Page 67 of His Wall

I stared at it.

I turned the phone face down on the nightstand.

Julian stirred. His arm tightened around my waist. He pulled me a quarter-inch closer in his sleep before his eyes opened, slowly. The hazel of them darker in the morning light than I had ever seen them.

He smiled.

"You're still here."

"I'm still here."

He pulled me closer. He pressed his mouth to my shoulder. To the inside of my wrist where the watch had been last night and was on the nightstand now. To the spot below my ear that he had found at 1:00 a.m. and had not stopped finding since.

I closed my eyes.

I let him.

I hated myself. I wanted him. I could not reconcile any of it.

He got up at 7:20 a.m. I heard him in the kitchen — water running, the espresso machine, a cabinet, a mug on the counter. I lay on my back in his bed for a long minute with my hands flat on my stomach, the morning light moving across the ceiling and the sentence sitting in me where it had been.

I had slept with my target.

I had slept with the man I was supposed to be monitoring. I didn’t know how to feel about that.

I got up.

His shirt was on the floor at the foot of the bed where I had pulled it off him. I pulled it on. The sleeves came down past my hands. I rolled them once. I crossed the hallway barefoot.

He was at the espresso machine in sweats and nothing else. The line of his shoulders was the line I had been tracing with my fingertips at 2:00 a.m. He turned when he heard me. The grin came up at the corner of his mouth and stayed.

"Coffee's coming."

"Thank you."

I crossed to the kitchen counter. The sketches were on the corner where I had set them down last night. The twelve-story one with the windows. The bridge. The doorway that led nowhere.

He came up behind me with the coffee in one hand. He set it on the counter. His other hand found my waist through the cotton of his shirt. He set his chin on my shoulder.

"What are you thinking?"

"That you should frame these, Julian."

"They're not finished."

"Nothing ever is."

He turned me around.

I was between him and the counter. His hands moved to my hips. Mine came up flat against his chest. I could feel his heartbeat against my palm.

He kissed me.

Slow. Coffee-warm. The kiss was nothing like the kisses from last night — the hungry ones, the ones with my hands in his hair and his hands on the bare skin of my back.

I kissed him back.

My brain was telling me to stop. My body was not listening.