Total pages in book: 82
Estimated words: 78334 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 392(@200wpm)___ 313(@250wpm)___ 261(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 78334 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 392(@200wpm)___ 313(@250wpm)___ 261(@300wpm)
I ignore the compliment as she’s said it to me more than once over the years. I push off the counter and move toward the table, pulling out the chair beside her and sitting, close enough that my knee finds hers underneath.
“How much longer?” I ask, nodding at the laptop.
“The article?” She glances at the screen. “Tonight maybe. Tomorrow morning at the latest.” She pauses. “And then I wait for Simon, and then I wait for legal, and then I wait for print,” Tessa says with the impatient resignation of someone who has made peace with the last mile of a long road, then blows out a long breath. “I’m just ready to be done with it.”
“It’s almost over,” I say.
“You keep saying that.”
“Because it keeps being true.” I reach over and close her laptop gently. “Tessa. Look at what you’ve built. Financial trails, the SAPG connection, Vega tied to the breach, Pelham and DelRey linked through blood as well as business and damning emails.” I rest my forearm on the table, angling toward her. “When this publishes, there’s nowhere for them to go. The FBI investigation starts the same day. The public pressure and the legal pressure hit simultaneously. It’s over.”
She looks at me steadily. “You sound very certain.”
“I am certain.”
“About the case,” she says. And then, more carefully. “What about after?”
The question settles between us without urgency. There’s no demand or ultimatum in her tone but a weighted curiosity. It feels like she’s been turning it over for days, but then again… I’ve been doing the same. Tessa and I never had a problem with was communicating our fears and desires.
I don’t look away from her. “What about us, you mean?”
“We haven’t talked about it,” she says with a soft smile. “We’ve been—” She gestures between us. “Whatever this is, and it’s been good. Really good. But I have a job that is always going to involve some level of danger, and you have a job that is always going to involve some level of danger, and neither of us has said anything about what happens when this particular danger is over.”
“What do you want to happen?” I ask, a bit of a cowardly way out of laying out my feelings first.
She considers that for a moment with the same careful honesty she brings to everything. “I feel like I have you again, and now I don’t want to lose you,” she says simply. “I spent five years being very disciplined about not wanting that, and I’m tired of the discipline.”
I feel a shift in my chest, slow and certain, like the vessel that’s been holding the tension finally snaps open. “I think we’re both in alignment on that, but I can’t pretend that the same fears aren’t there for me. If anything, they’re more brutal because we’re in the thick of it. My worst nightmare coming true.”
She looks at me for a long moment. “I’m not sure I ever really understood—and maybe I still don’t—how that translates into fear for you. You’re always so confident.”
“Not when it comes to losing you,” I say with a half laugh. “I know I dressed up all my objections to your career as concern and principle and reasonable disagreement, but it was just fear. Plain and ordinary.” I reach over and take her hand off the table, holding it the way I’ve been doing in the car, simple and deliberate. “I’m still afraid and that clearly hasn’t gone away.”
She turns her hand in mine, squeezing once. “But maybe fear is a reason to hold on tighter, not a reason to let go. Have you ever considered you might have it backward?”
“Yeah, I’ve considered it and it’s still a war going on inside me, Tess. Not sure I’ve got any real clarity and it’s hard… with all this going on. You’ve got a legitimate target on your back, and it doesn’t get any more real than what we’re facing now. So I’m not sure I can even comprehend what our future looks like together. I’m just trying to look at this day, and this day alone, making sure you stay alive.”
She nods in understanding, giving my hand another squeeze.
Then she stands, still holding my hand, and tugs. “Come on,” she says.
I let her pull me up and lead me to my bedroom. She’s unhurried tonight… I’d even call it settled and solid. At the bedside table, she lifts the pen from behind her ear, setting it down and unclipping her hair. It falls loose in a glorious crimson veil. She reaches for the hem of her shirt at the same time I do, our hands colliding, and she laughs softly.
“I’ve got it,” she says.
“I know,” I say, and let her.
She pulls it over her head and drops it, and I don’t move as I drink my fill, taking in her perfection, this woman I have been trying not to want since the second she called my name and asked for help. She lifts her chin, comfortable being seen in a way that some people never are.