The
Warehouse, Baltimore, Maryland
Sunday, August 29, 4:14
A.M.
Time Remaining on the
Extinction Clock: 79 hours, 46 minutes
My quarters were an office that had been
remodeled into an efficiency apartment. There was a bed, stand-up
closet-I didn’t have enough personal effects to call it an
armoire-and a work desk with a secure laptop. A small bathroom with
a tiny shower was built into what had once been a storage closet.
Cobbler met me at the door and entwined himself sinuously around my
ankles as I entered. He’s a great cat with a purr that sounds like
an industrial buzz saw.
I squatted down and scratched his fur for a
few minutes while I took stock of my life. Two months ago I was a
police detective with aspirations of going to the FBI academy. Sure
I’d worked on the Homeland task force, but I never thought that I’d
be playing secret agent. It still felt unreal and vaguely absurd.
After all, who was I? Just another working schlub from Baltimore
with a few jujutsu tricks and a steady gun hand. Big deal. How did
that qualify me to do this sort of thing?
Cobbler gave my hand a playful nip and
dialed up the volume on his purr.
I got to my feet and the room suddenly did a
little Irish jig as if some internal hand had thrown a switch to
dump the last of the adrenaline from my system. Exhaustion hit me
like a truck and I tottered into the bathroom, turned on the
shower, and adjusted the temperature to “boiled lobster.” I was
still dressed in the soiled clothes I’d worn since my escape from
the NSA at the cemetery. A lot had happened since then, and none of
it made me smell like a rose. I stripped down and turned the shower
to broil, but as I was about to step under the spray I heard a
knock on the door.
Cursing under my breath, I grabbed a towel
and knotted it around my waist and then jerked open the door,
expecting to have to tell Rudy or one of my guys from Echo Team to
piss off, but my growl turned into a smile.
Grace Courtland stood
there.
Her green eyes met mine and then did a
theatrical up-and-down evaluation of my state of near
undress.
“I was just about to take a shower,” I said.
“And believe me I need one.”
“I don’t care if you’re filthy,” she said
with a wicked smile, “because I’ve got a seriously dirty
mind.”
She looked quickly up and down the hall to
make sure it was empty, then pushed me inside and kicked the door
closed behind her. I pulled her to me and we kissed with such heat
that the air around us seemed to catch fire. With one hand she
helped me with the buttons of her uniform blouse; with the other
she pulled apart the knot on my towel. We left a trail of clothes
from the door to the middle of the bathroom floor. I popped the
hooks of her bra and she shrugged out of it as she slammed me back
against the wall.
“I couldn’t really tell you earlier, not
properly,” I said as she kissed my throat and chest, “but I missed
you.”
“I missed you, too, you big bloody Yank,”
she said in a fierce whisper, and her breath was hot on my skin. A
minute later we were in the cramped confines of my shower stall. We
lathered each other up and rinsed off together and never stopped
kissing. When she was aroused her green eyes took on a smoky haze
that I found irresistibly erotic. I lifted one of her legs and
pulled it around me and then hooked my right hand under her thigh
and hoisted her up so that I entered her as she leaned back against
the tiled wall of the shower. That moment was a scalding perfection
of animal heat that made us both cry out. The day had been filled
with stress and death and heartbreak and tension, and here amid the
wet steam we reaffirmed the vitality and reality of our lives by
connecting with the life force of each other.
When she came she bit down on my shoulder
hard enough to break the skin, but I didn’t care because I was
tumbling into that same deep abyss.
After that it all became slow and soft. We
stood together for a long time under the spray, our foreheads
touching as the water sluiced down our naked limbs, washing away
the stress and loneliness that defined us and what we did. We
toweled each other off and then lay down naked on my
bed.
“I’m knackered,” she whispered. “Let me
sleep for a few minutes.”
I kissed her lips and her forehead and
propped myself on one elbow. She was asleep almost at once. Her
dark hair was still damp and it clung to her fine skull and
feathered along the edges of her lovely face. Her eyes were closed,
her long lashes brushing smooth cheeks. Grace’s body was slim,
strong, curvy, and fit. She looked more like a ballet dancer than a
soldier. But she had a lot of little scars that told the truth. A
knife, a bullet, teeth, shrapnel. I loved those scars. I knew each
and every one of them with an intimacy I know few others had
shared. Her scars-amid the otherwise flawless perfection of
her-somehow humanized her in a way that I’m not articulate enough
to describe. They made her more fully human, more potently female,
more of a fully realized woman than any misdirection of fashion or
cosmetics could ever hope to achieve. This was a person who was
equal in power and beauty and grace to anyone and in my experience
second to none. I loved that about her. I loved
her.
And that fast my mind stopped and some inner
hand hastily stabbed down on the rewind button so that I listened
to what I’d just thought.
I loved her.
Wow.
I’d never said it before. Not to her. We’d
never said it to each other. Over the last two months we’d shared
trust and sex and secrets, but we’d both stayed at minimum safe
distance from the l word. Like it was radioactive.
Yet here, in the semi-darkness of my room,
in the midst of a terrible crisis, after hours of sleeplessness and
stress, my unguarded heart had spoken something that all of my
levels of conscious awareness had not seen or
known.
I loved Grace Courtland.
She slept on. I pulled the sheet up to cover
us both, and as I wrapped her in my arms she wriggled against my
chest. It was such an innocent-perhaps primal-act. A need for
security and closeness dating back to those long nights in the
caves while the saber-toothed cats and dire wolves screamed in the
night. Just that, I told myself.
As exhausted as I was, I couldn’t sleep. The
conference was in twenty minutes anyway, so I lay there and thought
about the enormity of those three little words.
Love is not always a goodness, its arrival
not always a kindness or a comfort. Not between warriors. Not when
we lived on a battlefield. Not when either or both of us could be
killed on any given workday.
Not when it could become a distraction from
focus or a cause for hesitation. Love, in our circumstances, could
get people killed. Us and those who depended on us. It was careless
and unwise and stupid.
But there it was. As real and present in my
heart as the blood that surged through each
chamber.
I loved Grace Courtland.
Now what do I do?