Page 31 of Kid Gloves

"You hate protocol deviations."

"I do."

"You drove four hours in the dark on gas-station coffee."

"I did."

She leans on the doorframe and looks down at me, and the smile arrives in stages, sunrise conducting itself, and she has never once in her life let a moment go unnarrated and God willing never will: "Wade Mercer. Did you miss the ranch?"

"The ranch is fine," I say, coming up the steps, watching her back into the warm light of the doorway with her grin going unsteady at the edges, and she hands me my own line back — "I wasn't asking about the ranch" — and then there's no more yard between us and no more phone line either, and I kiss her the way the whole drive home wanted me to — her laugh landing in my mouth, her hands fisting my shirt with that grip she warned me about, Tank circling us both like a customs official processing a shipment he personally approved.

"Wait — wait." She plants a hand on my chest, pulls back two inches, solemn as a customs inspection. "Protocol. Did you bring me anything from your travels?"

"I was on a protective detail."

"Dean brings Callie things from details. There's precedent."

There is, in fact, a crumpled gas-station bag in my jacket pocket, acquired at 2330 in Fredericksburg from a clerk who watched me stand in the candy aisle for four minutes like a man defusing it. I hand it over. She opens it and goes silent.

Peach gummies. The specific brand. Thursday night, minute seventy-one of the call, she'd mentioned them — one sentence, a story about Gran buying them after livestock auctions, sweet and fake and perfect, they don't stock them anywhere anymore, and then she'd moved on to the contractor and I had, apparently, not moved on at all.

"You were listening," she says, to the bag. Her voice does something at the edges.

"Minute seventy-one," I say. "I take minutes."

"Inside," she says against my jaw, breathless, imperial, gummies in her fist like a bouquet. "House rules. My house, my⁠—"

"It's technically my⁠—"

"My house," and she's laughing, pulling me over the threshold by the shirt, and the door closes on the porch light and the yard and the whole watching county, "your name's just on the paperwork, now shut up and come here."

Her rules, as issued, in the order issued:

The porch light stays on—"for Brisket, she has abandonment issues," delivered while walking me backward down the hall by the shirt, and I'd sign anything, the goat can have the porch, the goat can have the deed.

The T-shirt (mine, the traitorous shirt, three days on her body while I swept a stranger's hedges) stays on "until I say," which turns out to be four minutes, which are the longest and best four minutes of my quarter, my hands under soft cotton learning three days' worth of missed inventory while she narrates my own homecoming to me—"he returns from the field, visibly feral, having lost a fight with a beard trimmer"—until the narration goes to pieces on a breath because I've found the exact spot below her ear that files her whole operating system under pending.

"There," she manages, "that, log that⁠—"

"Logged," I say, into her throat, and take the shirt off her by executive action, her arms going up like she planned it, like we planned it, like three days of ninety-minute phone calls were all one long pre-brief for this, and maybe they were, because there's no first-time fumbling left in us, just the shorthand: her knees hitting the bed, my name in her mouth gone soft and certain, the lamp she reaches over and leaves on—"I want to watch you come apart, fair's fair, you did inventory last time," and God, the mouth on her, right up until I put mine on hers and make the narration optional.

She takes me apart. That's the report. Slow, greedy, laughing at the noises I've stopped policing, her hands baling-wire clever at my belt and then everywhere, and when I finally settle over her and into her she exhales my name like the answer to something, like a latch dropping into place, and pulls my forehead down to hers — conferring, always conferring, and we move like a conversation three days overdue. Her heels lock behind me. The headboard has opinions. Somewhere in the middle she starts to laugh — pure joy, no jokes left in it, and the laugh becomes the wave that takes her, her whole body going taut and then radiant, my name breaking into pieces against my mouth, and I follow her over like a man who finally, finally stopped checking the knots.

The lamp stays on. She watches. Fair's fair.

After, she's sprawled across me doing damage assessment at the ceiling—"the headboard's fine, don't write it up"—eating peach gummies out of the bag on my chest like a woman at a drive-in, offering me every third one as tribute. They taste like sweet and fake and gas station. They taste like minute seventy-one. I understand her grandmother completely.

"Best debrief of my career," she says, to the ceiling.

"You've never been debriefed."

"I run a federal program, I've been debriefed — okay, no, you're right, but if that's the format, I'm attending everything." She lobs a gummy. It bounces off my jaw. Tank collects it off the floorboards with the speed of a dog who knows contraband windows are brief. And I'm running a thumb along the ladder of her spine, cataloging what three days away taught me, which is the size of the hole this woman would leave. It's not romantic data. It's structural. There's a Delaney-shaped support column holding up buildings in me I didn't know had loads.

"Missed you," I say. Out loud. Unprompted. Both words.

She goes still, then props her chin on my chest, and her eyes are shining and merciless. "Say it again, that cost you so much."

"It's in the record. Reread the record."