Page 59 of The Drifter

My hand went to her wet hair—holding on, the way she'd held my forearm at the refrigerator.

The steam. The lap of the water. Her eyes coming up to mine and staying, checking her work, pleased with it, merciless.

She built me the way I'd built her. Patient. Thorough. Bringing me to the edge and easing off, twice, three times, until my legs were iron and my breathing was gravel and her name was most of my vocabulary.

"Sasha—I'm⁠—"

She hummed around me. I know. And she didn't ease off.

She took me all the way through it. I came with my hand fisted in her hair and my head back and her name breaking off the tile, pulsing into the wet heat of her mouth. She stayed with me, swallowing, working me slow through every last wave the way I'd stayed with her until there was nothing left in me anywhere, until I was empty and rung and swaying on my feet in that ridiculous, magnificent tub. She let me go and sat back on her heels and looked up at me like a woman who had never once lost a negotiation in her life.

"Clean," she announced.

I laughed. I sank down into that water and gathered her in. We settled together—me against the sloped end, her back against my chest, the water up around us both, her head on my shoulder.

We soaked. The steam drifted. The morning light came through the window soft and pearly and lay on the water. Her fingers laced through mine on her stomach, under the surface. Her breathing went long and slow, and mine followed it down.

I was happy.

I noted it the way I note everything, and then, for once, I didn't file it. I let it stand there in the open. A man in a queen's tub in a city he'd known three days, holding a woman who negotiated like her grandmother was watching, warm to the bone, nowhere to be. If the road wanted me, it could come knock.

I closed my eyes.

I don't know how long they were closed. A minute. Less. Long enough for the water to go glassy and her weight to settle full against me.

Then, something nicked the edge of my senses.

Small. Wrong. A sound that didn't belong to the building—thin, insect, mechanical, a whine down at the floor of hearing, coming from a direction that should have held nothing but gulls and sky.

My eyes came open.

They went straight to the window.

And there, six feet off the glass, hanging dead-level in the morning air with the harbor spread out gold behind it, was a drone. Matte gray. Rock-steady in the breeze coming off the water, which takes skill, or money, or both.

Its camera was pointed straight at us.

17

SASHA

Something changed in the water.

That's the only way I can put it. I was lying back against him in that tub with my eyes closed and my whole body gone to warm soup, his arms crossed loose over me, his heart doing its slow, unbothered thing against my back. And then, the arms weren't loose.

It was nothing. It was less than nothing. A tightening at his forearms, a half-degree change in the way he was holding me. If I had been anybody else, I probably would have slept right through it.

I’m not anybody else. I have spent my life reading the tiny thing—the guest whose smile doesn't reach, the hand that lingers a half-beat on the counter, the couple who ask for one room and mean two. My whole body is an instrument built to catch the subtle wrong note. And a note had just gone wrong somewhere behind me, in a man who didn’t have wrong notes.

I opened my eyes.

The steam. The window. The pearly morning light on the water.

"What is it?” I asked.

"Nothing."

He said it easy. He said it perfectly, actually—the voice level, the arms going deliberately loose again, a man arranging himself back into calm the way I arrange my face across a marble counter. And that was the tell, because I know that move from the inside. I’ve made a living out of that exact move. You don’t perform calm unless the thing underneath it is not calm.