“You going to come sit with me?” she asked.
After a moment, he came wordlessly to the couch and sat down a few inches away.
“What is it?” she asked, after a moment.
“I’ve just got a lot to think about.”
“You want to talk about it?”
He took a swallow of whiskey. “I don’t know how to.”
She looked at him. “Maybe that’s the problem.”
He returned the look, his eyes narrowing. “No. The problem is the problem. Not my disinclination to discuss it.”
“So you know how to, but don’t want to.”
For an instant, his face contorted in anger. He swallowed and seemed to get it under control. “What difference does it make?” he said.
“It makes a lot of difference. How is about you. Not wanting to is about me.”
He flushed and looked away, and she realized she was pushing too hard, no matter the truth of her words. She could be enormously patient and subtle when she was eliciting information from a target, but she had a habit of reverting to a more primitive, more deep-seated self with Rain. She cared too much about him; that was the problem. Her feelings made her forget herself. They brought forth all her default settings, the bad along with the good.
A little more tactical, girl, she thought. Not just for you. For him, too.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It just…scares me when you keep everything bottled up. It makes me feel insecure. I’m not used to feeling that way.”
He finished his Glenmorangie. Ordinarily, he savored a good single malt. Gulping it down like this, especially after a bottle of wine and a glass of port, wasn’t like him. “What do you mean?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Just…there are parts of you that you don’t let me see. And sometimes I feel like they’re the most important parts.” She was being tactical now, yes, but she wasn’t lying, either.
He refilled his glass and topped off hers. They sat quietly for a while, Delilah sipping her whiskey, Rain drinking his down, the light from the fire playing on the walls.
“I don’t know why you want to be with me,” he said, staring into the flames.
“Why do you say that?”
He kept looking away from her. “Because of what I am.”
“What are you?”
“You know.”
“I don’t. I only know how I feel about you.”
He shook his head as though saying No, you’re missing the point, then looked at her, his lips pursed, struggling with what he was trying to say. This time, what she saw in his eyes was utterly different from what she’d seen in the bar. She had never seen it before in him and wasn’t entirely sure what it was. But if she had to attach a word to it, the word would be…pleading.
“I’m…a…killer!” he whispered emphatically, as though simultaneously ashamed at the admission and bewildered that she couldn’t understand the point.
He looked away again. “Look at me,” he said, his voice rising. “I can’t stop. The most I can do is take breaks from the life, like an addict falling on and off the wagon. But it always finds me again. And you know why? Because it is me. It’s what I am.”
He drained the rest of his whiskey and slammed the empty glass down on the coffee table, then stood and started pacing, his head swiveling, his hands clenching. He was so wound up it looked like his body was fighting itself, the muscles bunched and writhing under the clothes.
She got up and intercepted him. He stopped in front of her and stood there, breathing hard, his hands balled into fists. No wonder he was working out the way he was. If he didn’t burn some of this off, it was going to consume him.
“Hey,” she said, trying to get him to meet her eyes. “Hey. I know you. As well as I’ve ever known anyone, maybe better. Don’t tell me you’re only that one thing.”
He laughed harshly. “What else matters?”
She took his face in her hands and steered it so that he was looking into her eyes. “You,” she said. “What you decide. That’s what matters.”
“I’m talking about what I am.”
She shook her head. “What you choose is what matters. Not the things you’ve done, or your abilities, or the training you’ve had, or even your inclinations. You can atone for all the rest, but your choices are what make you who you are.”
“You don’t understand…”
“I do. You’re not Gil. Don’t reduce yourself to that one thing. Find a way to be more than that. You have been, I’ve watched it happening in Paris.”
“I was fooling myself in Paris. And I guess you, too.”
“No, you’re fooling yourself now, or trying to. You’re in a bad situation and you’re terribly worried about your friend. Don’t let that…”
“I can’t!” he shouted. “I can’t be both. I have to be a certain way, or…or…”
“To save Dox, yes, you have to be that way, I understand,” she said, staying with him. “And you will. But that’s situational. It doesn’t define what you are. Don’t let it.”
He squeezed his eyes shut and drew his lips back from his teeth as though the agony he felt were physical. “I don’t know how,” he whispered.
“By the choices you make.”
He shook his head violently. “I don’t have a choice.”
“I know, and for the moment, you’re doing what you have to do. But the moment is going to pass. It’s a situation, it isn’t you.”
He looked up at the ceiling, his breath coming in short, sharp bursts, the muscles in his neck tight cords. He was fighting something, tears, terror, she didn’t know what.
“I…” he said, and then the word was choked off. He shook his head and took hold of her wrists as though preparing to cast her aside, and she sensed that whatever battle was raging inside him, he was losing it.
“Stay with me, John,” she said, trying to get him to look at her again. “Stay with me, please…”
And then he had her face in his hands and he was kissing her, ferociously, desperately, ravening her as though she was the only connection keeping him from being sucked away into some nameless horror. She kissed him back, hard, her mouth open, her hands in his hair, letting him feel her, take whatever he needed from her, making him know with her mouth and her hands and her body that she was there and she wasn’t going to let him go.
He backed her into the bedroom, his hands still on her face, his mouth not leaving hers for an instant. The feel of her jeans rubbing against her as she moved was suddenly maddening, electric, and she realized with a start that she was close to coming from nothing more than the way he was kissing her and the friction of a tight pair of jeans. For a moment, she forgot where they were, she wanted him to just keep kissing her like that, keep moving her like that, yes, just that way…
The back of her thighs bumped against the side of the bed. She was barely thinking now, she just wanted him naked, his skin against her, his weight on her, all of him inside her. He broke the kiss to lift her sweater over her head and was back before he had even tossed it aside, his tongue, his teeth, the taste of whiskey and his own taste, too. She managed to get his belt open, then his pants. She reached inside, and when she felt how hard he was, it excited her even more. She squeezed and felt his breath catch.
She pushed the jacket off his shoulders and tugged it down over his arms, then got his shirt off and threw it aside, never once letting him stop kissing her. He pushed her back on the bed and stepped out of his pants. She realized her bra was gone, she hadn’t even been aware of his doing it. Her groin ached and she was panting. Without thinking, she put her hand on herself, over her jeans, and rubbed. “Hurry,” she said.