Total pages in book: 39
Estimated words: 35507 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 178(@200wpm)___ 142(@250wpm)___ 118(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 35507 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 178(@200wpm)___ 142(@250wpm)___ 118(@300wpm)
I sit beside her. The screen fills with a raw file, loading dock at night, sodium light, crates, a clipboard hanging off a pallet jack. She pinches in. There. A B and an H in a slashed, impatient hand I used to find on lunch notes when I was seven.
My throat goes tight. I don't give that to the room.
"That's him," I say.
"That's him on their dock before he vanished. Which means he wasn't only running from Helix. He was in it long enough to sign their paper."
"Or he was inside long enough to steal it."
She turns her face toward me. We're too close for an office with a hall camera on the other side of a thin door. Her knee presses mine. The air between us goes tight and blistering, and I let myself look at her mouth for one stupid second.
"Colt."
"If I start that again I won't stop, and I need to be able to hear a door."
"I'm not asking you for a kiss, but I don’t know… just don’t make it weird."
"It’s not weird." The words come out raw. "It was a choice I don't regret and can't afford to finish tonight."
Pink hits her cheeks. She holds my stare anyway, emerald and stubborn. "Then we’ll finish it soon."
I nod. It's the most honest thing I have. I want her under me on a mattress that isn't borrowed from Alden. I want my mouth on the throat I can’t stop looking at. I want morning without a clinic ledger and a nineteen-year-old printing receipts for the company that took my father. I also want her breathing at dawn, and that want wins by an inch.
She saves the cropped frame to a folder labeled HAWTHORNE in caps, and shuts the laptop. The office drops to river sound and the tick of old brick cooling. I kill the overhead and leave the desk lamp on low.
"Boots off," I say.
"If this is another lesson I'm charging tuition."
"This is sleep."
She lies down on the cot nearer the window, facing me, auburn curls spilled over a mill-issue pillow. I take the one nearer the door. The gap between us is maybe a foot. I could close it with a hand. I don't.
"For the record," she whispers into the dim, "I wanted more too. Don’t make it weird that I want more."
"Wouldn't dare."
"You would. You dare most things. That's half your personality."
I almost smile at the ceiling. The other half of my personality is listening to the hall and the faint chime of Marin's tablet two rooms over. Helix has the landing. Helix has a boy Rowe trusts. Helix had my father on a dock and maybe in a clinic nine days ago. The next move they make is going to be at a person, not a rock, and the person they want most in this mill is lying one foot from my hand.
I turn my head. She's already watching me, eyes open, waiting to see if I'll break first.
I reach across the gap and find her fingers. That's all. Heat to heat. Her grip answers, fierce and certain, and we hold on in the dark of Alden's mill while the river runs and the Watchline keeps its ugly glowing vigil, and her pulse ticks against my thumb until the Watchline's light shifts on the ceiling.
10
Oakley
Morning at the mill arrives quietly. Gray river light finds the narrow office window, slides across two cots set too close, and lands on our hands still hooked together over the gap Colt refused to close last night and also refused to let go of.
I unhook first because if I don't I'll start the day by climbing into his cot in a building full of cameras and competent people.
He's already awake. Dark stubble. Flannel rumpled. That heavy, blistering attention aimed at the hall before it finds my mouth.
"Don't," he whispers.
"I didn't."
"You were going to."
"You don't know that."
"I know that."
Heat crawls up my throat. I sit up, Equinox shirt twisted, curls doing their worst, and I occupy myself with the laptop because looking at him in this small room is how we end up against another table.
Marin's voice carries from the Watchline, already mid-argument with a speakerphone. Banks. I catch pieces. Halo. Intake scan. Forgery tools. Then her tone sharpens and I know the clinic record isn’t going to be a mercy.
Colt’s on his feet before I finish lacing my boots. He holds the office door for me, manners showing up without asking, then his palm settles at the small of my back for three steps of hallway and vanishes before we hit the glass.
The Watchline is all cool screens and leftover coffee. Marin has two tablets going. Banks is a dry, irritated voice in the middle of the table, no video, which feels right for a man who lives in puzzles.