Page 38 of Accidental Bodyguard Summer

“I love you. That was supposed to be in the speech and I cut it, because I’m?—”

“An idiot. We covered it.” I’m crying a little, smiling so hard it hurts, both of us still holding on like the tide’s running. “I love you too. Now show me around this terrible apartment. Specifically the part with the bed. I’ve never seen where you live, and I intend to improve it.”

The bedroom is more beige, more nothing—bed made to a military standard I plan to personally degrade, one nightstand, one lamp, blinds at a uniform half-mast like the room is in mourning for itself.

And then, while he’s kissing my neck and walking me backward, my eye catches the nightstand drawer, not quite shut, and the corner of something purple.

“Noah.”

“Mm.” His mouth doesn’t leave my neck. Multitasking. Growth.

“What’s in the drawer?”

He goes still against me. Not wall-still. Caught-still. And he doesn’t say a word—that’s the thing I’ll remember, he doesn’t defend the position at all. He just reaches past me and pulls it open and lets me see.

Sticky notes. All of them. The smug fish.You’re not a bad person, flat and uncreased, riding on top like it outrankseverything. Thehydrate, gentlemenone from the fence post—“Delgado traded it to me,” he says, roughly, “don’t ask what it cost”—and ones I forgot writing, grocery lists with jokes in the margins, the tide chart reminder off my own doorframe, a purplegood luck at the debrief!!I stuck to his truck window three days ago, which means he peeled it off and kept it even while he was drafting his goodbye speech, the enormous beautifulhypocrite.

Two years in a beige terminal, and the only thing in this whole apartment the man ever curated is a drawer of my handwriting.

“When you were drafting the goodbye speech,” I say slowly, working it out, “the drawer was right here. You were writing me off in the same room as the evidence.”

“Where do you think the drafts kept failing,” he says.

“So this is where they live,” I say. My voice comes out wrecked. “I keep the notes in a drawer too. The ones I didn’t have the nerve to leave out. There’s a whole—you’re going to need a bigger drawer.”

“Abby.” His mouth is at my ear, and his hands have found the hem of my shirt, and everything about him has gone warm and sure. “Stop talking about storage.”

“Make me,” I say, delighted, because there is no sentence in our whole shared history he’s better qualified to answer, and he does.

The second time is nothing like the first time, and that’s its own discovery.

The first time was the storm: intense and reverent and half-drowned, both of us handling each other like evidence. This is Saturday morning cartoons. This is the two of us laughing beforewe’re even properly started, because my shirt gets stuck on my earring and he has to perform a tactical extraction, and then he discovers what the shirt actually is—I’M KIND OF A BIG DEAL IN THE MARINE BIOLOGY COMMUNITY, faded teal, the original—and goes still.

“You wore the first-day shirt.”

“I dressed for victory, Noah. I told you there were sections and a callback.”

He laughs into my collarbone, and then we’re both down to skin and grinning like fools, and then the grinning banks into something lower and hotter, and his hands slow way, way down.

He lays me down on his regulation bed and takes the scenic route. He’s learned me now, that’s the difference, he’s got the whole chart memorized and he navigates it easy, unhurried, mouth mapping down my throat, my breasts, the soft of my stomach, unhurried even when I start making sounds that would concern the dispatcher across the hall, his thumbs tracing slow blasphemy up the inside of my thighs while he tells me—tells me, in the low operational murmur, the one he used to waste on lock orders—exactly what he spent four idiot days almost giving up. By the time his mouth gets where I need it I’m already halfway gone, and he takes me the rest of the way like a man with a long weekend and a grudge against my composure, patient, relentless, reading every gasp like sonar, and when I break I breakloudly, both hands fisted in the bedding, his name ricocheting off the beige.

I’m still shaking when he kisses his way back up and surfaces to look at me, smug as Carl with a stolen bait shrimp.

“You’regloating,” I accuse, breathless.

“Building the file.”

“Oh my God, getup here?—”

He gets up here. There’s a brief professional intermission involving his wallet, during which I lie there admiring thelogistics—“you restocked,” I observe, and he says, “hope isn’t a plan, but it does shop,” which is the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me with a nightstand open—and then he’s above me, braced on those dock-building forearms Priya entered into evidence back in June, and everything goes quiet and sure.

When he slides into me this time there’s no held breath, no bracing—just this long mutual exhale, like two people setting down something heavy they’d been carrying in relays. He starts to move and I move with him and it’s easy, it’splay, it’s the two of us grinning at each other like idiots in the lamp light. I get a hand free and catalog him right back for once—the scar chart, the jump of muscle when my nails cross his ribs, the sound he makes when I roll my hips on the downstroke, filed, dated, mine—and he retaliates with the angle change that whites me out, and I retaliate for the retaliation, and it stops being a rescue or a reunion or anything with a mission profile at all. It’s just us. Loud and easy and home.

“Ask me,” I gasp, at one particularly excellent moment, “ask me if I’m—emotionally available?—”

“Don’t you dare finish the barista’s joke while I’m?—”

“Lot of light—” his hand does something criminal, and I claw back just enough syllables to land it, because I am a professional—“short intervals?—”