Page 72 of Travis
I changed, dove in, and started swimming.
The water was the same temperature it always was. My stroke was the same stroke. The length of the pool hadn't changed, the light from the underwater fixtures hit the surface at the same angle, and the echo of my breathing off the concrete walls sounded exactly the way it always sounded.
But the reset didn't catch.
I swam four laps. Eight. Twelve. Waited for the point where my mind went blank and my body took over and the noise behind my thoughts faded into the rhythm of the water. That point had never failed me. Not after the worst missions, not after the nights I'd stitched myself up over the sink, not after the mornings I'd stood in the shower and counted the new scars and wondered how many more I could accumulate before the math stopped working.
Tonight the point didn't come. Because the thing I was trying to reset from wasn't pain or overstimulation or the post-mission wreckage my system knew how to process. It was contentment, and contentment didn't respond to cold water and controlled breathing.
I stopped at the wall after twenty laps and hung there with my arms on the edge and my forehead against the tile. The silence in the pool corridor was supposed to be the good silence. The productive silence that let me think clearly and plan precisely and keep every variable in its proper column.
Instead, the silence gave me Sera. Her smooth skin under my hands. The sound she'd made against my neck. Her full breasts pressing against my chest. The taste of her on my tongue. The way she'd looked at me afterward with something on her face I didn't deserve and couldn't return and wanted so badly it made my chest ache.
I got out. Dried off. Didn't go back to the kitchen. Didn't go back to the bedroom. Went downstairs to the control room because that was where my hands had somewhere to go, and right now my hands needed somewhere to go before the rest of me followed them back to the woman sleeping in my bed.
The screens were cycling their standard overnight feeds. Kindt's communication channels, the regional monitoring arrays Maude maintained, satellite data on known corridor routes. I sat in my chair and let my eyes move across the data the way they moved across it every morning, scanning without directing, letting the patterns surface on their own.
It wasn’t very exciting but anywhere was better to place my attention than with the woman upstairs.
The feeds scrolled, and I let them. Routine chatter. Scheduling noise. Nothing that required me. Nothing to stop this noise inside my head.
I wanted to hit something. The heavy bag was waiting in the gym fairly screaming at me to come get it, the need to put my fists into something solid until the calm cracked open and something I recognized bled through.
But it wouldn’t be enough.
So I sat at the screens and pretended to work. Pretended I wasn’t completely coming apart. Pretended I couldn’t feel myself being pulled back toward that bedroom more with each passing second.
I couldn’t go back there.
I couldn’t think of the weight of her against me. The way she'd pulled me back to her mouth when I'd tried to slow down. The sound of my name in her throat.
I started scanning the overnight feeds more aggressively. Anything to try to keep my mind occupied.
I didn’t deserve her. I would never deserve her.
I couldn’t stay here. I had to get out.
My eyes stopped randomly sweeping the screens and became more definitive in their search.
I had to get out.
I could feel the shift happening, the operational part of my brain shouldering forward, hungry for something to lock onto in the screens. Anything. Any reason to leave this compound and drive into the dark and feel the hives come and the tremors start and the punishment land the way it was supposed to land.
Then I found it.
A courier handoff flagged in a communication. A supply transfer between two of Kindt's logistics nodes, scheduled for early morning. Not a transport. No victims in the vehicle. Just product and cash moving between waypoints on a route I recognized.
The handoff was happening at dawn. A stretch of highway I'd driven before, timing that was tight but workable if I left now.
Any other morning, I would have flagged it and waited. Run it through Sera's model. Let her pull the route apart and build the intercept plan the way she'd built the last one. The smart play. The play that had a hundred percent success rate.
Hitting something like this wasn’t what I did. No kids were involved so the risk wasn’t worth the reward.
Fuck that. I didn’t deserve any sort of reward. I didn’t deserve rest with no hives or tremors. And I definitely didn’t fucking deserve the woman sleeping upstairs.
I was going.
"It's four forty-seven in the morning," Maude said.
