Page 59 of Crowe
He smiled, and it was the slow one, the real one. “That’s not entirely why I’m thanking you.”
I held his gaze for a moment. Then I pulled the curtain open and stepped out into the store and went back to the bench and tried to appear like a man who’d simply been waiting, not a man who’d snuck into the dressing room to steal a kiss.
Diane came back around the corner just as Noah stepped out of the dressing room back in his street clothes. She looked between us with the serene expression of a woman who’d seen everything in forty years of running fitting rooms and had made peace with all of it.
“We’ll take the charcoal,” I said.
“Excellent choice,” she said simply and walked away.
“I’ll pay for the suit,” I said.
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I’ll just write it off as an expense for the mission. Don’t worry, Wolfe can afford it.”
I knew he wanted to argue with me, but I also knew that right now, he wasn’t working and there was no way I was letting him dip into any savings he had to pay for this suit when I was standing right here beside him.
He thought about it for a minute, but then he finally nodded and let me pay.
We walked back toward the parking garage in the afternoon light, Noah with the garment bag over one arm and his shoulder close to mine. Old downtown was quiet for a Wednesday with just a few people on the sidewalk, a delivery truck pulling out of an alley, and someone’s music drifting from an open window above us.
“I need one more thing,” he said.
“Anything.”
“I didn’t even tell you what, Jackson.”
What this boy didn’t seem to realize was that it didn’t matter what it was. If he wanted or needed it, I would make sure he had it.
“Okay, what is it that you need?” I asked, humoring him.
“Shoes.”
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go buy some shoes.”
He gave me an amused little smile, and we kept walking, his shoulder warm against mine in the afternoon sun, and I thought that if this was what ordinary felt like, I’d been missing it for a very long time.
Chapter nineteen
Noah
I was reading on the couch when Jackson came in. He didn’t have any groups out at the camp this week, but he still went out there most days. He said it was to do general maintenance, but I thought it probably had as much to do with walking the trails and getting out of this building as anything else. I’d gone with him a couple times, but I’d slept in today.
He gave me a kiss and then set his coffee on the counter before looking at me like he was about to say something he’d been thinking about for a while but wasn’t sure what I would think about it.
“What?”
He crossed to the armchair across from the couch and sat down, which meant it was a conversation rather than a stop on the way somewhere else. “I want to take you down to the gym this afternoon.”
I lowered my book. “The gym.”
“Second floor. We’ve got a training space down there.” He turned his coffee mug slowly in his hands. “I want to work through some basic self-defense with you. The Gala is this weekend, and I know you won’t be able to learn much in a day, but I’ll feel better if you at least know a few moves.”
I looked at him. He looked back, patient, waiting for whatever my reaction was going to be, but the thing was, it wasn’t a bad idea. It was a genuinely good idea. We didn’t know what was going to happen at the Gala, if anything, but Gator had said his gut told him Anton Corvane was planning something, and Hawk said they never ignored Gator’s gut. I’d never had any self-defense training. I’d thought about it after I got to Houston, but never actually did it, and it was probably time I did.
“Okay,” I said. “I trust you and the guys to keep me safe, but I think that’s a really good idea. Maybe after all this is over, you can teach me more than the basics. You know, just to be on the safe side.”
This was the first time either of us had made actual plans for what would happen after. We’d been living in this kind of limbo where we couldn’t make any decisions about the future until thiswas resolved, but I wanted there to be a future for us in the worst possible way.
