Page 72 of Second Alarm
"You're — " he starts.
"Don't."
"Hanna."
"If you say something too nice I'll cry, and I don't cry during sex. I have rules."
"You have rules about this?"
"I have rules about everything, Ty, which you're aware of."
"Okay."
"Okay."
He doesn't say it.
He also doesn't stop looking at me.
I let him.
Somewhere between the lamp and the ceiling I stop tracking the jokes. I stop tracking my face. I stop tracking whether my left knee is doing a stupid thing. I stop tracking whether I'm being romantic or practical or desperate or the woman who hasn'tlet another human being see her without a mask since she was fifteen and her father's captain came to the door.
He says my name once.
Just once.
The way he said it across a booth in Peak Grounds, on a Wednesday morning, when I couldn't find the joke.
Hanna.
I say his.
I don't remember the last time I said his full name without ironic weight — theTywith its armor attached. I say it now with the armor off. It comes out stupid. It comes out breathless. He hears it. He doesn't comment on it. His hand at my jaw makes the comment for him.
There's a moment. I can't describe it. I've been describing everything for twenty-nine years and this particular moment doesn't describe. It's a moment where the distance I've built on purpose — the six blocks between my mother's house and the Watershed, the nine hundred miles between Copper Ridge and Portland, the ten years between twenty-three and thirty-three — collapses the way buildings collapse in trainings at the academy, all at once, from the inside.
I cry.
I cry, which is against all of my rules, and Ty doesn't say anything about it, only keeps his hand at the back of my head and says, one more time,Hanna,and I cry harder, because he doesn't ask me what's wrong. Nothing is wrong. The thing that's happening isn't the thing being wrong — it's the thing being, for a second, exactly what I was afraid it would be, which was more than I could hold.
Afterword.
The lamp is still on. His ceiling has a small water stain in the corner shaped vaguely like a duck. The Le Carré is on his nightstand, face down and spine cracked. There's a bottle ofwater on the floor. He's lying on his back next to me with his hand on my stomach, and my face is wet.
"I'm sorry about that."
"Don't."
"It was a thing. I don't usually — "
"Hanna. Stop apologizing."
"Okay."
We breathe for a while.
"I didn't deflect once."
