm before it moves.
His arm settles around my shoulders. The weight of it draws me against his side, and there is nothing neutral about the contact. His fingers curl around my upper arm with a grip that is gentle in pressure and absolute in intent, a hold that saysherethe way he says everything: once, without repetition. I go because resistance would require energy I no longer possess and because going is what I want and because the distinction between those two reasons stopped mattering miles ago.
My cheek finds the space between his shoulder and his collarbone. Under the cotton, his heartbeat is slow and even, and the vibration of it travels through my skin and into the bone beneath. I am aware of every inch of him that is touching every inch of me: his thigh pressed against my knee, his ribs expanding under my forearm, his breath stirring my hair, the controlled pressure of his hand on my arm holding me the wayhe holds everything, with the focused restraint of someone who knows the difference between gentleness and softness and is choosing both at once.
This is the man who waited out every deflection I threw at him until I stopped performing and started asking, who made me say what I wanted in a voice that had nothing left to hide behind. That man is lying next to me in the dark with his hand on my arm and his heartbeat under my cheek and his mouth close enough to my hair that I can feel the heat of every exhale, and he is not moving.
The stillness is the loudest thing in the room. The want banked behind it pulses against my skin like a second heartbeat, and the restraint it takes to hold that still is a kind of power I have never encountered in anyone who has ever touched me.
"You're thinking very loudly," he says. His voice is low, roughened by exhaustion and the register he drops into when we're alone and the badge is off and the distance between us has narrowed past professional.
"I'm thinking that you're the most dangerous man I've ever met, and I'm falling asleep in your bed, and the fact that both of those things are true at the same time is either the bravest or the stupidest thing I've done. I broke into a cop's house once, so the bar for stupid is high."
His hand tightens once on my arm. "Go to sleep, Renata."
"Is that an order?"
"It's a strong suggestion from someone trying very hard to keep a promise."
The admission costs him. I hear it in the roughened edge of his voice, feel it in the tension that runs through the arm around me, the coiled restraint of a body that wants one thing and a word that requires another. He promised just sleep, and he meant it, and the effort of meaning it with me pressed againsthim in his shirt in his bed in the dark is making the tendons in his forearm stand taut against my skin.
I press my face into the curve of his neck. His pulse jumps under my lips, and the involuntary response sends a flicker of satisfaction through me that is entirely inappropriate for a woman who agreed to just sleep and entirely consistent with a woman who has been provoking this man and is not yet finished.
"Thank you," I say against his skin, and the words are small and sincere and carry no brat at all, and the honesty of them surprises us both.
His hand moves from my arm to my hair. His fingers push through it slowly, a rhythm that claims and soothes in equal measure, and my eyes close against the pulse in his neck, and my breathing slows, and the tension in my muscles releases in increments that feel like doors unlocking one by one.
I fall asleep between one breath and the next, with his arm around me and his fingers in my hair and the certainty that for the first time in as long as my memory reaches, I am not performing safety. I am not calculating the distance to the nearest exit or the vulnerability of the sleeping position or the probability of needing to run before morning. I am in the bed of someone who could have taken what he wanted tonight and chose to hold me instead, and his restraint is more terrifying than his hands ever were, and I am not running, and that is enough.
17
ANDY
The week after Patricia Moreau's arrest passes in the slow grind of paperwork, federal coordination, and the particular quiet of a precinct that knows one of its detectives is waiting for the axe to fall. I spend the days catching up on the caseload Fontenot carried while I was running a shadow investigation, writing supplementals, returning calls. The nights are worse. My house smells like cedar and nothing else, the second coffee mug is back in the cabinet, and the guest room door stays open on a room that holds the faint impression of a woman who folded the sheets before she left.
Renata went home to her apartment a few days after the debrief. She didn't ask me to drive her. She called a cab while I was in the shower, left my spare key on the kitchen counter beside a note that readyour dish towels are terrible, buy new ones,and was gone by the time I walked into the kitchen with wet hair and the wrong number of coffee mugs in my hands.
That was days ago. The IA review has been grinding through channels since the morning after the arrest, and Hebert's assistant called at eight to tell me the captain wants to see me at ten.
Hebert's office door is closed, which means the conversation has already been decided and the meeting is a formality.
I sit in the chair across from his desk and wait while he finishes reading from a file I recognize by the tab color as Internal Affairs. The reading glasses are on his nose instead of pushed up on his forehead, so he's been reviewing the material for a while and hasn't bothered to perform the casual removal that usually accompanies my visits. He's past staging body language for my benefit. He's delivering a verdict.
The office smells like the same burnt coffee that permeates the entire floor, stale and over brewed, the air of a room where a man has spent his morning reading about the professional failures of another man he respects enough to call in rather than send paperwork.
"Close the door behind you." He says it without looking up from the file.
