Page 53 of You, Only You

"I'm still here," she said.

Something broke. Not dramatically, not with sound or movement. Just a structural failure somewhere deep in the architecture I'd spent seven years building, a load-bearing wall that had been holding up everything and was suddenly, quietly, not.

I don't know who moved first. Maybe both of us. Maybe neither. Maybe it was just the distance between us finally collapsing under its own weight, because there'd been too much of it for too long and neither of us had the strength left to maintain it.

I kissed her.

Not carefully. Not with the precision I brought to everything else in my life. This was graceless and desperate and tasted like blood and adrenaline and something underneath both of those things that I didn't have a name for. Her mouth was warm and she made a sound against my lips that went through me like voltage, and my hands, my bloody, shaking hands, found herface and held it like it was the last solid thing in a world that had come apart.

She kissed me back. Not gentle either. Her fingers twisted in my shirt and pulled, and the force of it surprised me, the urgency, like she'd been waiting and was done with waiting. A small sound escaped her, tight and pained, and the part of my brain that was still functioning remembered her ribs.

"Sorry." I started to pull back. "Your..."

"Don't." She pulled me closer. Kissed me harder. Her hand slid to the back of my neck and held on, and I stopped thinking about her ribs. Stopped thinking about anything except the taste of her and the warmth of her and the impossible fact that she'd seen the worst thing about me and her response was this.

For a span of time that I couldn't measure and didn't try to, there was nothing else. No case. No Reeves. No blood on the marble or gunpowder in the air. Just her breath and mine and the silence of a hallway that had become the only room in the world.

Then the rest of it came flooding back. All of it. The case. The trial. Her testimony. Her career. The defense attorneys who would pick apart every weakness they could find, and right now I was handing them the biggest one. I could already hear it: the auditor and her subject, romantically entangled, every piece of evidence she'd gathered now tainted by association.

I broke the kiss. Pulled back so fast we both gasped. Got to my feet and put three steps between us, then four, my chest heaving, my heart doing something violent and uncontrolled against it.

"Will?" She was breathless. Confused. Her lips were damp and her eyes were searching my face and I had to look away because looking at her made the distance feel like a physical injury.

"That was..." I started. Stopped. Tried again. "We can't."

"What?"

"This. What just. We can't do this." My hand found my lips, rubbed hard, like I could scrub the taste of her off my mouth. I couldn't. "The case. Your testimony. If the defense finds out, they'll use it to..."

"I don't care about the..."

"I care." Too sharp. Too loud in the quiet hallway. I made myself lower my voice but the words still came out wrong, all edges. "I care about you walking out of this with something. A career. A reputation. Something that isn't destroyed because you got tangled up with..."

I almost said me. Caught it. Rerouted.

"With the case," I finished. But she heard the detour. I saw it in her face.

She stood slowly. Her arms came up, wrapping around herself the way people do when the temperature drops suddenly and without warning.

"You're doing it again," she said.

"Doing what?"

"Deciding. What's best for me. What I should care about. What I'm allowed to..." She stopped. Pressed her lips together. When she spoke again her voice was quieter, and the quiet was worse than the anger. "You just kissed me like the world was ending. And now you're standing over there telling me it was a mistake because you've decided what it costs."

"It's not about..."

"Did you ask me? Whether I think my career matters more than this?" She gestured between us, a sharp motion in the dim hallway. "Did you even consider that I might have already done that math? That maybe I've been doing it for weeks?"

I opened my mouth. Closed it. She was right and I knew she was right and the knowing didn't change anything because the image of her on the witness stand with a defense attorney sayingAnd isn't it true that you were sleeping with the subject of your investigation was playing on a loop in my head and I couldn't make it stop.

"I can't be the thing that ruins this for you," I said.

"And I can't be the thing you keep at arm's length because you're scared of what happens if you don't." Her voice broke on the word scared, just slightly, just enough. "You want to know what ruins things, Will? This. Exactly this. Getting close and then slamming the door because it's safer on your side of it."

"It is safer."

"For who?"