Page 31 of The Jackal

"You're smiling," he said. I felt the rumble of it more than heard it.

"You can't see my face."

"Don't have to." His hand moved slow up the length of my spine and back down, mapping me, unhurried, like he had all the time in the world and intended to spend a good portion of it doing exactly this. "I can feel it. Right here." He tapped once, lightly, over his own sternum, where my mouth was resting. "You're grinning against my chest like a woman who's pleased with herself."

"I am pleased with myself." I pressed the grin harder into him just to prove it. "I have earned this smugness. Do you have any idea how long I've wanted to do this?"

"Some idea." His voice went dry and low. "You were never what I'd call subtle, Mags."

I laughed, and he caught the sound like he wanted to keep it, rolling us so I was tucked into his side, one heavy arm banded across me, his other hand coming up to trace the line of my collarbone with a fingertip that was rough and careful at once.

I watched him do it. I couldn't stop watching him—that was the thing I kept running into. In the low light, he was almost too much to look at directly, all that hard, beautiful architecture gone soft and open in a way I suspected almost nobody on this earth had ever gotten to see.

The heavy brow. The mouth that gave away so little and had just given away everything. The body I'd spent an embarrassing amount of my life imagining and had, somehow, still undersold, all of it laid out beside me in my own bed like it had always meant to end up here.

And that was the strange part. The part I turned over in the quiet while his fingers moved on my skin.

I had never really touched this man before tonight. A handshake, a coin pressed into my palm, the accidental brush of arms in a doorway—that had been the whole of it. My hands were learning him for the first time, the geography of scars I'd catalog later and ask about someday, the exact places that made his breath catch. A body I'd never known.

So, it made no sense at all that lying against him felt like coming home from somewhere I'd been too long.

There's a thing that happens with the dogs, once in a great while. A dog comes into the kennel and settles against you inside an hour like it has always been yours, like the two of you got separated by some clerical error of the universe and have only just now been handed back to each other.

It's rare. Most trust is built slow, brick by patient brick. But now and then, a thing just fits, and every cell of you recognizes it before your mind can catch up and ruin it with reasons.

That was this. My body knew him. It had made its mind up in a parking lot a while back and never once wavered. Now, the rest of me had finally caught it up. Lying in the curve of him, I felt something in my chest unclench that I hadn't known was clenched since before I could remember.

"I almost let you go," I said into the dark.

His hand went still on my back.

"That day. The coin. You closed my hand and walked off and I stood there and I thought—that's it, then. He's told me. A woman's supposed to hear a thing like that and have some dignity about it." I traced an idle line down his forearm, over the ridge of muscle. "I moved here to get away from it. From you. I unpacked my whole life and left one box taped shut because it had you in it."

"I know about that box."

"You do not."

"The coin's in it. Or was." He said it with a certainty that made me lift my head to look at him, and he looked back at me steady. I understood he'd guessed it, or worse, known it, the way he seemed to know things. "A man doesn't hand a woman a thing like that and not wonder whether she threw it in the harbor."

"I kept it on the windowsill," I said. "I texted you like an idiot. You didn't answer. And I still—" I stopped. Started again, because he deserved the true version. "I'm just glad I'm stubborn. That's the whole thing I'm trying to say and doing badly. I have never in my life known how to leave a door alone. It's cost me. But if I'd had one ounce more pride, I'd have deleted your number and moved on with my dignity intact and I'd have missed—" I gestured at the two of us, the bed, the impossible fact of him. "This. So. Thank God, I'm difficult."

Something moved through his face, slow, and he brought his hand up and pushed my hair back off my cheek with a gentleness that didn't match the size of him. "Don't ever get less difficult," he said. "I mean that. Whatever comes. That stubborn thing in you—" His jaw worked. "It's going to be the best thing that ever happened to me. It already is."

I kissed him for that. I couldn't not. It went warm and slow and deep, his hand curving around the back of my neck. For a while, there was no talking at all, just the drag of his mouth and the heat of his skin under my palms and the low sound he made when I settled myself over him that I was already, greedily, addicted to.

He touched me like a man who'd decided to learn me by heart—slow, thorough, ruinous—until I was undone all over again and boneless against him and laughing weakly at the ceiling.

"You're going to kill me," I informed him.

"Not the plan." He gathered me back in. "Talk to me. Tell me about your life. The real stuff. I've got time to make up."

So, I did. Curled into his side with his heartbeat under my ear, I told him about the day-to-day. About Walt, who ran the place on coffee and spite and grief he'd never name, and set a cup down beside you instead of saying he loved you. About Dani and her terrible taste in gym men. About the mornings that smelled like diesel and dog, and the ache of a placement that doesn't take. I told him about my dogs, the real ones, mine—about Beans and her obsessions, about Tiny walking into the sliding door, about Duke.

I felt him go attentive when I got to Duke. Not tense. Just present, the way he got when a thing mattered.

"He handed you off tonight," Cash said. "You know that? In your front room. He looked at me and asked me a question and I answered it and he said okay."

"He did not."