She stepped out of the small pile of objects and walked to him.
She put her hands on his face.Not the careful nurse’s hands she’d had on the back of his head Saturday night in the kitchen.These were different hands — the hands of a woman who was done with restraint.Her thumb at his jaw.Her palm at his temple.She held his face the way a person holds something they’ve been afraid of breaking and have just decided to stop being afraid.
She kissed him.
He kissed her back.
Three weeks of rationed discipline came undone in the entryway of the house on Golden Acres Road.He’d stood at her counter and stood at her kitchen sink and stood across an operational map from her on Sunday and at every point he had measured the distance between them in inches he wasn’t allowed to close.He stopped measuring.
His hand went to the back of her neck.The other to the small of her back.She made a small sound against his mouth that wasn’t a word, and he answered without language, and the kiss went on long enough that when she pulled back to breathe, the front-door deadbolt had been locked for almost three minutes and he hadn’t noticed any of them.
“Bedroom,” she said.
“Okay.”
She took his hand and led him.
* * *
She turned on the bedside lamp, not the overhead.
Warm light.Enough to see by.Enough to be seen by.She stood at the foot of the bed in her scrubs and looked at him — the man she’d spent three weeks watching across coffee cups and across kitchen tables and across an operational map, the man who had stood thirty-seven seconds away from her this morning and counted Mississippis until she came through a stairwell door.
“Come here,” she said.
He came.
She pulled the hem of her scrub shirt up and over her head and dropped it on the floor.Her sports bra came off after it.Her hair stayed up in the low knot, a few strands falling around her ears, and she didn’t reach to fix them.
He lifted his thermal over his head.His T-shirt came with it.He let both pieces fall to the floor beside her shirt.
She looked at him for a long moment.Then her hands went to his chest, palms flat, and she took her time mapping what was there — the breastbone, the collar of muscle, the soft place at the base of his throat where his pulse moved.Her fingers grazed across to his left forearm.To the scar.
She touched it with the same clinical precision he’d watched her use when she’d first identified it three weeks ago in his cottage — the kind of touch a nurse used when she was assessing damage.Her thumb followed the raised line from inside the wrist to the elbow.
“I know where it is,” she said.
“Of course you do.”
“I’ve known where every scar on you is since the second time I saw your forearms.”
“I assumed.”
She unbuttoned his jeans.He unzipped them.The rest came off in the natural order things came off when two people had stopped being careful, and he watched her watch him, and she let him watch.
Her scrub pants came off after his.Then everything else.
She stepped out of her clothes and stood in front of him, and the lamp light fell across her shoulders and the line of her collarbone and the small hollow at the base of her throat where he’d wanted to put his mouth for three weeks.Auburn hair coming loose from the knot.Green eyes.The freckles he’d only ever seen at the bridge of her nose now visible across both shoulders.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay, what?”
“Okay, I’m looking at you.Give me a minute.”
Her mouth pulled at one corner.“Take the minute.”
He took it.