Page 76 of The Maverick
I'd been a boy.
I hadn't known what she'd meant.
I knew now.
Rebecca Lynn was looking at the moon on the ocean, and her hand was warm in mine, and the Bell was holding its altitude steady, and somewhere a couple miles back behind us in Charleston Dominic Craine was still sitting on whatever Dominic Craine was sitting on, and somewhere in Marfa my mother was forgetting another word, and somewhere in this same plane of existence I'd been a man who'd never said a word about my father out loud to anybody.
I'd been a man who would never have predicted, in a thousand attempts, that I'd be in a helicopter over the Atlantic,watching a girl in a thrift-store top and her grandmother's earrings look at the moon.
I loved her.
That was the math.
It didn't matter how long I'd known her.
It didn't matter that I had no business loving anyone right now.
It didn't matter what anyone else thought about it.Anyoneincluded me, three days ago.Anyoneincluded Lucas, who would tell me with a straight face that this kind of thing wasn't supposed to happen this fast and that men who'd lost their heads in this line of work tended to get other people killed.Anyoneincluded whatever sane, careful, prudent ghost of Tommy Dane I'd been carrying around in my back pocket since I'd put on a uniform.
Letanyonebe damned.
I loved this woman.
I was going to love her in the open, fast and slow, the way my mother had said, and I wasn't going to waste a second of it judging the speed.
Rebecca turned her head to me. She caught me looking. Her mouth turned up.
"What?" she asked, soft, into the headset.
"Nothing, sweetheart."
"Liar."
"Maybe."
She squeezed my hand once.
She turned back to the window.
And the moon held its silver path across the water all the way to the horizon, and the Bell flew us steady, and I sat there with the woman I had no business loving, and loved her, anyway.
21
REBECCA
I'd heard people talk about mind blowing sex.
I'd nodded along in the way you nodded along to things you understood theoretically but hadn't personally verified—the way I nodded when people talked about business class flights or fresh truffle or the feeling of having no debt. I understood the concept. I had no data.
I had data now.
We were still in the helicopter when I understood that the evening wasn't going to end the way evenings ended when they were merely good. It wasn't anything he did—he was just sitting beside me with his hand warm around mine, watching the moonpath on the water the way he watched everything, straight and honest. But I was aware of him in a way that had moved past aware into something physical, a low, insistent pull that had started somewhere in the lobby when he'd kissed me in front of Sasha like it was the most natural thing, and had built through the blindfold and the field and the rotors lifting us off the grass and the Atlantic opening up underneath us like a secret he'd been keeping, just for me.
By the time the helicopter banked back toward the city, I was not thinking about the moon.
I was thinking about his hands. Those big, warm, capable hands. I wanted them all over me.
The suite was warm when we got back.
