The Near Kiss

Emma's POV

There's a particular kind of silence that only happens after you've stopped pretending.

We'd stopped pretending somewhere around midnight, though neither of us had said so out loud. Daniel sat across from me on my living room floor, back against the couch, the case files spread between us like a battlefield we'd both grown tired of fighting on. The lamp in the corner threw everything in gold and shadow. Outside, the city had gone quiet in the way it only does after two in the morning, when even the restless give up and go to sleep.

"You should go home," I said, not meaning it, and he knew I didn't mean it, because he didn't move.

"You should stop pretending you want me to," he said, and something in his low voice, a little rough from hours of talking, made my pulse do something embarrassing.

I looked down at the photograph in my hand instead of at him. It was easier that way. Safer. The photograph showed the tram wreckage from an angle the news never aired, and I'd been staring at it for so long that the twisted metal had stopped looking like a tragedy and started looking like a puzzle, which was its own kind of horror.

"I keep thinking," I said, "that if I'd never gotten that first text, I wouldn't know how to be afraid of my own life. I used to just live it. Now everything feels like it's waiting to happen."

Daniel didn't answer right away. When I finally looked up, he was watching me with an expression I didn't have a name for, something between concern and a hunger he was clearly trying to keep on a short leash.

"You're not the same person who got that text," he said quietly. "You're stronger than her. Sharper. I've watched you piece together things that took the department three weeks to even consider."

"That's not exactly a compliment. It means I have a stalker with a personal vendetta and a flair for the dramatic."

"It means you're the reason we're this close to knowing who's doing this."

*This is close.* Two words that had been living rent-free in my chest for a week, because I knew what they cost him to say, knew he'd spent the better part of a year chasing a ghost who left no fingerprints, no patterns, nothing but warnings that arrived exactly when they were needed and never a second before.

The room felt smaller suddenly. Or maybe it was just that he'd shifted closer without either of us deciding to let that happen, the file folders forgotten between us, his knee brushing mine in a way that sent something electric skittering up my spine.

"Emma." My name in his mouth had never sounded like that before carefully, like he was setting down something breakable.

"Don't," I said, except it came out soft, nothing like the warning it was supposed to be.

"Don't what?"

*Don't look at me like I'm something you've been waiting for.* I couldn't say that. I couldn't say any of the things crowding behind my teeth that I'd started memorizing the sound of his car in my driveway, that some nights I laid awake replaying the exact timbre of his laugh, that somewhere in the last six months of derailed trams and cryptic warnings and a killer who seemed to know my schedule better than I did, he had become the one steady thing I reached for.

I didn't finish the sentence. He was close enough now that I could see the small scar above his eyebrow, could feel the warmth radiating off him, could smell rain and coffee and something achingly familiar that I never wanted to stop smelling.

"I've wanted to do this since the hospital," he said, voice barely above a whisper. "Since you woke up and the first thing you asked wasn't whether you'd live. You asked if the woman in the yellow raincoat made it."

My throat tightened. I hadn't known he remembered that.

"I was scared," I admitted. "I still am."

"Of what?"

"Of this." My hand found the collar of his shirt, not pushing him away, not quite pulling him closer either, caught in that terrible, thrilling middle place where every instinct I had screamed at me to be careful and every other part of me had already stopped listening. "Of wanting something that could get taken away. Everything I've wanted lately gets taken away, Daniel."

"Not this," he said. "I promise you, not this."

His hand came up to my jaw, so gentle it made something in my chest crack open, and the last careful inch between us started to disappear. I could feel his breath now, warm and unsteady, could feel my own heartbeat slamming so hard I was sure he could hear it. My eyes drifted shut. I let them. For one suspended, weightless second, I let myself believe that this just this, just him could exist outside of everything else trying to kill me.

His lips were a whisper away from mine when the alarm tore through the apartment.

Not the smoke detector. Not my phone.

The security system. The one Daniel had installed himself after the second break-in, the one wired to every window and door in the place, the one that had never not once in three months gone off by accident.

We both went rigid at the same instant, the moment between us shattering into something cold and sharp. Daniel was on his feet before I'd even processed the sound, his hand already reaching for the gun he kept holstered at his hip, his whole body shifting from the man who'd almost kissed me into someone I barely recognized alert, coiled, dangerous in a way that should have frightened me and instead made me feel, absurdly, safer.

"Stay behind me," he said, and I did, my heart still racing from an entirely different kind of fear now, my lips still tingling from a kiss that never happened.

The control panel by the door blinked red. Not the front entrance. Not a window.

The fire escapes outside my bedroom.

Daniel's jaw tightened as he stared at the panel, and in the low gold light his face had gone the color of a man who already suspected what or who he was about to find.

"Someone's already inside," he said.