Page 15 of Steel and Ice

BLAIR

I powered down my office lamp and slid the last desk drawer shut with my hip. I checked the door the way I always did. Reading the seam, the way metal acknowledged metal.

It had lied to me before, so I was wary.

I’d referred Colt out and the handoff was logged by another clinician. Clean line, no ceremony.

Three days since the front porch incident. Short enough to still live in my muscles, long enough for the story to shape into fact.

I walked down the hallway and flicked off the lights as I moved. My hand stayed on the knob and refused to turn. I told myself the street would be empty the way it always was this time of night. That I preferred it that way.

Both were lies.

The truer sentence stood behind them: he’d be there. We’d never made an arrangement. No message or invitation. Yet a pattern had formed.

A quiet frequency I could tune to.

Another lie tried itself on. If he wasn’t there, I’d keep walking. If he was, my body would know before I saw.

I stood motionless with my hand on the knob, listening as if the building might answer. Fluorescents settled in the background. My pulse argued for both outcomes at once.

Stalker , my mind offered.

Patient , another part said.

Neither word landed as a threat, but the question itself carried all the heat.

Outside, the night separated into a scene I’d seen a thousand times before.

Several moving parts: a bus exhaled two blocks over and a crosswalk counted down with red certainty.

A camera’s LED blinked and tossed a dot onto the market’s glass across the street.

The prickle of being watched found my skin yet again. But this time, I let it stand.

Witness, not victim.

I took each step slowly, my footsteps announcing me to the city. Rubber on grit, the soft snap as the curb took my weight.

I turned toward the dark stretch of street where an answer would live. I walked, a man bound by a spell of his own making.

If he was there, the machinery in me would hear it first; the ease of his breath in the truck, a man who chose stillness over display.

I scanned the curb and tried to want the nothing that would prove me reasonable.

Colt was there. Not outside my door like an ask. But down the block under a streetlight with the engine off and the windshield fogged at the corners.

No lights flashed, no horn honked. Presence I could feel without claim.

He parked with the kind of discipline that turned his truck into background. If you didn’t know what you were looking for.

But I knew exactly what I was looking for.

I angled myself toward him and let the distance between us dissipate. At the hood I stopped and listened as heat hissed from the engine, ticking as it cooled. The window framed Colt’s outline.

He didn’t reach for me or shift. Only the rise of his chest moved, and the night seemed to notice and rearrange itself.

“Hands?” I asked.

Colt raised both and set them open on the wheel. His palms were quiet—nothing to take, nothing to hide.

I opened the door and climbed into his truck as the leather moaned beneath me. The cab smelled of cold air, soap, and the faint mineral of Colt’s skin.

No radio, no music. City sounds moved outside like water under a pier.

His hands stayed where I could see them, which steadied me more than I thought it would. I reached over and gently touched the bruise on his cheek. A touch that said I understood tonight.

The sacrifice he’d made for me. I leaned in and let my mouth find his. Even, unhurried. Enough heat to answer the question the dark street had asked.

Colt breathed against me and let out a low sound that could have turned into hunger.

“Travis is in custody,” he said, close enough that his words almost touched my lips. “Parole violation.”

The facts clicked into place, a latch finding its strike. I didn’t need any details. I’d been around long enough to know what would happen to Travis.

He’d be put away for years given the video and his history.

“Home?” I asked, barely louder than the engine.

He drove like he’d saved the motion, as if his body knew the way to my house. Light from streetlamps broke across the hood of his truck in neat bands. Our faces reflected back to us in the glass before they disappeared again. Block after block, city streets.

Colt’s hands gripped the steering wheel until I lifted one, by a few degrees, and let it hover near my thigh without settling.

Not a test—permission he could take or leave.

He took it.

We slid onto my block and pulled up in front of my house. My neighbor’s doorbell LED woke as we nosed to the curb. One slow blink, a tiny electric eyelid that told us we were worth remembering.

We crossed the sidewalk without hurry, the city moving in our periphery. Someone dragged a trash bin down the street, while another person clicked a bike chain.

Colt didn’t touch me; I didn’t ask him to. The nearness was its own intoxicant with its own voltage.

Inside, I turned the deadbolt and eased the latch forward.

I listened to the clean click after the repair.

It held with a clean, confident seat. No false kiss at the strike, no stutter.

Colt had fixed it earlier. It’d been quiet work; he rehung the plate, shortened a screw.

He taught the door to say yes without having to force it.

Colt stepped inside. The air changed, like weather inside walls.

His mouth found mine, greedy. I answered, a promise I’d held inside. Collar fabric bunched in my fist. I pulled him in, not to direct him, only to keep the gravity honest.

Colt made a sound that lit the room and me from within.

Plaster cool at my spine; his chest a heat I knew. His breath broke, then steadied against my cheek as I gave him my mouth again.

The latch held. So did we.