Page 31 of Remmen

I walked her back. And in the small dim front room of the office, with the outer door shut and Chelsea gone to the market, I backed her up against the inside of the door and kissed her like I’d been waiting since dawn, because I had.

She made a sound into my mouth and fisted her hands in my shirt and kissed me back just as hard, up on her toes, both of us forgetting, for a minute, where we were.

Then she flattened her hands on my chest and pushed, breathless, laughing and furious at herself. “Go. Go, you enormous problem, before somebody needs their mayor and finds him doing this.”

“Kiss me again and I’ll do more,” I promised.

But I went. The feel of her mouth stayed with me the rest of the day and I got nothing done.

Two days later she turned up at my office and held a pen out at me.

“You go through these quick,” she said. “For all the paperwork. I had a spare.”

I looked at the pen. I looked at her. “You brought me a pen.”

“They dry out.”

“Is that the best excuse you could come up with?” She went red. I took the pen. I’d have taken anything she handed me, and when our hands met over the plastic, I tugged her forward and stole a kiss.

No one was looking. But if I swiped my papers off the desk, someone might come to investigate the sound, so I had to settle for a mere kiss.

In between, we were circumspect. We passed in the square in daylight and I said counselor and she said Mayor and we both kept walking. I lived off the ten seconds of it until the next one. She was better at it than me. She stood across the Council table and gave her report on the outreach, dry and even, the numbers finally starting to climb, and never once let her eyes snag on mine. I signed where she pointed and looked at her mouth the whole time.

That night she came through my window.

She got one leg over the sill and the rest of her stuck there, graceless and grinning in the dark, and I caught her under the arms before she brained herself and set her down on my floor.

“I have a door,” I said.

“The door faces the street.” She was breathless and enormously pleased with herself. “This is more romantic.”

“You could have broken your neck being romantic.”

“And yet.” She spread her arms in my dark front room and took the place in: the one chair, the cold grate, the shelf that held a whetstone and a tin cup and not much besides. She’d been here before. She looked at it again anyway. “You know, for a man who runs a whole town, you own about six things.”

“I own what I need.”

“That’s sad. We need to get you a rug.” She said we like it was nothing, like there was a we that bought things. We both heard it. Neither of us went near it. She just crossed the floor and climbed the rest of the way into my lap, and for a while it was purely fun — a woman sneaking into my house like we were young and stupid and had nothing to lose.

It stayed fun until it didn’t.

I lay in the dark afterward with her breathing slow against my chest, and the fear came in plain and cold: if the wrong person had seen that climb, if one neighbor’s light had been on, they’d take her. No argument, no appeal. A shuttle, then the stars, and I’d never see her again.

I held her a little tighter and she didn’t wake. I lay awake with it, and underneath the fear was something I couldn’t fathom.

She slept deep and easy, trusting. She had no business trusting anything on this planet, least of all in my bed. One of her hands was fisted in the blanket. Her mouth had come open. She’d kick the covers off within the hour, and I’d pull them back up, and she’d never know. I wanted a thousand nights of it. I wasn’t allowed even this one.

I was happy. Happier than I’d ever been.

She left a hair tie on my windowsill. A small red circle of nothing. I found it in the morning and didn’t throw it out and couldn’t have said why. I put it in the drawer. A grown male, mayor of a settlement, keeping a woman’s hair tie in a drawer like it meant something. If one of my men had seen it, he’d have known everything. I shut the drawer.

The reckoning came the next afternoon, with Anne safe across town in her office and no one the wiser.

I came out of the granary and Rauf was standing in the road waiting for me, road-dirty and grim, the whole square giving him the wide silent berth it always gave a Butcher. He’d come into town alone. He braced when he saw me and held his ground.

“Mayor. I’m looking for the counselor.”

Everything in me that had learned its trade in the sand came up at once, hot and stupid. No. The word was most of the way to my teeth. You don’t get to look for her. She’s not for you or your yard. Get off my road. I had it loaded and I wanted to fire it more than I’d wanted anything all week.