Page 27 of Accidental Bodyguard Summer

“Abby.”

“Mm?”

“I’ve got a plan for tonight.” I bring her palm up, kiss the center of it, fold her fingers over the kiss like something she can bank. “It’s long. It’s thorough. There’s redundancy built in. You keep doing that, the plan fails on the launch pad.”

“I love it when you talk contingencies.”

There’s a condom in this house because she is, at her core, a scientist who plans for outcomes; she informs me of the location with her mouth against my jaw and no shame whatsoever, and I’ve never been so grateful for rigor in my life.

And then there’s no more logistics. There’s her underneath me in the storm-gray dark, knees rising to bracket my hips, her hands framing my face like I’m worth a long look. The reverence I’ve been rationing all summer comes up out of me all at once—no wall on earth holds against a spring tide.

“Hey,” she whispers. “You’re allowed.”

Sentence unfinished. She means all of it.

I push into her slow, and the sound we make together—her gasp, my groan, one thing, indivisible—burns itself into me like a coordinate I’ll navigate by for the rest of my life. She’s heat and welcome and impossibly close, and I hold still, shaking with the effort of it, because I want to keep this second. The rain. Her eyes gone wide and dark. The absolute absence of anywhere else.

“Noah.” Her heels press me deeper. “I’ve got you. Move.”

I move, and her breath breaks against my ear like surf finding shore.

It builds like weather, long and slow and inevitable—deep unhurried strokes while she narrates in fragments,yesandthereand my name, my name, my name, until the fragments run out and it’s just breath and the wet drum of rain and the old sweet rhythm two people find when they stop being careful. Her nails map my back. My hand finds her thigh and hitches it higher and she cries out at the angle, and something in me that’s been at parade rest for a decade finally, finally breaks formation.

“There he is,” she gasps, triumphant even now, even wrecked—and I drive into her and she meets me, every stroke, greedy and glad, both of us graceless now, headboard keeping time against the wall, and I feel her start to go again, the flutter and clench of her, her spine bowing.

“With me,” I get out, barely words, my hand finding hers on the pillow, fingers lacing, anchor set.

“Yes—Noah?—”

She breaks first and takes me with her. White-out. Her pulsing around me, my face buried in her neck, her name the only word I have left and me saying it like a man saying land, land, land.

The rain keeps going. Eventually, so do our lungs.

I deal with necessities and come back to find her exactly where I left her, starfished and boneless, one arm thrown over her eyes, and when I sit on the edge of the bed she reaches out blind and hooks two fingers in my waistband-that-isn’t and tows me down like docking a skiff. She fits herself against my side, head on my chest, one leg claiming both of mine, a full-body annexation conducted without a word, and then she sighs—this long, whole-summer sigh, the sound of a checklist completing—and goes quiet.

Quiet. Her. I count forty full seconds of it, her heartbeat slowing against my ribs, the rain softening to static, and I’m actually starting to worry when she finally speaks.

“Your heart’s going like a hatchling,” she murmurs, into my sternum. “Flipping sand.”

“Takes a while to stand down. Occupational.”

“Mm. No.” She tips her chin up, and even in the dark I can hear the grin arriving before she deploys it. “That’s not the occupational rate. I’ve fallen asleep on this chest during documentaries, sir. I have baseline readings.”

“For the record,” she says, at some point, sleepy-serious, tracing the oldest scar along my ribs like she’s reading it in braille, “you can wake me up. When the quiet after gets loud. I know you won’t ask, so I’m making it a standing order. Wake me up, and I’ll talk about parrotfish until it’s boring in here again.”

I don’t have anything to say to that. Or I have everything to say to that and no currency to pay for it yet, so I press my mouth to her hair and hold her tighter, and she nods against my chest like the message went through anyway. It did. She’ll never know what it cost to receive it, which is nothing, which is the miracle. The tide just came in and the boat lifted. That’s all it ever was, apparently. I needed water instead of a wall.

“So,” Abby says, into the dark, some unmeasurable time later. She’s draped across my chest, one leg thrown over me, drawing idle nonsense on my sternum with a fingertip. “Preliminary findings.”

“Mm.”

“One. The couch is fired.” Her finger taps once, itemizing. “Two, I’m going to need the file you’ve apparently been building, in discovery, unredacted. Three—” she props her chin on my chest, and her face in the last of the storm light is soft and smug and mine, mine, the word installing itself without authorization—“you laughed. Mid-operation. Actual audible laughter. I felt it. That’s going on the whiteboard.”

“It is not going on the whiteboard.”

“NOAH FACTS, item seven, dated and initialed.”

“I’ll deny it.”