Page 71 of Second Alarm
"Okay."
"I need you to know that."
"Okay."
"I'm going to think about Cal tomorrow. Tonight — " I stop, because I've saidtonightand it's seven forty-seven in the morning, and I have to laugh at myself a little, which I do. "This morning. I'm not thinking about Cal this morning. I'm here to not think about Cal this morning."
"Hanna — "
"I'm not agreeing to anything. I'm not making any deals. I drove here and I parked and I came up the stairs, and I knocked, and that's the extent of the plan."
"Okay."
"Stop saying okay."
"Okay."
I cover my face with both hands and laugh into them — not a funny laugh, the laugh of a woman who's taken a left turn off every cliff available and finally landed somewhere soft.
He steps closer. Not all the way. Halfway.
"Look at me."
I look at him.
His eyes are the same eyes I've been avoiding for weeks and ten years and the rest of my life combined, and in the thin morning light of his hallway they're the specific gray-brown of wet bark. Nothing defensive in them. And with the clarity that only comes from not sleeping, I understand: the thing I've been afraid of isn't Cal finding out.
The thing I've been afraid of is this.
Looking at Ty Brennan and having him look back without any of the walls I've spent my adulthood building.
"Can I — " I say, and I don't finish, because his mouth is on mine before I do, the way the match isn't on the paper until it is.
It isn't the kitchen hallway. It isn't the linen closet. It's his bedroom, two rooms away, a bed made properly because he's a man who makes his bed. His sheets are soft. He has a lamp on. He doesn't turn the lamp off, and that's the first thing I notice — that the lamp stays on, that I'm looking at him and he's looking at me, that there's nowhere to hide. My academy-brain and my Portland-brain and the weeks in-Copper-Ridge-brain all reach for the joke, and the joke doesn't come, and instead I hear myself say, very quietly:
"You have to understand that I've thought about this for ten years."
"I know."
"Not — not like a perv. I mean — " Already reaching for the deflection.
"Hanna."
"Yes?"
"I know."
His hands know my ribs the way mine know his jaw. I'm nineteen again and twenty-nine now, both things are true at the same time, which is something I didn't know could happen in a body. He remembers. He's remembered — the small stupid things, the spot under my ear, the inside of my elbow, the line of my shoulder — and he's added new ones, because I'm not nineteen-year-old me and he isn't twenty-three-year-old him. The softness at his waist I don't remember. The small silver scar on his left hip is new. My own new things are a mile-long list I don't have time to be self-conscious about because he'scataloguing them like they aren't new, like they're simply the current map of me.
"I don't want to deflect."
"Then don't." He says it into my collarbone.
"I don't know how to not."
"You're doing fine."
I'm not doing fine. I'm doing the opposite of fine. I'm doing something I haven't done in my adult life, which is let a man look at me and have opinions about what he sees. Ty has opinions. His opinions are visible and specifically favorable. He doesn't say them the cluttered way men said things in my Portland bedrooms. He says them with his mouth on my collarbone, his hand on my hipbone, in the specific quiet way he says everything — flat and true and without rhetoric.
