Deadline (35 page)

“Becks, I don’t know if—”

“Do you want me to stop?” She twisted out of my grasp, moving with a simple grace that made my breath catch in my throat. Then she reached up to take my hands, sliding her fingers into mine. “I’ll be totally honest. I don’t want to stop. But I will, if that’s what you want.”

“I… I don’t know, I just…” I looked at our joined hands, studying the short, practical shape of her nails. She had the nails of an Irwin. That made me feel better, oddly enough. I was just another hazard zone for her to explore. “I don’t know if this is such a good idea.”

“Hey. Look at me.” I raised my head. Becks met my eyes and said, “I’m not going to ask you for a commitment. I don’t want to go steady. You’re my boss, and you’re my colleague, and I respect that. But we almost died today, and I’d like to remind myself that we didn’t.” She stepped back, still holding my hands. “I’m lonely. Don’t you ever get lonely?”

It was suddenly hard to breathe. “Every damn night,” I said, and closed the distance between us with a step, yanking my hands free before wrapping my arms arounwaist again. This time, I was the one initiating the kiss; this time, I was the one pressing with increasing urgency as she kissed me back, bringing one hand up so she could curl her fingers through my hair and pull my head a little farther down. We kissed until my lips felt bruised and my chest hurt with the effort of continuing to breathe.

Becks pulled back, fingers still knotted in my hair. “Does that mean you don’t want me to stop?”

“Don’t stop,” I managed, and kissed her again.

Somehow we made it out of the bathroom and down the hall to the guest room where she’d been sleeping. I managed to keep the towel on until the door was closed behind us, when Becks resolved the question of what I was supposed to do with it by removing it from my waist and throwing it to one side. She untied her bathrobe and pressed herself hard against me before resuming her frantic kisses. The feeling of her skin touching mine was almost more than I could handle. I groaned. She moaned appreciatively, the sound of a living woman desiring and being desired, rather than the sound of the dead. God, I needed to hear that. I didn’t spend nearly enough time among the living.

The ringing silence in my head was forgotten, drowned out by the sounds our bodies made—skin sliding against skin, fingers rustling through hair, lips meeting and parting and meeting again. Becks kept moving steadily backward, forcing me to follow if I wanted to keep kissing her. I wanted to keep kissing her, and so I kept going until she pulled me onto the bed and slung one leg over mine, keeping me there. I didn’t resist. I didn’t want to. For the first time since George died, I really didn’t give a shit about anything but the present. It was a nice feeling. I’d missed it.

“Shaun.”

I started kissing her neck, tasting the slightly salty flavor of her skin. I’d missed that, too. The taste of a woman’s neck, the way it moved when she breathed—

“Shaun.”

It took a moment for the fact that Becks was talking to me to sink all the way into my brain. I stopped
kissing her in order to push myself back and look at her face. Her hair was rumpled, making her look like she’d just finished running a marathon after holding off an entire horde of zombies with nothing but a shotgun. I was starting to understand why she kept it long. It might be impractical as hell, but it made views like this one possible, and that was worth a little inconvenience. “What? Did I do something wrong?”

“No.” She smiled, a little wryly. “I just wanted to let you know that I have condoms.”

I hadn’t even thought that far ahead. I blinked for a moment, and then nodded. “Cool, because if I have any, they’re downstairs.” Actually, I wasn’t sure whether I had condoms in my pack or not. I hadn’t needed that sort of thing in so long that I’d stopped thinking about it, since thinking about it didn’t do me a damn bit of good. Sex wasn’t a factor in this post-George world. There just wasn’t time.

Becks smiled a little more, looking surprisingly shy, considering that we were buck-ass naked and twisted around each other. “Will you let me up?” she asked.

“Um, right.” It took some effort to untangle our limbs. She stood, stretching to give me the best possible view of her body—and I had to admit, the girl was stacked—before crossing to her pack and bending to rummage through one of the inside pockets. I stayed on the bed, feeling suddenly awkward and not exactly sure where I was supposed to put my hands. That was another thing I never had to worry about before. I wasn’t even sure I was supposed to be looking at her when she wasn’t in the bed. I settled for sitting up with my hands resting loosely between my thighs, looking in her direction, but trying to keep myself from really
looking
. She might get upset if I looked away.
She might decide I didn’t like the way she looked or something.

Jesus. When did life get so damn complicated?

“Here we go.” Becks turned, a foil-wrapped condom held between her thumb and forefinger, and walked back toward the bed. “I’ve got a birth control implant, but you can’t be too careful, right?”

“Right,” I echoed, faintly. The pause had given me time to think, which wasn’t such a good thing. My body was still voting in favor of going through with things, but now my brain was trying to weigh in on the topic, and it wasn’t convinced that this was a good idea. It was reasonably sure that this was a really
bad
idea, and if there was any time to stop, this was it.

Becks tore the foil.

My brain found itself outvoted in a sudden upset sponsored by the body and supported by every hormone I had. I was reaching for her, and she was reaching for me, and then her fingers were unrolling the condom along the length of my cock, and then coherent thought took a backseat for a while. Its services were no longer required, or really wanted. Everything that mattered was in the bed, and none of it took the slightest bit of thinking. All I had to do was act. So I closed my eyes, cupped my hands against the side of her waist, and let the moment do the driving.

I don’t know how long the moment lasted. Long enough that when it ended, I was even more exhausted. It was a better exhaustion, it was just… all-consuming, the kind of tired that it’s almost impossible to fight. I helped clean up the mess with my eyes half-closed, fumbling as we got the damp sheets and the used condom into the appropriate hampers and waste baskets. Then I sagged back into the mattress, relaxing utterly
as my head hit the pillow. It felt like all the tension was finally running out of me, leaving me floating in that wonderful horizon between half-asleep and all the way gone.

Fingers trailed down the length of my chest, coming to rest just above my navel. “Good night, Shaun,” whispered a voice, inches from my ear.

God. For the first time in longer than I could remember, the world felt like it was actually back the way that it was supposed to be. I brought up a hand to brush my knuckles against her cheek, smelling the sweet-salt-sex smell of her, and smiled.

“Good night, George,” I said, and slipped away into sleep.

I
woke sprawled buck-ass
naked on the guest room bed, surrounded by the furry mounds of sleeping bulldogs. Groaning, I pushed myself up onto my elbows. The door was open about a foot—just enough to explain my unwanted guests. I scrubbed at my face with one hand, trying to wake up enough to start worrying about my clothes. “Guess it’s time to deal with another fucking morning, huh, George?”

Ringing silence answered me. I pulled my hand away from my face and sat all the way up. “George?” Still no answer. “You’re starting to freak me out here, George. What did I do to earn the silent treatment? I’m doing what you asked me to do. I’m actually stepping up to the plate. So could you stop fucking around?”

She didn’t stop fucking around. She was still there—I remember what sane felt like, and this wasn’t it; sane didn’t come with the constant low-grade awareness of George sitting at the back of my head—she just wasn’t talking. I scowled.

“Fine. If you want to play silent treatment, we’ll play silent treatment. See how
you
like it.” I scooched my butt
along the mattress, eventually gettin to the point where my feet hit the floor. Every muscle in my legs ached. I could already tell I was going to be applying Icy-Hot and gulping aspirin like M&Ms all day. I guess that’s what you get when you go and outrun an outbreak.

“And yet somehow better than the alternative,” I muttered.

The mystery of how the door got open was answered by the stack of clothing and crap on the bookshelf just inside. I sent a silent thanks to Maggie’s in-house laundry service—silent because with her computer systems, I was vaguely afraid the program in charge of the laundry service might respond if I thanked it out loud—and began getting dressed. Even the things I’d left in the bathroom were clean, down to the rust on my ancient Swiss army knife. I shook my head. Sometimes it’s possible to be a little
too
efficient. It was unnerving to think of the house sending out tiny cleaning devices and using them to polish my thumb drive and pocket change to a mirror sheen.

At least nothing was missing. I shoved things into their respective pockets, fastened my belt, and sat down on the bed to put my boots on. That’s when the reality of my position finally filtered through my sleep-addled, George-less brain:

I was the only person in the room. Where the hell was Becks? I looked back at the bed, which didn’t offer any answers. From the way I’d been sprawled when I woke up, there was nothing to prove that anyone else had been in the bed to begin with. That was a little worrisome. If I’d gone even further over the edge and started hallucinating being seduced by random members of staff, the time remaining before I went totally insane was probably pretty low.

With that cheerful thought at the front of my mind, I started trying to get my boots on. The process was complicated by the dogs, who thought attacking the laces was a fantastic game. The main difference between dogs that size and cats seems to be that cats, while crazy, are at least
meant
to be little, whereas the process of shrinking dogs seems to drive them insane. “At least we have that much in common,” I muttered, and stood, stretching for a final time before walking out of the room. I left the guest room door open. No point in depriving the bulldogs of a nice warm bed.

Alaric was sitting at the kitchen table with his laptop, tapping industriously away. A half a pot of coffee sat in front of him, wafting the delicious smell of hot caffeine toward me as I entered. I stopped to sniff appreciatively. The sound got his attention; he looked up, nodded briefly, and looked back down again. “Hey.”