"And?"
"Outcomes are exceptional."
She laughs against my chest, and I feel it in my ribs. I roll to the side, pulling her with me, and she settles against me with the comfortable ease of a woman who has been thinking about fitting into this space for months and finds that the fit is exactly right.
My hand traces the freckles on her shoulder in a pattern I will remember when I remember nothing else.
Her fingers find the scars on my knuckles and trace them one by one, reading the history of damage with the gentle precision of a woman who has spent her career putting people back together.
"These are old," she says.
"Most of them."
"This one isn't." Her thumb presses a mark across my second knuckle, white and thin. Recent.
"Hatch cover on the helo. Last rotation."
"And you didn't have it looked at."
"It was a scrape."
"It scarred."
"Everything scars."
She lifts her head and looks at me with an expression that is equal parts tenderness and the specific frustration of a medical professional confronting a patient who doesn't take care of himself. "When we get back to the center, I'm doing a full assessment of every scar on your hands. Non-negotiable."
"Is that a professional order or a personal request?"
"Yes."
I pull her closer. The morning light has gone from early gold to full sun, and the room is warm, and her body against mine is warm, and the coffee is cold on the counter downstairs, and I cannot remember the last time I wanted to stay in a place this much.
We drowse. We talk. She tells me about the first time she stood on a starting block and knew the water was where she belonged, before the shoulder took that away and gave her a different purpose. I tell her about the first poem I wrote, in a forward operating base with sand in everything, three lines about the color of blood on concrete that I never showed anyone. She doesn't ask to see the notebook. She just listens, her fingers still tracing my knuckles, and the patience of her listening is an intimacy I didn't know I was missing.
Sunday passes in the slow, heavy way of a day that both of us know is borrowed. Rivera will have updates. The rehab center needs attending. The investigation, the tampered equipment, the pattern that brought us together in the first place, is still running underneath everything, a current that doesn't stop because two people stopped pretending.
We eat. We shower, separately, because the banter required to negotiate a shared shower in her small bathroom is more than either of us can manage without ending up back in bed, and there are limits to how much borrowed time the day can hold. She puts on clean clothes and looks like the Ireland the worldsees. I put on yesterday's clothes and look like a man who didn't go home.
"You need clothes," she says.
"I need a lot of things. Clothes are on the list."
"What else is on the list?"
"Coffee that isn't cold. A toothbrush that isn't my finger. More of whatever this morning was."
She smiles, and the unguarded version surfaces again, the one that exists before the professional composure. "The toothbrush and clothes can be arranged. The rest is already in progress."
Evening comes. We've been in her townhome all day, the investigation on pause and the world outside held at the length of a phone call, and the quiet between us has settled into a comfort that doesn't need filling. She reads on the couch. I sit beside her, and the notebook stays in my pocket because the woman next to me is the poem and writing it down would mean looking away from her, and I am not looking away.
We go to bed together. She brushes her teeth while I stand in the doorway and watch her in the bathroom mirror, and the domesticity of it, toothpaste and bare feet and the casual way she bumps her hip against mine when I step in to wash my face, is disarming in a way that combat never was. Eighteen years of training against every kind of threat, and a woman in cotton shorts bumping her hip against mine undoes all of it.
In bed, she turns to me, and I don't let her set the terms.
My hand closes around her wrist and I pin it above her head, and her breath catches, and the look she gives me, sharp and hot, is an invitation disguised as resistance.
"Round two already?" she says. "Your recovery time is impressive."
