Page 83 of The Forbidden Center

She’s at the computer when I come out. I stop beside the desk, and she reads one last line, clicks twice, and closes the window.

Then she looks up at me. “I sent it.”

“The handover?”

“And the discharge note. Maren has both.”

I put my bag down. “So that’s it.”

“Yes.”

She doesn’t go and hide inside the next sentence.

“You are no longer under my care.”

The building gets very quiet around that.

I’ve wanted it for weeks, and not because I wanted the treatment finished. Because I wanted the sentence.

Astrid comes around the desk and stops far enough away that neither of us has to pretend the distance happened by accident.

“I did not turn away because I did not want to.”

The parking lot comes back whole. My hand at her jaw, her fist in my jacket, her mouth at the corner of mine because she picked the last inch differently than I did.

“I know.”

“You could be less pleased with yourself.”

“I could try.”

“Do not.”

That takes the grin off me, and she watches it go, and so do I.

I stay where I am. Astrid takes the rest of the distance.

Her palm lands flat against my chest, nowhere near a landmark, with no instruction attached to it.

She lifts her face and I close the last inch.

It’s careful for about a second. Then she catches my lower lip and the careful part becomes somebody else’s problem.

I get my right hand at her waist and my left around her side and I hold on, and it works, and I don’t let myself turn that into evidence.

Her fingers go up into the hair at the back of my neck. Her breath catches against my mouth when I pull her in, and she follows, and that’s worth more than anything I could have talked her into.

I go back to her mouth, slower, and her hand moves off my chest to the side of my neck and then down over my collar.

Her thumb finds the front of my right shoulder joint.

Presses.

Familiar pressure, and my arm loosens before I’ve had a say in it.

Astrid goes still, and the kiss ends because she’s stopped being inside it.

I open my eyes. Hers are on her own thumb, which is still sitting exactly where she’s tested that joint a hundred times.