She watched him think through the words, trying to sort out her meaning. She fumbled for a concrete example.

“See, if… if they had you,” she explained slowly, “if they grabbed you somehow… I would have to come after you.” It was so true it frightened her. She didn’t understand why it was true, but that didn’t change the fact.

His eyes widened and seemed to freeze that way.

“And they’d win, you know,” she said apologetically. “They’d kill us both. But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have to try. See?” She shrugged. “Liability.”

He opened his mouth to speak, then shut it again. He paced to the sink, then back to stand right in front of her.

“Why would you come after me? Guilt?”

“Some,” she admitted.

“But it wasn’t you who involved me, not really. They didn’t choose me because of you.”

“I know – that’s why I said some. Maybe thirty-three percent.”

He smiled a tiny bit, like she’d said something funny. “And the other sixty-seven percent?”

“Another thirty-three percent… justice? That’s not the right word. But someone like you… you deserve more than this. You’re a better person than any of them. It’s not right that someone like you should have to be a part of this world. It’s an evil waste.”

She hadn’t meant to be quite so vehement. She could tell she’d only confused him again. He didn’t realize how unusual he was. He didn’t belong down here in the filth of the trenches. Something about him was just… pure.

“And the last thirty-four?” he asked after a moment of thought.

“I don’t know.” She groaned.

She didn’t know why or how he had become a central figure in her life. She didn’t know why she automatically assumed he would be there in the future when that made no sense at all. She didn’t know why, when his brother had asked her to keep an eye on him, her answer had been so earnest and so… compulsory.

Daniel was waiting for more. She spread her hands helplessly. She didn’t know what else to say.

He smiled a little. “Well, liability doesn’t seem such an awful word as it did before.”

“It does to me.”

“You know if they came for you, I would do what I could to stand in their way. So you’re a liability for me, too.”

“I wouldn’t want you to do that.”

“Because we’d both end up dead.”

“Yes, we would! If they come for me, you run.”

He laughed. “Agree to disagree.”

“Daniel —”

“Let me tell you what else I see when I look at you.”

Her shoulders hunched automatically. “Tell me the worst thing you see.”

He sighed, then reached out to gently lay his fingertips along her cheekbone. “These bruises. They break my heart. But, in a really twisted and wrong way, I’m sort of grateful for them. How shameful is that?”

“Grateful?”

“Well, if my idiot bully of a brother hadn’t beaten you up, you would have disappeared, and I would have had no way to ever find you again. Because of your injuries, you needed our help. You stayed with me.”

His expression when he said the last four words was very unsettling. Or maybe it was his fingers lingering on her skin.

“Now can I tell you what else I see?”

She stared at him warily.

“I see a woman who is more… real than any other woman I’ve ever met. You make every other person I’ve known seem insubstantial, somehow incomplete. Like shadows and illusions. I loved my wife, or rather – as you so insightfully pointed out while I was high – I loved my idea of who she was. I truly did. But she was never as there to me as you are. I’ve never been drawn to someone the way I am to you, and I have been from the very first moment I met you. It’s like the difference between… between reading about gravity and then falling for the first time.”

They stared at each other for what felt like hours but could have been minutes or even seconds. His hand, at first just touching her cheekbone with the very tips of his fingers, slowly relaxed down until his palm was cradling her jaw. His thumb brushed across her lower lip with a pressure so light, she wasn’t totally sure she hadn’t imagined it.

“This is entirely irrational on every level,” she whispered.

“Don’t kill me, please?”

She might have nodded.

He put his other hand on her face – so softly that despite her bruises there was no hint of pain. It was just live current, like the way a plasma globe must feel from the inside.

She started to remind herself, as his lips pressed gently against hers, that she was not thirteen years old and this was not her first kiss, so really… then his hands moved into her hair and held her mouth more firmly against his, his lips opened, and she couldn’t even finish the thought. She couldn’t think how the words were supposed to string together.

She gasped – just a tiny puff of breath – and he pulled his face an inch back, still holding her head secure in his long hands.

“Did I hurt you?”

She couldn’t remember how to say Just keep kissing me, so instead she stretched up on her tiptoes to throw her arms around his neck and pull him closer. He was not unwilling to comply.

He must have felt the drag in her arms, or his back was protesting the considerable difference in their heights; he grabbed her waist and swung her up onto the island counter, never breaking the contact between their lips. Reflexively, her legs wrapped around his hips at the same time that his arms pulled tight around her torso, so their bodies were warmly fused together. Her fingers twisted themselves into his hair, and she was finally able to admit to herself that she had always been attracted to these unruly curls, that she’d secretly enjoyed running her fingers through them while he was unconscious in a way that was totally unprofessional.