"The lock."
"Okay." She steps back. "Come in."
The apartment is small. One main room with a galley kitchen along the left wall, a couch facing the window, a bookshelf crammed with medical texts and paperbacks. Hallway to the bathroom and bedroom. Clean, warm. Smells like her shampoo, something clean with vanilla under it. A mug of tea on the counter, still steaming. Laptop open on the couch with what looks like patient charts.
"Coffee?" she asks.
"I'm here for the lock."
"So you've said. Twice." She moves to the kitchen. Fills the kettle. "I'm making you coffee because you look like you haven't eaten since Tuesday, and Mabel would kill me if she found out you were in my apartment and I didn't feed you."
My jaw works. She's right about the not eating part. The kitchen at my place has a coffeemaker, a case of protein bars, and enough canned soup to survive a siege. Cooking for one lost its appeal around year fifteen of military service.
The back door is off the kitchen. The lock is worse from the inside. I crouch, pull the toolkit open, start removing the stripped screws. Standard work. Hands busy. Focused.
Except she's right there. Four feet away, moving around her kitchen, pulling a mug from the cabinet, the stretch lifting her tank top enough to show a strip of skin above her waistband. Soft. Pale. The curve of her hip visible where the sweatpants dip.
"How'd you know the lock was bad?" she asks.
"Checked the building during my rounds."
"You do rounds on this building?"
"I do rounds on every Holloway property."
"Hank owns the building. You could've called him."
The screwdriver slips. I catch it, reset, keep working. "Hank's busy."
"Hank's always busy. That's not why you're here."
Silence. Because she's right, and lying to her feels wrong in a way I can't explain. Lying to assets, to targets, to commanding officers, that was part of the job for twenty years. Lying to Mira Cross in her apartment while she makes me coffee in bare feet and a tank top feels like a sin.
The new screws bite into fresh wood. I drill pilot holes, set the strike plate flush, test the deadbolt. It locks clean. Solid. Nobody's getting through that without serious hardware or a battering ram.
Standing up, I turn to tell her it's done.
She's right behind me. Close enough that if I exhale hard she'd feel it on her forehead. Close enough that I can see the freckles across the bridge of her nose that I've never been near enough to count. Her chin is tilted up because she has to look that far to meet my eyes, and her throat is bare, and her mouth is six inches from mine, and every operating procedure I've ever memorized evaporates.
"Lock's fixed," I say. My voice has dropped. Lower than command voice. Lower than anything I recognize as my own.
"Thank you."
She doesn't move back. Her eyes are on mine, and they're steady, and they're asking the question she asked in the field a week ago. The one she's been asking since she was eighteen. The one I've been refusing to answer since the day I realized that Ben Cross's little sister had grown into a woman who makes my hands shake.
The air in this kitchen is too warm. Her mouth is right there. Full. Soft. My hands are at my sides with the screwdriver still in one, and all it would take is one step, one forward motion, and I'd be kissing a woman I've wanted since before I had the courage to admit it.
Fourteen years.
She was sixteen when I noticed she'd stopped being a child. Not in a wanting way. In a oh Christ, this is going to be a problem way. The way she carried herself had changed. The way she walked into a room and owned the space. Sixteen. And I was thirty, and I was deploying in two weeks, and I sat in Ben's driveway after she went inside and gripped the steering wheel until my knuckles went white.
Twenty-two when she showed up at Hank's in that red dress during my leave. I left the bar twenty minutes after she walked in because if I'd stayed I would've done something unforgivable in front of her brother.
Twenty-eight when she called me from Denver at two in the morning because she'd lost a patient and needed a voice that didn't ask if she was okay. She just needed someone to breathe on the other end of the line. I stayed on for forty-five minutes. Neither of us said a word. Ben never knew about that call.
Thirty. Now. Here. Six inches away in a tank top with wet hair and bare feet and eyes that say I've been waiting for you to stop running, Reid, and I'm running out of ways to be patient about it.
My hand moves before my brain clears it. The screwdriver clatters on the counter. My palm cups the side of her face, and her skin is warm from the shower, and she inhales sharp through her nose, and her eyes close halfway.
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