Chapter 2: Off Duty
The safe house is a cabin on a ridge in the Shenandoah, two hours west of the city, at the end of a gravel road that turns to ice in February. By the time you get there it's snowing. By the time Leon has walked the perimeter twice, checked every window, and briefed the two agents in the car at the bottom of the drive, it's snowing hard enough to bury the car.
You sit in front of the fire in your coat and watch him do it. He doesn't sit down. He doesn't take off his jacket. He moves through the cabin like water finding the low places, testing, checking, and you realize, watching him, that he's going to do this all night.
"They're in Canada," you say. "Or Portugal. Or a cave. It was a carving on a door, Leon. Not an army."
"They found your door." He checks the window lock again. "They walked past a Secret Service post in the middle of the night and found your door. That's an army."
"Sit down."
"I'm on duty."
"You're always on duty." You stand up. You take off your coat. Under it you're still in the leggings and sweatshirt you pulled on in the two minutes he gave you, and your hair is a disaster, and you don't care. "Six years. You read every letter I sent you and you never wrote back once. You owe me a conversation. Sit down."
He turns around from the window. In the firelight his face is all hard planes and shadow, and he looks tired, so tired, the kind of tired that goes all the way down.
"You want to know why," he says.
"Yes."
"Because every time I got one I sat down to write back, and every time I got as far as Ashley, and then I'd stop." He says your name like it costs him something. "Because you were twenty in Spain and terrified, and I was the only thing between you and something terrible, and that's not a real thing. That's what fear does to people. I've seen it. I didn't want to be the guy who took advantage of it. So I figured, she'll grow up. She'll get over it. She'll meet somebody her own age who didn't have to carry her across a lake. And I'll read about her wedding in the Post and I'll be glad for her."
You stare at him.
"Leon. I'm twenty-six."
"I know."
"I've been an adult the whole time you've known me. I've run a foundation for four years. I've testified in front of Congress. I've dated people. A finance guy. A professor. They were fine. They were nice." You take a step toward him. "Every single one of them, I'd lie in bed afterward and think, he'd never have gone through a door ahead of Leon."
His jaw works.
"I didn't write you those letters because I was scared," you say. "I wrote them because you're the only person alive who knows what it was like. And because I wanted you to see what I turned into. I wanted you to see I could carry myself now." You stop in front of him. "And because I've wanted you since about day four, when you made me a joke about a dumpster in the middle of a firefight and I laughed for the first time in a week. That's not fear, Leon. I know the difference. I know it better than anyone."
He closes his eyes.
"You're my protectee," he says, very low. "There are rules. I'm not allowed to want you."
"Do you?"
He opens his eyes. He looks at you, and there's nothing in his face now, no agent, no rules, just a man in a cabin in the snow who has been holding a door shut for six years and is very tired of holding it.
"Every letter," he says. "Every single one."
You reach past him and take his phone off his belt, and press it into his hand.
"Call Hunnigan," you say. "Get yourself off my detail."
Hunnigan picks up on the first ring at one in the morning. You can hear her through the phone, clipped and unimpressed.
"Let me guess."
"I need to be relieved," Leon says. He's looking at you while he says it. "Effective now. Conflict of interest. Davis and Morrow can hold the perimeter until a new lead gets here."
A pause. A long one.
"Leon," says Hunnigan, "I've known you for twenty years, and I have been waiting for this phone call for six of them." Something taps; she's typing. "You're relieved as of oh-one-oh-four. Replacement lead arrives when the roads clear. Davis has the perimeter. And Leon?"
"Yeah."
"Don't screw it up," Hunnigan says, and hangs up.
Leon lowers the phone. He looks at it. He sets it down on the windowsill very carefully, the way you'd put down something that might go off.
"So," you say. "Agent Kennedy."
"Not anymore." He's still looking at the phone. "Not for you. As of four minutes ago I'm just a guy in a cabin."
"Then say my name."
He turns around.
"Ashley," says Leon Kennedy, and the sound of it in his voice, rough and low and certain after six years of ma'am, goes through you like a bullet.
You don't know who moves first. You think it's you. You think you go up on your toes and he comes down to meet you, and his hand is in your hair and yours is fisted in his shirt and his mouth is on yours, and it's nothing like you imagined, and you imagined it a lot. It's not gentle. It's six years of not, all at once. He kisses you like he's been starving, deep and hungry and a little desperate, and when you open your mouth to him he makes a sound in his chest that you feel all the way down to your knees.
"Tell me to stop," he says against your lips. "Any time. Any second."
"If you stop I'll break your nose. I've done it before. I wrote you about it."
He laughs. You've heard him laugh before, dry little huffs in Spain, at his own bad jokes. You've never heard this one. It comes up out of him low and startled and real, and he picks you up off your feet by the backs of your thighs, and you wrap your legs around his waist like you've done it a hundred times, and he carries you, not across a lake this time, just across a cabin, to the rug in front of the fire.
He lays you down. He kneels over you. And then he stops, his hands braced on either side of your head, breathing hard, and just looks at you.
"What?" you whisper.
"Nothing." His thumb traces your cheekbone. Your freckles. "I've thought about this. I'm not proud of it. I just want to look."
"Look later," you say, and pull your sweatshirt over your head.
You weren't wearing anything under it. He stares. He makes a sound like he's been punched. Then he lowers his head and puts his mouth on you, on your collarbone and the swell of your breast and your nipple, hot and wet and slow, and you arch up off the rug and grab his hair.
You get his shirt open. Buttons go somewhere. You've seen his body before, in pieces, in Spain, blood and bandages, but you've never been allowed to touch it, and you touch it now, the hard muscle of his chest and the scars layered over it and the line of hair below his navel, and when you get your hand inside his trousers and wrap it around his cock he drops his forehead to your shoulder and swears, softly and with feeling, into your skin.
"Ashley." It's almost a plea. "If you keep doing that, this is going to be very short."
"We've got until the roads clear."
"The roads might clear tomorrow."
"Then you'd better hurry up and get your pants off, Kennedy."
He does. You get your leggings off, between you, clumsy and laughing, and then there's nothing between you but firelight. He kisses his way down your body. He pushes your thighs apart with his broad warm hands and looks up at you once, a question, and you nod, and he puts his mouth on you.
You've been touched before. Not like this. He's patient and thorough and absolutely focused, the way he is with everything, and he pays attention, and when you gasp he does it again, and when your hips jerk he holds them down with one forearm and doesn't let up. The fire crackles. Snow hisses on the windows. You grab the edge of the rug, then his hair, then nothing, and you come apart with his name in your mouth and your heels digging into his back.
He comes up over you. His mouth is wet. His eyes are very dark.
"Condom," he says, rough. "In my bag. I didn't. I wasn't planning."
"Liar. You packed in two minutes and you had time to pack condoms?"
"I packed for every contingency." His ears go red. "It's a habit."
You laugh so hard he has to get up and get them himself.
When he comes back down to you, sheathed, you pull him in with your legs around his hips, and you look at each other, and he pushes into you slowly, and your breath stops.
He's big and you're tight and he goes slow, stopping, letting you adjust, his forehead pressed to yours and his whole body trembling with the effort. When he's all the way inside you he stays still. He just breathes. His eyes are closed.
"Leon. Look at me."
He does. And then he starts to move.
It's slow at first, deep and grinding, every stroke dragging a sound out of you that you didn't know you could make. Then you hook your ankles behind his back and pull, and he gets the message, and it isn't slow anymore. The rug burns your shoulders. You don't care. He's driving into you and you're meeting him and he's saying your name over and over, Ashley, Ashley, like he's making up for every letter he never sent.
He gets a hand between you and finds your clit and you go over again, hard, crying out, clenching around him, and that's what does it for him. He buries his face in your neck and groans your name into your skin and shudders through it, his hips stuttering, his arms locked around you.
For a long time neither of you moves. The fire pops. His heart is going like a hammer against yours.
"Well," you say eventually, a little hoarse. "That was worth six years of ma'am."
He laughs into your neck, helplessly.
Down at the bottom of the drive, through the snow, a radio squawks. Leon's head comes up. You both hear it: his earpiece, lying on the windowsill where he left it with the phone. Davis's voice, thin and tinny. Then a sound that isn't Davis's voice. Then static.
Leon is on his feet before the static stops, naked, gun in hand. You didn't even see him pick it up.
"Davis," he says into the earpiece. "Davis, respond."
Nothing. Just the hiss of the snow.