Page 69 of Under Her Protection

Vivienne did not move.

She lay in the grey linen in the pale morning light with the hand of a Blackthorn operative on her stomach and permitted herself, for the second time in twenty-four hours, two minutes of honesty. Two minutes of honesty. She had slept. She had not expected to sleep. She had slept the whole six hours between midnight and now with a woman's head on her shoulder, which was not a thing she had done, not all the way through a night, since some time in 1998.

Her left shoulder was tight. She had pressed hard against the car door on the rue de Sévigné, and the muscle had held the shape of it through the night.

She put her hand over Leo's hand on her stomach.

Leo's eyes opened.

They did not snap open. They opened the way Leo did a lot of things — without hurry, without a tell. She looked at Vivienne across the pillow. She did not say good morning. She did not say Madame. She moved her hand under Vivienne's, turned it, palm up, and laced her fingers between Vivienne's fingers, and left it there.

"Hello."

"Hello."

"You are here."

"I am here."

"Mm."

Vivienne rolled onto her side.

She rolled to face Leo, which was a small adjustment in her bed that had in the last five years been made only by her own body, and she put her free hand flat on Leo's chest, over the collarbone with the old pale scar, and rested there.

"Tell me about that," she said.

"The scar."

"Yes."

"Later."

"All right."

A pause.

"Not because I will not tell you," Leo said.

"I know."

"Because it is not a morning story."

“Okay.”

They lay.

Leo's thumb moved once on the back of Vivienne's hand. It was a small motion, one swipe, and it did not mean what the same motion would have meant from a man over a glass of Armagnac across a table in a lounge. It was simply the acknowledgement of a hand.

Vivienne put her free hand flat on the hand on her stomach, over Leo's hand, over her own skin. The pulse at the base of Leo's thumb, which she had not registered until this morning, was there under her palm. Leo's pulse on a Thursday morning after a near miss with a bullet was not a resting pulse. It was close. It was closer than it had any business being.

Vivienne, who had spent twenty-five years not doing this, did it. She lay in her own bed with the thirty-eight-year-old operative her oldest friend had told her on Wednesday night was going to be messy, and she did not feel messy. She felt, instead, her own breathing at rest, which was not a permission she gave herself in a room she shared.

"Ask me," she said, after a minute.

"Ask you what."

"What you have wanted to ask me since the flowchart."