Page 133 of Nash
Her eyes fill. She blinks it back. "What do I do?"
"You open the shop at noon. Sit at your station with the earpiece Knox gives you. Watch the street. If you see the white pickup, you say 'truck' and nothing else. Knox handles the rest."
"Truck. One word."
"One word."
"I can do one word." She picks up her coffee. Her hands are steady. "I'll probably think seven hundred words while I'm saying the one word, but the one word is the one that will come out."
"That's all I need."
"Nash." She sets the mug down. Her finger traces the rim. "Last night. At the clubhouse. You said our room."
"I did."
"And I said our bed." She's still tracing the rim, and her eyes are on the mug. "Then we moved on because East was being renamed, there was rosemary chicken, and sex on a desk, so we never actually talked about it."
"We're talking about it now."
"Are we?" She looks up. "Because I need to know if that was a thing you said in the moment or a thing you meant. I can handle either answer, but I must know which one it is before today happens. Because today is already a lot and I can't carry today while also carrying the question of whether you actually want to live with me or if you were just defending the aesthetic integrity of our wall decor."
Her voice is light. Her hands aren't. I reach across the table. Take her hand. Pull it away from the mug.
"I want to live with you."
"In this apartment?"
"This apartment works for now. My place is a studio with a bed and a coffeemaker. There's nowhere to put a spice rack, which means there's nothing for you to reorganize."
Her mouth twitches.
"We can find something together," I say. "When this is done. Something with enough room for your sketchbooks, my gear, and whatever chaos you bring into a space just by existing in it."
"I bring organizational chaos. It's a specific genre of chaos. It looks like a mess, but everything is exactly where I put it."
"I know."
"You want to live with me." She says it flatly. Testing the weight of it.
"I want to come home to you. I've been coming home to you for weeks. The address is a detail." I pull her hand across the table and press my mouth to her knuckles. "My girl lives here. I live where my girl lives."
Her eyes fill. She blinks hard. Squeezes my hand.
"Okay." She takes a breath. "What happens after today?"
"I was thinking we celebrate." I hold her gaze. "Maybe another trip to Vesper."
The blush starts at her neck and climbs. Her teeth catch her bottom lip. "Vesper."
"If you want."
"If I WANT. Nash. Nashville. The man asks me if I want to go to the sex club where he made me come three times and introduced me to things I didn't know I needed. If I want." She picks up her coffee with her free hand. "Yes. I want. Aggressively and with my entire body. I especially want to revisit the posterior exploration department because I have been thinking about that more than is probably healthy, and I have questions but also requests."
I laugh. It's six in the morning, the operation six hours away, and this woman has me laughing at the kitchen table.
"Fuck, I love you."
"See? The posterior exploration department gets results. The answer to that question will always be yes, and the fact that you asked it with a straight face is part of why I love you."
