His hands move with patience. One hand stays at my hip, thumb tracing a slow line along the fabric of my dress where it cinches at my waist. The thin material between his hand and my skin feels suddenly like a very unconvincing barrier.
The other slides up my back, pressing between my shoulder blades, drawing me into him until there is no interpretable distance left between us and I can feel his heartbeat against my sternum, steady and fast.
My fingers find the back of his neck, the short hair at his nape, and I feel the muscles there tighten when I touch them. His breath catches when I trace my fingers along his jaw and apparently I’m conducting research with my eyes closed.
He pulls back just far enough to look at me. His eyes search my face — not for permission, which he already has, but for something else. Certainty, maybe.
Confirmation that this is the real thing and not a product of adrenaline and whiskey and the kind of extreme circumstances that make bad decisions feel inevitable.
I meet his gaze and don't look away.
"Still a terrible idea?" he asks.
"Catastrophic," I say. "Completely indefensible."
He kisses me again, slower this time, deeper, his hand coming up to cradle the side of my face with a gentleness that is somehow more devastating than any of the rest. My chest aches with it and I let it.
His lips find my throat again and linger. "Bedroom."
I tip my head back against his hand, tightening my grip on his nape. He says my name once, low, against the side of my throat, and I pull him toward the hallway. His hand is warm in mine and I lead him through an apartment I've only lived in for a few days, which means I walk him into the linen closet first.
The second door is correct. The room is dark except for the streetlight coming through the curtains, and the moment we're through the door his hands find my waist and we're kissing again.
He walks me backward toward the bed, slow and unhurried, and I feel the backs of my knees find the mattress edge. He stops there, both hands on my waist, letting me decide what to do with it.
I have been given more exits tonight than in the last eight years combined.
I reach up and pull him down with me.
He catches himself on one arm, hovering over me in the dark with his weight carefully distributed, and I feel the warmth radiating off his bare chest before he's even fully settled.
The streetlight catches his jaw, the line of his shoulder, and I reach up and trace the edge of his collarbone with two fingers just to see what happens.
What happens is his eyes close for exactly one second.
Filed.
He kisses me again — deeper than the kitchen, like we've graduated from the opening argument to the actual case — and his hand finds the hem of my dress. He doesn't pull at it, just rests his palm against my knee, warm and unhurried, and waits.
The waiting is its own kind of statement.
"You're doing that on purpose," I say against his mouth.
"Doing what?"
"Going slow."
"Would you like me to stop?"
No. "I'm just noting it."
He smiles, I feel it at the corner of his mouth, and when his hand moves a fraction higher, I stop noting things.
What he does with his hands should probably be studied in an academic context for the benefit of humanity at large.
My throat produces sounds I had genuinely forgotten were in my repertoire. My hips move toward him on pure biological instinct, negotiating independently of my brain. When I pull him closer he comes without resistance, his weight settling against me with a solidity that makes me exhale completely for the first time in recent memory.
I press closer and let the rest of the night be exactly what it is.
***
The room settles around us like it's exhaling.
I'm staring at the ceiling. Beckett is on his back beside me, one arm behind his head, the other resting at his side with his fingers loosely curled. The streetlight makes a pale stripe across the ceiling that I've been watching move for the last two minutes while my nervous system files a very lengthy report.
"Say something," he says.
"I'm processing."
"How long does that usually take?"
"Longer than this."
I turn my head to look at him. In the low light his profile is sharp and still, and he's looking at the ceiling like he is entirely comfortable with silence, which I find irritating and attractive in approximately equal measure.
"You could say something too."
"I'm waiting for you to finish processing."
"Thoughtful."
"I have my moments."
I look back at the ceiling. The stripe of light has moved six inches since I started watching it. Outside, a car passes. The refrigerator hums in the kitchen. The apartment makes the small, domestic sounds of a place that doesn't know anything significant just happened inside it.
"The acquisition," I start.
"Not right now."
"I'm just saying…"
"Waverly." He turns his head and looks at me, and the directness of it stops whatever I was building toward. "Not right now. Please."
I close my mouth.
He's right. The acquisition and Gary's filing and every other landmine in the civilian landscape of my current existence will all still be there in the morning. With the same blast radius and the same potential for catastrophic damage, and absolutely nothing about addressing any of it at midnight will improve the outcome.
You are allowed to have this one hour. The world will resume its hostilities shortly.
"Okay," I say.
"Okay," he agrees.
The silence that follows is not uncomfortable. This is, in itself, a minor miracle.
"For the record," he says to the ceiling, after a while. "You were wrong."
I frown. "About what specifically? The list is long."
"About it not mattering." He pauses, and in the pause I hear the weight of every conversation we've talked around instead of through. "That night. You said it didn't matter to either of us."
I did say that. I said it because the alternative, admitting that a single night eleven years ago had been lodged under my skin ever since, was not a thing I was willing to hand him.
I stare at the ceiling for ten full seconds.
"I know," I say.
He doesn't push, doesn't ask me to elaborate or confirm or apologize. He just receives the two words and lets them be what they are. An admission dressed up as an acknowledgment.
His hand finds mine in the dark — fingers against fingers, loose and unhurried. And I don't pull away.
Outside, a cab horn blares twice. Somewhere down the hall, the front door opens: Sloan, home from the club, her keys hitting the bowl by the door with cheerful clatter. Sounds like she has had a good night and expects the apartment to be exactly as she left it.
A pause. Then, through the wall, in a tone that manages to convey pride, delight, and profound personal vindication simultaneously: "Oh my GOD."
Beckett's shoulders shake. I press my hand over my face.
"I hate this apartment," I say.
"No you don't."
He's right, I don't.