Page 287 of Across His Line

She moves and makes a noise into the pillow. One eye opens and finds me.

“Draft day,” she mumbles with a smile. She blinks both eyes open and sits up on her elbow. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Ready for breakfast?”

She gets up fast.

By noon, I’m pacing. I’m in the pants and the shirt, not the jacket, not the tie. The first round doesn’t start till seven. My dad wants to walk the building at two. My mom has a hair appointment downstairs she made for herself and then tried to give to Tessa, and Tessa refused. Sato has called twice. Nothing’s happening. Nothing is going to happen for seven hours. And I can’t sit down.

I go to the window. I go to the door. I look at the room service menu. I go back to the window.

Tessa’s on the bed with her laptop, setting up listings on eBay. She’s been doing it for an hour. She closes the laptop.

“Come here,” she says.

“We have to leave.”

“At two. It’s twelve-twenty.”

“My mom’s downstairs.”

“Getting her hair done. For an hour.” She sets the laptop on the nightstand next to my phone, which is still buzzing. “Come here, Rafe.”

“There’s a—the walls in this place—”

She grins. “Then be quiet.”

I stand there in the middle of a hotel room in dress pants with my hand on the back of my neck, and she looks at me from the bed with one eyebrow up, and I am so fucking gone that I don’t even argue.

It’s quick. It’s quiet, mostly. Her hand over my mouth at one point, laughing, because I’m not. It’s the only forty minutes all day that I don’t think about a stage, or a man in a suit with a card, or a list with my name on it somewhere in the forties. It’s just her, in my T-shirt, in a too-soft hotel bed, telling me to be quiet.

When she gets up, she finds the tie on the back of the chair, comes back, stands between my knees while I sit on the edge of the bed, and puts it around my neck.

“You don’t know how to tie a tie,” I say.

“I watched a video.”

“When?”

“Last night. While you were asleep.”

She does it. Badly, the first time. She frowns at it and pulls it out and does it again. The second time, it’s perfect. She straightens the knot with two fingers and pats it flat against my chest.

Then she looks at me. “I was this nervous when I got the Woodbury email.”

I sit on the edge of the bed and don’t say anything.

She smiles a little. “I thought everything was going to change if I got in.” Her fingers stay on my tie. “It did.” She pauses. “Most of it was worth it.”

I reach for her and pull her between my legs.

She looks down at me. “Imagine if I listened to you and withdrew.”

I close my eyes. “Yeah.”

Her hands come up around my face, thumbs tracing along my jaw.

For a second, neither of us says anything.