Page 48 of The Drifter

Clint Dane sat in the middle of my bed and looked at me for a long moment.

Then, he reached over and took the sheet and pushed it all the way off, and he stood up.

He was naked. He was completely, unhurriedly naked, and he stood there in the copper light in the middle of my bedroom with all of it—the shoulders and the abs and the thighs and every rough, scarred, sun-cut inch of a man who had been in some places—and he did not put a hand anywhere near himself. He did not perform it. And he did not make a joke.

He just stood there. Empty-handed.

"Now there's nothing in mine," he said.

I stared at him.

"That's not the same."

"It's exactly the same."

"You are a man⁠—"

"I've got a body that's been used hard," he said. "There's things on it I'd rather you didn't ask about yet. I've been shot twice and one of them was ugly. I've got a knee that tells me when it’s going to rain.” He held his hands out to the sides, palms open, and he said it without one ounce of self-pity. "And I’m standing in a strange woman's bedroom in a strange city with nothing on me. No pack. No boots. Not even the pistol. I want you to understand what that means, because I don't do it."

I couldn't say anything.

"You want to be useful," he said. "So, be useful. Come here and let me look at you."

"That is not being useful."

"Sasha." And there it was—the country a smile comes from. "It's the most useful thing anybody's ever done for me."

I dropped the shirt.

It made a soft sound on the floor. I heard it land and I stood there with my hands empty and my arms hanging at my sides and my heart going like a bird in a box.

He didn't come and get me. He stood in the middle of that room and waited, with all that air between us.

So, I crossed it.

Again. It didn't get easier.

I walked across my bedroom naked in the copper light with nothing in my hands. I stood in front of that man and I let him look at me.

He looked.

He took his time about it. He looked at my face first, which is a thing men do not do. Then, he looked at all the rest of me, slow, the way he'd read the boot leather, the way he'd read my lobby. He looked at the stretch marks on my hips and at the scar on my knee from a bicycle and a curb when I was a kid. He looked at my hands.

He looked for so long that my skin came up. The flush went from my chest into my throat. I had to fight myself to keep standing in it.

"There," he said. Quiet. "That's it."

"That's what?"

"That's the woman who was in that hallway."

And he didn’t touch me.

That was the thing. He stood there close enough that I could feel the heat coming off him and he did not lay one hand on me. He let me stand in front of him with nothing on and nothing to do, and something in me that had been braced since I was nine years old in a linen closet let go, all at once.

My eyes went hot.

"Don't," I said.