Page 8 of Carry on Wayward Son

He handed me another beer, even though I hadn’t finished the first. Apparently, everybody thought my hands should be occupied. “Rios looks good.”

“He does.”

“Doesn’t have any idea what to do with any of this yet.”

“No.” Across the room, Rios accepted another handshake, saying something that made the man laugh. “He’ll get there.”

“Yeah.” Ford leaned against the wall beside me, both of us scanning the room in companionable silence for a moment. “You know what’s next with whatever it is that brought you back?”

That was his roundabout way of asking if the classified mission that had brought me back to the Outer Banks was going well. Not that I could confirm or deny.

I tipped back the last of the first beer. “I’m figuring it out.”

Bree waved from across the room.

Ford pushed off the wall. “Bree needs help with a keg. Don’t disappear.”

I didn’t commit to that. I was damned good at disappearing. It was another of those occupational hazards.

Gabi found me next, appearing at my elbow with a basket of something fried and the determined expression that said she intended to feed me whether I wanted it or not. “Eat. You’ve been home for a week, and I haven’t seen you sit down to a real meal once.”

“I’ve been eating.”

“If I didn’t see it, it didn’t count.” She pushed the basket into my hands. “These are hushpuppies. They’re perfect. Eat them.”

I ate one. It was perfect.

“Thank you,” she said, as if I’d done her a favor.

“How are you liking being back on the island after all those years away for school?”

“It’s good. Busy. The clinic is more than I expected, which is actually great. I needed the distraction.” She glanced toward Daniel at the bar. “And some other things are going better than expected.”

“I noticed.”

She looked back at me with that look she’d had since we were kids that cut right through whatever surface story you’d constructed. “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Don’t do that. You know what I’m asking.”

I ate another hushpuppy. “I’m fine, Gab.”

“You’re standing against a wall at Rios’s party, watching everyone else have a good time.”

“I’m observing. It’s different.”

“It really isn’t.” She bumped her shoulder against mine. “You could just be here. You don’t have to act like a fly on the wall.”

She drifted back toward Daniel before I could answer, which was probably deliberate.

I stayed where I was and watched the room.

Military intelligence work—the real work, not the version people imagined—was mostly this. Reading the way people moved through space and what that movement said about what they carried and what they hid and what they were trying not to look at. The skill didn’t care whether I was in the Horn of Africa or a microbrewery on the southern tip of the Outer Banks. It just ran. A computer program in my brain. An integral part of my operating system.

What it assessed right now was the fact that every person in this room had someone.

Sawyer and Willa in their corner. Ford, who kept finding reasons to end up at Bree’s end of the bar and pretended each time that it was incidental. Rios finally making it back to Madden’s side, and the way his posture changed in the last three feet of crossing the room toward her. Something he probably didn’t know he was doing. Caroline laughing at something Hoyt said, her hand resting on the table between them in that way of couples who’d stopped needing to be touching but always did anyway.