Page 26 of Accidental Bodyguard Summer

I’ve imagined this—I can admit that now, in the red dark, with her hands sliding under my shirt like she’s checking me for a heartbeat. Weeks of not-imagining it on a too-short couch. Every version I didn’t let myself finish was quieter than this. None of them had her narrating.

“For science,” she gasps, as I map the line of her throat, “I need to report that the wall thing was a complete misread, you’re—oh—you’re extremely warm-blooded?—”

“You talk during this.”

“I talk during everything, this was disclosed, you signed off?—”

I kiss her quiet. It works for a glorious half a minute, her fingers curling against my chest, and then she pulls back an inch, and her eyes in the dim are enormous and sure, and the humor in them has banked down into something that stops my breath.

“Take me to bed, Noah,” she says. “I’ve been sleeping twelve feet from you all summer. It’s the worst-designed experiment I’ve ever run.”

“You’re sure,” I say, against her mouth, because the last clear-headed cell I own insists on it. “Once I’m through that door, Doc, I’m not good at partial commitments. Ask my enlistment record.”

She pulls back to look at me. Rain-light on her face, her mouth kiss-bruised, her eyes steadier than I’ve ever seen them, and when she answers there’s no joke riding shotgun for once.

“Noah. I’ve been sure since the sticky note. I was sure at the soccer game, and the bingo hall, and the night you told me theworst thing about yourself expecting me to leave, and I did the opposite of leave. You’re the one who needed the full dataset.” She takes my face in both hands the way I’ve wanted her to since the muffin. “Peer review’s over. Findings are in.”

I pick her up off the counter. She wraps around me, and I carry her down the hall past the whiteboard, past the door I’ve verified every night, and this time I go through it.

Her room smells like her—sunscreen and rain-damp air and the ghost of that shampoo that’s been sabotaging me since June, coconut and something green under it. Turtle charts on the wall. A fern on the sill, doomed, beloved. I set her down on the bed like the high-value cargo she is, and she immediately ruins the solemnity by scooting back and yanking off the sleep shirt—tonight’s says I LIKE BIG BOATS AND I CANNOT LIE—and flinging it toward the hamper, missing entirely.

Then she’s bare to the waist in the storm light, and everything in my head goes to sea.

“You’re staring,” she says. Not shy. Pleased. Cataloging me right back.

“Building the file.”

“Anything to declare?”

“Yeah.” My voice comes out wrecked. “I’m never getting over you. That’s a preliminary finding.”

Her breath catches—I hear it over the rain, I’ll hear it for years—and she reaches up and takes the hem of my shirt, and I let her peel it off me, let her look, her palms flat over the scars she doesn’t ask about, tracing them like coastline on a chart, like they’re geography instead of history. Nobody’s touched me like that. Like all of it can stay.

“Come here,” she whispers, and I do, and the world narrows to the two of us and the drumming roof.

I take my time. She’d tell you—she does tell me, running commentary dissolving into shorter and shorter words—that I do everything like I’m defusing something, careful, both hands, total attention, and God, does she reward attention. Every inch of her answers. The dip of her collarbone makes her sigh; the underside of her breast makes her arch; when my mouth closes over her nipple she makes a sound that rewires me, high and broken and honest, her fingers tightening in my hair like I might be recalled. I learn her the way I learn water—patiently, completely, committing everything, because conditions change and I want to know her in all of them.

By the time I hook my thumbs in her shorts she’s trembling, hips rising to help, saying my name in a tone I’ve never heard her use on any other word. I kiss down her stomach, settle between her thighs, look up the length of her—flushed, wide-eyed, hair a storm across the pillow.

“Okay?” I ask.

“If you stop, I’m calling Rafi. There’s a duty channel and I know the pattern now.”

The laugh comes out of me rough and real, shaking loose ten years of ballast, and then I put my mouth on her and her whole body bows.

She’s loud. Of course she’s loud—she’s Abby, she’s never once experienced anything quietly, and every gasp and plea and broken half-sentence lands on me like commendation. I take her apart slowly, learning what makes her thighs shake, what makes her grab the headboard, what makes her go suddenly, wonderfully silent—there it is, the three seconds, the quiet before she wins—and then she breaks with a cry that the rain graciously covers for the neighbors, shuddering, her hand fisted in my hair, my name coming apart in her mouth.

I work her through it and then hold still, forehead against her hip, while she comes back in stages. Her fingers loosen. Smooth over my scalp, absent, tender, like I’m something she’s keeping. Outside, the storm leans on the little house, and the little house holds, and I stay right where I am, listening to her breathing come back down the altitudes, more at peace than I’ve been in ten years of chasing quiet across two oceans.

“Okay,” she breathes, at last, to the ceiling. “Okay.” Once for the world, once for herself.

“Doc.”

“Give me a second, my legs filed for leave.” She tugs at my shoulders. “Up here. Now. I want—up here.”

I surface, and she kisses me slow and deep, humming like I’m something off Marnie’s seasonal menu. Her hands chart downward—waistband, drawstring, a brief dignified struggle with the knot that has us both laughing into each other’s mouths, and then her hand closes around me and the laugh punches out of me as a groan.

“Oh,there’sa data point,” she whispers, awed, wicked, working me slow, and I have to catch her wrist before the summer ends right here.