Page 84 of The Maverick
I wasn't going to pretend now.
I was going to use the time.
I was going to take her to Marfa.
I was going to do it before whatever was coming for the Danes got close enough that I couldn't.
I tightened my arm around her and felt her settle deeper against me without waking, and I lay there in the gray light and ran the schedule.
We could be in Marfa by tomorrow night.
We could be back in Charleston by the next day.
We could be done with the introduction, done with the recognition, done with whatever piece of me my mother and Rebecca Lynn between them needed to confirm before the next part of my life started, in time for me to come back to this city and take whatever piece of Dominic Craine was going to need taking.
I'd be ready.
I was always ready.
I closed my eyes.
The gray went gold somewhere in the seam of the curtains.
Outside, the harbor began its slow process of becoming morning.
In here, in the warm dark, with the woman I had no business loving asleep against my chest and the clock running onsomething I couldn't see yet, I let myself have one more minute of the thing I'd never let myself have.
Then I started to plan.
23
REBECCA
Iwoke up happy.
That was the first thing—not the ceiling, not the rent number, not the reflex inventory of what I owed and what I'd earned and what the gap between them looked like this morning. Just happy. Clean and uncomplicated, the way happiness was supposed to feel and almost never did, like a room with all the furniture moved out and the windows open.
I lay still for a moment and let myself have it.
The suite was full of morning. The harbor light came through the balcony doors in long, pale bars, catching the dust in the air and the last waxy pooling of the candles and the cream cardigan still on the floor where Tommy had pushed it off my shoulders. The sheets were the kind of sheets that had a thread count I didn't know the vocabulary for—heavy and smooth and cool in the way that only expensive things were cool, like they'd been engineered specifically for the morning after something good.
Tommy was asleep.
I turned my head and looked at him the way you looked at someone when they couldn't look back—taking my time, makinga record of it. The way his chest rose and fell. The jaw I'd first kissed on a sidewalk like a woman who did things like that, which I hadn't been and, apparently, now was.
Three days.
I'd known this man three days, if I counted today.
I pressed my face into the pillow and smiled at it like an idiot.
I slipped out of bed to use the bathroom and stood in the doorway of it for a moment, because the bathroom at The Palmetto Rose was not a bathroom I could walk into without registering it.
It was enormous. White marble, floor to ceiling. A soaking tub on a raised platform that could have fit three people and a guitar. Towels on a heated rack—I touched one and it was warm and the thickness of it was obscene, the kind of thick that meant you'd been wrapped in something that cost more than my weekly grocery budget.
The mirror above the double sinks was lit from behind and made everything look like a magazine. I stood in front of it in Tommy's t-shirt and looked at myself and thought:this is the same face. The same face that was in the bathroom of that apartment on the third floor with the yellow curtains and the flickering bulb.
The shower was a glass enclosure the size of my bedroom, with a panel of controls on the wall that looked like something from a spaceship. Multiple knobs. Multiple heads. A digital display showing a temperature in a number I didn't recognize because it was in Celsius, which I didn't use.
