Page 30 of The Jackal

Then, I did the thing I'd thought about more than I'll admit to.

I kissed her.

Not the way I'd pictured it in the weak hours, all those nights I'd sworn I never would. In the picture, it had been careful. Tender. A slow and decent thing, the kind of kiss a man gives a woman he means to be gentle with.

It wasn't that.

The second my mouth found hers, something came off its chain in me, something I'd kept locked down so long I'd half forgotten it was in there, and it took me clean over. I kissed her like I was starving and she was the first meal in a year. I kissed her like she might be taken back. My hands were in her hair, on her jaw, dragging her up into me, and she made a sound against my mouth that finished off whatever was left of the composed man who'd walked in her door.

I've spent my life being the still one. The calm one. The one whose pulse doesn't move. There was nothing still in me now. I needed her the way I've never let myself need anything—the taste of her, the sounds she made, the give of her under my hands—and she was right there with me, fisting my shirt, pulling me down, giving as good as she got.

We got each other out of our clothes in a graceless hurry, buttons and straps and that green dress pooling somewhere on the floor. Then, there was a moment. Just one. Where we stopped. Stood in the dim of her room, both of us breathing hard, and looked. Everything we'd never said stacked up in the small space between us.

Then, she reached out and laid her palm flat against the center of my chest.

Right over my heart. And I knew what she was doing, because she'd done it once already with her face buried against my neck in a courtyard—she was feeling it beat. Feeling it going hard and fast for her, this heart of mine that stays flat through the worst the world can throw. Then, her hand slid down. Down my chest, down my stomach, lower, unhurried, until she'd taken hold of me, and the breath went out of me rough, and my forehead dropped to rest against hers.

"I want you," she said. Barely a whisper. "Cash. I want you."

I didn't hesitate. I'd hesitated over this woman for way too long. I was done hesitating.

I got my hands under her and lifted her—she came up light, the one weight I'd never mind carrying—and she wrapped her legs around me the same instant, quick and sure, like our bodies had rehearsed this a hundred times in some other life while the rest of us wasted the years. She reached down and guided me and shifted against me. I was inside her before our mouths even found each other again, the two of us gasping into the half inch of air between our lips at the feel of it. At finally.

I held her there. Held her up, her arms locked around my neck and her face against my jaw. We moved together slow and then not slow at all, the anticipation breaking us. I felt her come apart around me with my name in her mouth, and I went with her—the pair of us breaking in the same moment, standing up in the dark of her little room with everything else in the whole world gone quiet.

There was a finality to it I don't have a better word for. Like a last line. Like the closing sentence of a thing we'd both been reading toward for years without knowing how it ended—and here it was, and it ended like this. Her wrapped around me. Me holding her up. The two of us arriving in the same breath at a place I'd spent my whole life certain wasn't built for a man like me.

When our legs remembered they were legs, I carried her the few steps to the bed and laid her down and stretched out beside her. I didn't let go. I wasn't planning to let go for a good while.

The room had gone soft and dim, only the streetlight coming through the blinds in bars across the sheets, and I propped up on an elbow and looked at her. Really looked. I've spent my life memorizing the faces of the dead so I could carry them home whole. I'd never once done it for a living one. Never had the reason.

Now, I did.

I traced the whole map of her in that low light—the flush still high in her cheeks, the freckle under her eye I'd forgotten, the way her mouth kept trying not to smile and losing—and I ran my thumb along the line of her jaw and set every bit of it down somewhere permanent in me.

She started to laugh.

Quiet at first, then a real giggle, warm and helpless, her hand coming up over her mouth. And I felt my own face do the thing it almost never does without being told. I smiled.

"What's funny?" I asked.

The color went up her throat again—I swear I could all but hear her blushing in the dark—and she caught her lip in her teeth, and then she said it, brave and completely undone.

"Can we do it again?"

I smiled wider than I'd smiled in years. Maybe wider than I ever had.

"Mags," I said, and I pulled her in, and I meant it more than I've meant almost anything in my life. "I've got no place in this whole world I'd rather be."

15

MAGNOLIA

Ilay in the bars of streetlight with my head on his chest and listened to his heart do the thing it wasn't supposed to do.

I knew about that heart. I knew what men like him were built to be underneath—slow-pulsed, unhurried, a resting rate that set off the machines in my mother's hospital on the rare occasions men like him ended up wired to them.

I'd felt it in the courtyard, steady as a clock through all that chaos. I felt it now, under my ear, going quick and uneven and warm, and I understood that I was the reason. That somewhere in this big, still, dangerous man, there was a thing only I seemed able to speed up, and he was letting me hear it, which was its own kind of confession.