Page 5 of The Jackal

By midafternoon, I'd gotten half a cup of food into Max and reached the absolute end of what I had to give, which is the part of this job no one warns you about. You can't pour from a dry well, and the wells dry.

I left him with a frozen marrow bone and the radio playing low—he settled better with a human voice in the room, even a stranger's, even a man on a country station selling trucks. I went out to the round pen to run a younger dog through scent work, because I needed an hour of a problem that had a clean answer.

That was where Dani found me. Dani was twenty-six, built like a gymnast, ran our intake and our social media and had the kind of confidence I'd have killed for at her age and was a little afraid of now. She leaned on the rail and watched me work the young shepherd.

"You look like hell," she said warmly.

"Thank you. I sat with Max."

"You're going to fall in love with that dog and it's going to wreck you."

"I'm a professional."

She laughed. "How long has it been, Maggie, real talk?”

"Since what?”

"Since you let an actual human being touch you."

And there it was, dropped into the middle of a normal day like she was asking about the weather. The young shepherd found his target and sat, pleased with himself. I clicked and tossed him his ball and took my time about answering, because the honest answer was embarrassing and the dishonest one was more so.

The truth was that I had a body that still very much wanted things, and a life that had quietly stopped offering them.

It wasn't that I'd given up. I'd downloaded the apps like a responsible adult. I'd sat across a high-top from a perfectly nice account manager named Brett who'd talked about his macros for forty minutes. I'd gone home and lain in the dark with my own hand and a clearer imagination and thought, with no small amount of grief, that this was probably it now—that the wanting would go on, banked low and constant under everything, and the having would just become a thing other people did. I missed it more than I let myself look at. The weight of a man. A mouth at my throat. Being wanted out loud by someone who wasn't in a hurry to be somewhere else.

"It's been a while," I said.

"How long is a while?”

"Dani."

"That long?" She whistled. "Okay. We're fixing that."

"We are absolutely not."

But the conversation had already done the thing those conversations do, which is pull the cork on something I kept corked on purpose. Because the trouble was, when I let myself think about being wanted, I didn't think about Brett and his macros. I thought about a man I'd known in Virginia Beach. I always did. He was the watermark under every blank page I tried to start.

I'd met him through the work, on the edges of the same military world—a quiet man in a community of loud ones, which was its own kind of loud.

I'd flirted with him the way I don't flirt with anyone, openly, stupidly, with my whole chest, because something about him had reached into me and turned a key I hadn't known was there.

He was beautiful in a way that had nothing to do with being pretty.

He had a stillness to him that made the air around him feel charged, like the half-second before weather breaks, and God, help me, I'd wanted to be the thing that broke it. I'd wanted his hands on me with an intensity that had, frankly, alarmed me. I'd made it about as obvious as a woman can make a thing without taking out an ad.

And he'd looked at me—he'd looked, I hadn't imagined that part, I'd caught it more than once, a heat in him pulled back fast behind a door—and then, he'd stepped away. Every time. Polite. Unreachable. A wall with good manners.

I'd told myself it was the work, that men like him filed women under distractions and distractions under threats, that he'd chosen the mission the way men in my life always chose the mission, and that I was a grown woman who knew better than to keep her hand on a stove.

It hadn't helped. Knowing better never does. I'd left Virginia Beach with him still in me like a splinter under skin, too deep to dig out, sealed over but felt.

"You went somewhere," Dani said.

"I'm right here." I called the shepherd in and ran my hands down his sides and didn't look up. "Just tired."

She let me have the lie, which is the nicest thing she does.

I drove home in the gold light with the windows down and the marsh going past, all that silver water and bright green grass that had no idea anything in the world was wrong.