Page 18 of Broken Ride

Three seconds later, the phone buzzes again. Same area code. Different number.

I pick up the phone and hold down the power button until the screen goes black. The motion is controlled, deliberate, the practiced efficiency of a woman who's been doing this for fourteen months and has the choreography memorized.

When I look up, Wade is watching my hands. The dead phone. The white-knuckle grip I haven't loosened. I set it face-down on the desk between the manifests.

His body has gone still in a way I've learned to read on him, the same locked-down tension he carries into the chute before the gate opens. Controlled fury looking for a direction. His knuckles are white on the edge of the desk.

"Who," he says. One word. Not a question.

"Not your problem."

"That's not what I asked."

"It's the answer you're getting." The echo of our first conversation lands between us, deliberate, and his nostrils flare at the callback. I hold his gaze until the fury in it banks into low heat, still burning but pulled behind his teeth.

"I should go," I say.

"Probably."

Neither of us moves.

The room is too small. It was too small when I walked in, and every minute I've spent inside it has compressed the air further. His maps and my manifests overlap on the desk, and the visual is uncomfortably accurate, two separate investigations tangled together by proximity and the growing suspicion that pulling them apart would cost more than leaving them woven.

"You're staring at me," I say.

"Would you rather I stopped?"

"I'd rather you did it less obviously."

"That's not how this works." His voice is low enough that the words barely carry across the desk between us. "I've been obvious since Midland. You just haven't wanted to deal with it."

He's right about that too, and the bluntness of the admission hits a crack in the wall I've been mortaring shut with professional distance. The disciplined refusal to want things I can't afford. I've been measuring the distance between his body and mine since I walked in, the way I measure every distance in every room I enter, assessing threat, calculating escape routes, mapping the fastest path to the door.

Except the calculations have been running wrong for weeks. The distance between us doesn't register as threat. It registers as gravity, pulling from my sternum, and I've been compensating for it the same way he compensates for his bad shoulder, by pretending it's not there.

"This is a bad idea," I say.

"I didn't suggest anything."

"You didn't have to."

"Then what are we arguing about?"

"We're arguing about what to do with a federal drug corridor."

"That's not what we're arguing about."

The accuracy of that lands like a fist. The anger it triggers has nothing to do with Thornton Livestock. It has everything to do with the heat pooling low in my abdomen while I sit across from a man who drinks too much, watches too carefully, and makes me want things I stopped letting myself want a long time ago.

"Don't make this something," I say.

"I'm not making anything. You walked over here."

"With evidence."

"With an excuse."

The word hits like a slap, and the worst part is how precisely it lands. I could have called. I could have texted. I could have waited until morning and met him at the pens where the light is flat, the distance is wide, and the smell of livestock would overpower whatever it is about his skin that's been pulling at me since the first time he stood too close.