Chapter 10: The Line

Beckett

I did not sleep again.

This was becoming a pattern.

I lay in the dark and looked at the ceiling and thought about a hallway and a hand on my chest and a heartbeat that had not been steady and the specific way Sloane Mercer had looked at me when she said yes I still like it was the simplest thing in the world when it was actually the most complicated thing either of us had said since she moved in.

I got up at four thirty.

Went to the kitchen. Made coffee. Stood at the window the way I had been standing at windows a lot lately because apparently that was what I did now when I could not sleep and could not work and could not do anything useful with the thing that was happening inside my chest.

Marcus called at seven.

I answered on the second ring.

"You look terrible," he said.

"You can not see me."

"I have known you for six years. I can hear it." A pause. "What happened."

I did not answer immediately.

Marcus waited. He was good at waiting. It was one of the things that made him useful and also occasionally infuriating.

"Nothing happened," I said.

"Something happened."

"Nothing I am going to tell you about at seven in the morning."

Another pause. Longer this time.

"Beckett," he said carefully. "How complicated is this getting."

I looked out the window at the city waking up below me.

"Complicated," I said.

He was quiet for a moment.

"Is that a problem," he said. Not a challenge. Just a real question.

I thought about it honestly which was something I had been avoiding doing.

"I don't know yet," I said.

He accepted that. Marcus always knew which answers to push on and which ones to leave alone.

We talked about work for twenty minutes. Real things. A board issue that needed handling. A contract that was close to closing. Normal things that existed in the part of my life that had always been clean and simple because I had made it that way deliberately.

After I hung up I stood in the kitchen for a while longer.

Then I heard her alarm go off down the hallway.

She came out at seven forty five.

Hair up. Work clothes already on which meant she had been awake for a while before the alarm. I recognized that. I did the same thing. Lying there in the dark waiting for the time when getting up became justifiable.

She stopped in the kitchen doorway when she saw me.

We looked at each other.

Last night was there between us in the way things are when something has shifted and both people know it and neither has decided what to do about it yet.

"Coffee is made," I said.

"Thank you," she said.

She came in and poured herself a cup and stood at the counter and we were back to our specific distance. The one we had developed without discussing it. Close enough. Far enough.

"I have been thinking," she said.

"About."

"Last night."

I waited.

She wrapped both hands around her cup and looked at it. Then up at me.

"I think we need to be careful," she said. "About what we are doing."

"I agree."

She looked slightly surprised that I agreed immediately. "You do."

"Yes."

"Because the situation is already complicated enough and adding something personal to it—"

"Sloane."

She stopped.

"I agree with you," I said. "I am not arguing."

She looked at me for a moment. "You are being very reasonable about this."

"Is that a problem."

"It is unexpected."

I looked at her across the kitchen. At the way she was holding her coffee cup with both hands. At the way she was trying to be practical about something that had stopped being practical the moment she put her hand on my chest in the hallway last night.

"Can I tell you something honestly," I said.

"That would make a nice change," she said. Which was fair.

"I have been careful my entire adult life," I said. "About everything. Every decision. Every relationship. Every person I let close and how close I let them get. I built an entire system around being careful and it has worked very well and I am not going to pretend it has not cost me anything because it has cost me a great deal."

She was very still.

"And then you moved into my apartment," I said. "And started making roast chicken and leaving the kitchen light on and asking me questions nobody has asked me before and staying in the room when most people would have found a reason to leave."

She did not say anything.

"So yes," I said. "I think we should be careful. I think the situation is complicated and getting more complicated and adding something personal to it creates risks that are real and significant." I looked at her directly. "And I also think that I stopped being able to be fully careful about this approximately ten days ago and I am telling you that so you know where I am. Not to pressure you. Just so you know."

The kitchen was very quiet.

Outside the city was moving. In here it was just the two of us and the coffee and the morning light and something that had been building for three weeks sitting in the space between us.

She looked at me for a long moment.

"Ten days ago," she said.

"Yes."

"That was the second night."

"Yes."

She looked at her coffee. "What happened on the second night."

"You moved a stack of my case files to the other end of the counter so you had room to eat without asking if it was okay," I said. "And then you apologized immediately and offered to move them back. And I told you it was fine. And you looked at me for a second like you were trying to figure out if I actually meant it."

She was very still.

"And I realized I actually meant it," I said. "That was the second night."

She did not say anything for a long time.

Then she put her coffee cup down.

She crossed the kitchen.

She stopped in front of me. Close. The closest we had been except for the hallway last night.

She looked up at me.

I looked down at her.

"I am scared of this," she said quietly. Not ashamed of it. Just honest.

"I know," I said. "So am I."

"You do not seem scared."

"I have had more practice hiding it."

Something moved across her face. Almost a smile. The real kind that she did not do often enough.

"Beckett," she said.

"Sloane," I said.

She reached up and put her hand on my face. Just her palm against my jaw. Warm. Simple. The most uncomplicated gesture anyone had made toward me in five years.

I closed my eyes for exactly one second.

When I opened them she was still looking at me.

"Okay," she said quietly. "Okay."

She dropped her hand.

Picked up her coffee.

Went back to her side of the counter.

I stood there.

"What does okay mean," I said.

"It means I am not going to pretend this is not happening," she said. "It means I am not going to make a rule about it or put it in a document or negotiate terms around it." She looked at me over her coffee cup. "It means okay. We figure it out as we go."

I looked at her.

"I have never figured anything out as I go," I said.

"I know," she said. "Neither have I." A pause. "Maybe that is the point."

She picked up her bag from the chair by the door.

"I have a nine o clock," she said. "I will be back by seven."

"I will be here," I said.

She nodded once.

Walked to the elevator.

The doors opened. She stepped in. Turned around.

She looked at me across the penthouse for one moment.

Then the doors closed.

I stood in the kitchen for a long time after that.

Then I picked up my phone and called Marcus back.

"Something happened," I said when he answered.

A pause.

"Good something or bad something," he said.

I thought about a hand on my jaw. About okay. About figuring it out as we go which was the most terrifying and the most right thing anyone had said to me in a very long time.

"I genuinely do not know yet," I said.

Marcus was quiet for a moment.

Then he said something he had not said to me in five years.

"Good," he said. Simply. Just that.

And somehow that was exactly the right thing.