We run through it once more. Faster. Tighter. Times, routes, contingencies, the choreography of an operation with no margin for error, because the margin got used up weeks ago when Tally sat across from me in June's with a winter jacket zipped to her chin and told me an officer had come to her door. The words come out clipped. Marine brief. Trevor's shoulder aches. My hand shakes once, briefly, and I press it flat to the table until it stops.
Then there's nothing left to prep. The house goes quiet. The clock ticks. Eileen's concentrator hums from the back bedroom, steady and indifferent, the soundtrack of a morning that feels both ordinary and entirely not. Trevor's eyes find mine across the table. Hold. One beat. Two. The look of a man who's said everything he's capable of saying and is waiting to see if the silence holds anything worth adding.
It doesn't. We both know it doesn't. So he picks up his backpack. I pick up mine. The screen door whines when I push it open. August heat rolls in, thick and insistent. Somewhere a dog barks. Somewhere an engine turns over and fades.
Trevor follows me out. Boots on gravel. The sound of two men walking toward something neither's entirely sure they'll survive, walking anyway because walking is the only move they've got.
Past midnight and the house is dark except for the low lamp I leave on in the hall for Eileen, a twenty-watt bulb in a fixture older than both of us put together, throwing just enough light to navigate by and not enough to wake anyone who's managed to fall asleep, which tonight is exactly one person in this house and it isn't me.
Trevor's in the doorway of his room. One hand on the frame, the other loose at his side, his body angled like he was on his way somewhere and changed his mind mid-step. Gray t-shirt and boxers, no socks, his feet bare on the hardwood, and Trevor Hollander barefoot in a dark hallway does something to my chest that belongs in a category I don't have language for.
I come down the hall from the bathroom, still damp from the shower, a towel slung low on my hips, my hair pushed back and dripping onto my shoulders. The towel smells like the soap Eileen buys, something cheap and floral that doesn't belong on my skin but is the only thing in the house, so it's what I use, and the scent follows me down the hall like a ghost that means well.
We stand there. One beat too long. My jaw is set the way it gets when I'm running something over and not saying it, which is most of the time, and the something tonight is about the size and weight of a cinder block and sits right behind my sternum where my heart should be. Trevor rolls his shoulder once, slow, working the old wound, and my eyes track the movement without permission, following the line of his body the way they've been following it since I was a kid lying a hand's width from him in a twin bed, pretending not to notice, pretending so hard I almost believed it.
He doesn't move. Doesn't speak. Just stands in his doorway with his hand on the frame and his eyes on my face, and the look he gives me is complicated in a way that would take ten thousand words to unpack, and we don't have ten thousand words. We have this hallway and this night and whatever comes after, which might be nothing, which might be everything.
I cross the hall. I don't say anything. I put one hand flat against his chest and walk him backward into the room, and he lets me, his body yielding to the pressure of my palm like it's been waiting for exactly this, and the door clicks shut behind us with a softness that feels both deliberate and entirely accidental.
It starts the way it always starts — rough, charged, my hands gripping his jaw, his fingers digging into my hips hard enough to bruise, both of us working out the fear and the adrenaline and the twenty years ofalmostin the only language we've managed to get fluent in. His mouth is hot against mine. His stubble scrapes my chin. The towel hits the floor and neither of us bends for it, because bending means stopping, and stopping is not an option, not tonight, not with the backpacks by the door and the alarm set for six and the weight of tomorrow pressing down on both of us.
I get his shirt off. One hand at the hem, dragging it over his shoulders, and then his chest is bare and the scar is there, pale against his tan, the puckered ridge from collarbone to deltoid. My palm finds it. But not the way it did two nights ago — that was slow, reverent, a question I was asking with my hand. Tonight it's quick, claiming, my thumb pressing the ridge once like I'm checking it's stillthere, still real, still his, before my hand moves on, because tonight isn't about the wound. Tonight is about what's left after the wound, and what's left is in this room, and it's running out of time.
Trevor goes still under it. Just for a second. A full-body pause, his breath catching, his eyes on mine in the dark with a focus that could cut glass, and then he's pulling me back in, his hand at the back of my neck, his mouth on mine, and the kiss is hungry in a way that has nothing to do with want and everything to do with two men who've run out of time to be careful.
We grapple. That's the only word for it. Not making love, not fucking — grappling. His back hits the wall, my knee between his thighs, his hand finding my cock and gripping hard, my teeth on his neck, his hips grinding up into mine with a pressure that blurs my vision. We move off the wall to the bed in a stagger of mouths and hands, and then I've got his wrists pinned above his head and my mouth at his throat, sucking a mark into the skin below his jaw that'll be visible tomorrow, and neither of us gives a single fuck, because tomorrow is its own country and we are not its citizens.
Underneath the urgency, something else keeps surfacing. In the way his hand cups the back of my skull when I'm between his legs, fingers gentle in my short hair, holding me there not with force but with a tenderness that feels both ancient and brand-new. In the way I press my forehead to his sternum and just breathe for a moment, my face against his chest, his heartbeat hammering against my skin, the rhythm so familiar I could set a watch by it — andthe familiarity is the thing that finally cracks something loose behind my ribs.
When he pushes into me it's slow, and then it isn't, the two of us finding the rhythm we always find, his cock stretching me open until my whole world narrows to a single point of white-hot pressure and his name is in my mouth and my hand is fisted in the sheets and his other hand is laced through mine against the mattress, knuckles white, holding on like the holding is the thing keeping us both in the bed and on the earth and inside the one night we've got before the morning takes it. I come with his mouth on the back of my neck and his hand on my cock, and he follows a few strokes later, his body going rigid over mine, a sound torn out of him low and broken against my shoulder.
Neither of us says a word. Not "I love you." Not "come back." Not "don't get shot." The words sit right there, right at the surface, visible in the dark, close enough to taste, and neither of us reaches for them. I don't reach because I don't know how to say it without it sounding like a goodbye, and goodbyes are the one thing I've spent my whole life refusing to practice. Trevor doesn't reach because he's spent his whole life swallowing exactly this — the want, the need, the truth of what lives between us — and the habit's too deep to break in one night, even a night like this.
We end up tangled and wrecked on top of the covers, my arm thrown across his chest, both of us staring at the ceiling in the dark. My breathing's ragged. His is slower, measured, a man consciously controlling something that wants to run wild. Sweat cools on our skin. The roomsmells like sex and cheap soap and the musk of two bodies pressed together longer than either of them planned.
My breathing evens first. My body makes the decision my brain's been fighting — sleep comes like a closed fist, sudden and total, pulling me under before I can resist. The last thing I'm aware of is Trevor's hand finding my forearm where it lies across his chest, his fingers settling over my wrist, holding me there.
I don't dream. Or if I do, I don't remember it. What I remember is surfacing sometime in the deep of the night to the quality of silence that means Trevor's still awake. His hand hasn't moved from my forearm. His breathing's too measured, too controlled, a man counting his own heartbeats and finding the count unsatisfactory. I don't open my eyes. Don't speak. Just lie there with my arm across his chest and his hand on my wrist and the dark around us and the weight of everything we haven't said pressing down on both of us like something that might, with time, become bearable.
His thumb moves once across my wrist. A slow, deliberate stroke, the pad of his finger against my pulse point, and the touch is so gentle it almost doesn't register, and then it's gone, and his hand is still.
Trevor doesn't sleep. I can feel it in the stillness of his body, a man who's decided sleep is a luxury he can't afford, not tonight, not with tomorrow waiting at the end of the driveway in two backpacks and a phone full of nothing yet and a town that's already decided how this ends. His hand stays on my wrist. My arm stays across his chest. We lie there in the dark, not speaking, not moving, just existing inthe same unbearable silence that's defined us since we were old enough to know what silence cost.
The alarm will go off at six. The backpacks will be shouldered. The door will open. The day will begin. Whatever happens after that belongs to a future neither of us is brave enough to name, so we don't name it. We lie here. We breathe. We hold. And for now, in this room, on this narrow bed with its military corners and its water-stained ceiling, holding is the thing we can do, so we do it.
Chapter Twenty
Trevor
The county road narrows to a single lane where the asphalt gives out and the gravel begins. Trees press in from both sides, Pennsylvania hardwoods gone dense with late-summer growth, branches meeting overhead in a tunnel of green that turns the light strange and dappled. I've been driving an hour. Twenty miles out of Roan, east along the route Cole mapped on the back of that gas station receipt, the forest thickening with each mile, the radio cutting in and out until I shut it off and let the engine fill the cab.
Then the cruiser appears. Not behind me — ahead, coming the other way, black-and-white with the light bar dark, moving at the unhurried pace of a man who isn't worried about being late because he decides what late means. Calloway. I clock him through the windshield — graying hair, clean-shaven jaw, the bulk of a man who fills his uniform by volume rather than fitness. He passes without slowing, without looking, eyes on the road aheadlike I'm just another set of headlights on a road that belongs to him.
I keep my speed steady. Eyes forward. Hands loose. The Marine in me runs the calculation: target moving west, likely returning to Roan after whatever he came out here to do. I wait until his taillights vanish around a bend, then check the odometer, count two-tenths of a mile, and swing the Ford onto a dirt track I spotted on the way in — barely a road, more a depression in the undergrowth where loggers pulled timber twenty years ago and nobody bothered to maintain the path. The truck bounces over roots. Branches scrape the paint. I don't care. The phone's in my pocket. The mission is the mission.
I find the pull-off a quarter-mile in — a shallow cut in the tree line where the ground levels just enough to park without being seen from the main road. I kill the engine. Sit. Listen. The forest is loud the way only empty forests are — birds, insects, the high whine of cicadas in the canopy, the soft creak of branches settling in the heat. No engines. No voices. Just the green weight of Pennsylvania pressing in from all sides, and somewhere beyond it, the thing I came to find.
I grab the phone. Battery: sixty-one percent. Enough. The digital zoom maxes out at a grainy ten-times that Cole would call amateur hour, but amateur hour is what we've got, so I make peace with it and shoulder the door open.
