Page 60 of Take the Fall
“I’ve worked a lot of these.”
“That’s not the same as believing it.” But he let it go, the way he kept letting it go, because he’d decided to trust me and trust meant he stopped pulling when I asked him to without my having to ask. He turned and poured the water. “Sit down before you tip over. I’m making you something with protein in it and you’re going to eat it and not fight me. I’m keeping a chart now.”
“You keep saying that. There’s no chart.”
“There’s a chart. It’s in my head. It’s very damning.” He set a mug down in front of me, then stood behind my chair and put his hands on my shoulders, light, careful of the marks, and bent and kissed the top of my head, and then the side of my neck, slow, where it wasn’t bruised. “You scared me,” he said, low, against my skin. “I’m not going to keep saying it. But you did. And I get to be a little ridiculous about feeding you for a few days. That’s the deal.”
“That’s the deal,” I said.
His mouth moved along the line of my throat, unhurried now, and his hands slid down off my shoulders and over my chest, careful, learning the parts of me that didn’t hurt, and the morning tilted, the way it does, out of comfort and into something warmer. I turned my head and found his mouth with mine, and he made a low sound into it, and the mug sat steaming and forgotten on the table.
“You’re meant to be resting,” he murmured against my lips, not stopping, his hand flat and warm low on my stomach.
“This is restful. I’m sitting down.”
“You’re a liar.” But he was smiling into the kiss, and his fingers had found the waist of the borrowed sweatpants, and the whole tender careful sweetness of the last hour was turning into something with a pulse in it. “We can’t. Your ribs.”
“My ribs have opinions. I’m overruling them.” I caught his wrist, turned in the chair enough to pull him round and down toward me, careful, both of us careful and neither of us stopping. “Come back to bed. We’ll be slow. I’m extremely good at slow, I’ll have you know, I’ve been told.”
“You’ve been told.” He laughed, breathless, letting me draw him in, his knee coming up onto the chair, his hands in my hair. “By whom. I’ll need names. For the chart.”
“Come to bed and I’ll tell you my whole sordid history.”
“That’s the most romantic thing you’ve ever”
My phone rang.
It was face-up on the counter, and it lit and buzzed and turned itself into the loudest object in the room, and I knew the weight of it before I saw the screen, the same way I’d known in the laneway which sound the boots were going to make.
He stilled against me. I felt him feel me go still under him.
The screen saidInspector Murphy.
For one second I didn’t move. His hands were still in my hair and his mouth was an inch from mine and the kettle was cooling and the whole good morning was sitting in the room with us, and the phone buzzed a second time, steady and insistent, and I watched the cost of the next hour walk in the door without knocking.
“You should get that,” Ryan said quietly. He’d already pulled back an inch, reading my face, reading the change in it, the detective coming up under the lover the way it always did. “It’s early for Murphy.”
“Yeah,” I said.
I reached past him and picked it up.
“Hawley.”
“It’s moving.” Murphy didn’t waste a hello when the ground had shifted. He just started, fast and flat, the register he kept for the days a thing came loose. “There’s a window and it isn’t wide. I need you here.”
Ryan had stepped back to give me the call, but not far, and I felt his attention go to a point on me, the warmth of a minute ago gone, the cop rising in him the way it rose in me too, trained, automatic, impossible to switch off.
“How long’s the window,” I said. Level. Nothing in it.
“Hours. We plan it now and we.” A beat. “I know what the doctor told you. I wouldn’t pull you off the couch if it could keep.”
“It can’t keep.”
“No.”
“Half an hour,” I said, and hung up, and stood in a cooling kitchen with the man I loved watching me put my face back together.
He didn’t say anything for a moment. He just looked at me, the question already loaded behind his eyes, the timing of it laid out in his head the way he laid everything out. Early. Urgent. A window. A man getting up off doctor’s orders to go and stand in a room he wasn’t being told about.
