Page 28 of Accidental Bodyguard Summer

“You’ll countersign it.” She yawns, enormous, mid-sentence, exactly the way she falls asleep during documentaries, and settles back down over my heart like she was surveyed for the spot, one hand flattening over the scar on my ribs like she’s keeping a thumb in a book. “You countersign... everything...”

Gone. Mid-word, mid-victory. Her breath goes long and even against my skin, the rain eases toward a hush, and I lie there in a bed I’ve cleared every night and never once slept in, holding the loudest, brightest, best thing that has ever happened to me, listening to the quiet after. The fern on the sill drips somewhereunder the window’s rhythm. The whiteboard glows faintly down the hall, four colors of a season, one column of me.

Rain’s fine, I told her. It’s the quiet after I don’t like.

Turns out it was a supply problem. The quiet after just needed her in it.

I’m not falling. That word’s for people partway down. I’m at the bottom of the ocean, and the light down here is better than anything on the surface, and I’m not coming up.

Chapter 11

Abby

Iwake up at the bottom of the ocean, which is to say: pinned under two hundred pounds of sleeping bodyguard arm, in full sunlight, deliriously happy.

The storm’s gone. The window’s all blue sky and glitter, the fern on the sill looks smug, and Noah Vance is asleep in my bed. Actually asleep, not the tactical nap of a man listening through his eyelids, but heavy, unarmored, dead-to-the-world asleep, one arm slung across me like a boom gate, his face mashed into my second pillow. Awake, he’s all right angles and watchfulness. Asleep he looks about nineteen, and something about it makes my chest hurt in the best way.

“Okay, Abby,” I whisper to the ceiling. “Be normal about this.”

I am not going to be normal about this.

I conduct a careful, extremely scientific review of the previous night’s findings while the sun climbs the wall. Finding one: the man kisses like it’s a load-bearing activity. Finding two: I said things out loud that Priya will never fully extract from me, though she’ll die trying. Finding three: at some point near dawn, half asleep, he pulled me back against his chest and mumbledsomething into my hair that sounded a lot likestay put, Doc, and I have never in my life been so happy to receive an order.

His breathing changes. The arm tightens a quarter inch—verification, even asleep—and then his eyes open, and I watch the system boot: ceiling, window, room, me. Me. The last check lands and holds, and his whole face does the thing, the thaw, the one I’ve been chasing all summer, except now it doesn’t stop at almost.

Noah Vance smiles at me. First-light, unguarded, catastrophically good. Somewhere a grant committee is never getting this in a report, and it’s still the finding of my career.

“Morning,” he says, voice full of gravel.

“NOAH FACTS,” I say. “Item eight. You smile like it’s Tuesday now. What happened to the lighthouse rationing schedule?”

“Budget changed.” He pulls me in and kisses me before I can convert that into feelings out loud, which is efficient, because I was going to make it weird. His hand splays warm across my spine like he’s holding a compass steady. “Nest check’s at low tide,” he murmurs into my hair. “Which gives us until ten hundred.”

“To do what?”

He tells me. In words. Multiple full sentences of shocking specificity, delivered flat and quiet against my ear like a weather advisory.

Item nine: not actually monosyllabic. Catastrophically otherwise. The man has been hoarding fluency like everything else, and I am now the sole licensed importer.

We’re late for the nest check. The turtles, per usual, do not notice. Delgado notices. Delgado notices so hard he pulls a shoulder muscle not saying anything.

We are also, it turns out, terrible at being subtle, and the town takes roughly eleven hours to process the intelligence.

It starts with Mrs. Pruitt, who takes one look at the two of us collecting the paper—I’m wearing his shirt, which in my defense was the nearest garment, and he has his hand at the small of my back like it grew there—and says nothing. Saysnothing. Mrs. Pruitt. She just waters her tomatoes with the smuggest arc of hose in horticultural history, and by noon there’s a pie on our porch rail with a note that says “About time.—E.P.” and a smaller note underneath it, in the same hand, that says “The pie is for him. Make your own, you’re family.”

I cry a little on the porch about the second note. Noah pretends to check the tree line while I do, which is his way of holding my purse.

“We should probably have a story,” I say at breakfast, mopping up egg yolk. “For town. Something dignified. A timeline that doesn’t involve federal custody.”

“They watched the whole thing happen in real time, Doc. Marnie has apool.”

“The pool was about whether. Nobody has details.” I point my fork at him. “I’m just saying, when Gus asks—and Gus is going to ask, he asks like a cross-examination, it’s the Coast Guard Auxiliary training—the official statement is that we’re ’seeing each other,’ which is mature and vague.”

Gus asks at 2:15 that afternoon. What I actually say, under the mild pressure of his eyebrows, is “I love him and he built me a laminated radio protocol card,” and Gus nods like a man who has just won twenty dollars, because he has, and the official statement is dead by 2:16, survived by no one.

Here’s what changes, and here’s what doesn’t.

The protocols stay. Same lock order, same varied routes, same beacon in my field bag, same Noah walking the tide line before I’m allowed on the sand. He’s not lighter about the threat—if anything he’s tighter, because now everybody at Sunbreak Harbor Security knows exactly what this detail costs him, including, since this morning’s shift-change look between him and Delgado, Delgado.