Page 60 of The Drifter

"Clint."

"It's nothing, Sasha." His hand came up out of the water and moved slow down my arm. "Water's going cold. That's all."

The water was not cold. The water was still warm enough to poach an egg. But he'd already shifted under me, already started the smooth business of getting us up and out. It was done so gently, so competently, that a woman who didn't do what I do would have felt cared for.

I felt handled.

I know handled. I do handled for a living. And there is a specific insult in being handled by an expert when you are one yourself, in feeling the warm cloth come down over your eyes by a hand that knows exactly how to make it feel like a kindness.

I let him do it. I let him lift me out of that tub and wrap me in a towel and I let him not tell me, because whatever it was had put a stillness in him that I hadn’t seen in three days, not even close. Some old, animal part of me went quiet and cooperative in the presence of it the way a field goes quiet when the hawk's shadow crosses over.

He dried off fast. That was new, too. The man who did everything slow was moving now with an economy that had no waste in it anywhere. He was doing it while trying to look like he wasn't, and the trying was somehow worse than if he'd just moved.

He got dressed.

He put on the clothes from yesterday, the old ones, not the good gray shirt Sasha-in-a-store had picked out—the road clothes, the leaving clothes—and he did it in about ninety seconds. I stood in my bedroom doorway wrapped in a towel with my wet hair down my back and watched a man armor up.

The pistol went in at the small of his back. He hadn't worn it with me. He'd made a whole speech about not wearing it, standing naked in this room, about what it meant that he wasn't wearing it. Now, it went on without a word, and the shirt came down over it, and he checked the fall of the fabric in the mirror the way I check a lobby. I understood that whatever had happened in that water, we were not in the country of the last two days anymore.

"You have to go," I said.

"I have to go."

"Where?"

He turned around and looked at me. His face was gentle, and it was closed. Both at once. I hadn’t known a face could do both at once until I watched his do it.

"I've got to check on something," he said.

"That's not an answer."

"No." He came across the room, and he stopped in front of me, and he put his hand along the side of my face. His thumb moved once over my cheekbone. "It isn't."

I stood there.

Every reflex I own was going off. Ask him. Read him. Get it out of him. I get things out of people, it's the one gift I have that never fails, I can open a stranger like a folding map. Push. Push now, while he's touching your face, while the door's still open a crack.

And underneath all of that, a colder, older thing, standing very still and saying: don't.

Because I knew this shape. I had watched this exact shape cross my marble for years. The man who goes still. The one who checks the exits. The one who came home from someplace he'll never name and moves through a lobby reading corners. I had made a vow about that shape, and I had broken the vow, and I had spent two days pretending the shape wasn't part of the man.

The shape was the man. It had just walked back into the room, and it had put on a pistol, and it was standing in front of me with its hand on my face being tender. I wasn’t going to get anything out of it, because whatever this was, it was the thing I had sworn off. It was the reason I'd sworn off. It was bodies-disappear-when-they-need-to. It was blood in a room and a folio I'd have to scrub and a badge at my counter with a photograph.

And I had let it into my bed.

"Okay," I said.

He looked faintly surprised. He'd braced for the push. He knew me well enough already to brace for it. I hadn't given it to him. Something moved behind his eyes that might have been relief and might have been something sadder.

"Okay?" he said.

"You have to check on something. You can't tell me what. I've been on the other side of that sentence a thousand times, Clint. I know how it goes." I got my chin up. It cost me. "I'm not going to make you lie to me twice."

He closed his eyes for a second.

"I'm not lying to you," he said.

"You're not telling me. It's a cousin of lying. I've met the whole family."