The next morning, Parker ran into Jarod before Broots did, which was probably a good thing, because Jarod's eyes were turning pink. She only noticed because she was looking for it, but once she looked for it, it was obvious. Back at headquarters, the first symptom had shown up twelve hours early. This time, his reddening eyes were sixteen hours ahead of schedule.
She'd almost certainly regret it later, but she didn't tell Jarod what she saw.
"You'll be working all day, and we don't want to draw attention by pulling you aside for a shot," she said by way of explanation as she tugged him into the smokers' lounge. It was harder for her to find a vein in the hazy gloom, but it was also harder for him to catch his own eye accidentally in a reflective surface. He sagged into his chair, then jumped back up, quicksilver-free and smiling.
Before he left to go to the port terminal, he paused and noted, "I didn't have the nightmare last night."
She didn't say, "I know."
Instead, she said: "Good. Maybe I'll actually sleep through the night for the rest of this assignment."
Broots called Miss Parker to pick him up halfway through the lunch hour. According to his report, Kalakos had cornered him not long after clock-in.
"That guy really hates the Centre," he grumbled over his reheated lasagna. He and Parker were lurking around the cafeteria, not troubling to appear as anything less than extremely obvious Centre employees. "Today, I can't blame him. If we got him together with Jarod on a bad day, they could really do some damage."
It was good news, though, as it meant the resident skeptic among the longshoremen had bought Broots as the decoy plant. Jarod was free to unearth the mole, wiped of suspicion. Just now, however, he was talking to his sister.
"It's that reporter again," said Broots, unnecessarily.
Parker hummed. "Yeah." She waved a fly off Broots's lasagna, thinking. Then: "She's Jarod's sister."
Inevitably, Broots choked on the lasagna.
"What?" he said, once he had cleared his throat with a coughing fit and downed a glass of water.
"He doesn't know."
Broots boggled at her. When she didn't expand, he sat back and looked across the hall at the conspiring siblings over by the vending machines.
"Oh," he said.
When they got back to the hotel long after sunset, a team from Centre headquarters had been and gone, having moved Broots's things to room 217 and Jarod's few personal belongings to Parker's room. Broots threw his teammates a look of mingled discomfort and jealousy as he got off on the second floor.
Jarod didn't have much in this world — he never had, not since he was four and a pair of men pulled a bag over his head and wrestled him into a waiting car. Still, room 402 felt much smaller with the addition of Jarod's toothbrush, Jarod's duffel bag of clothes, Jarod's electric razor, and Jarod himself.
"That's yours," said Parker, pointing to the bed closest to the door. "I've been sleeping in the other one."
"Perfect," said Jarod, with no real feeling. He dropped his work bag on the top cover and reached over his head to pull off his sweater. The t-shirt underneath rode up, baring a strip of skin; Parker indulged in its inspection. Nothing unprofessional in having a peek.
The air was so thick with fear, errant glances and unsaid words, it was like breathing on a hot, humid day. Parker wished she'd thought to suggest that they go out and see Baltimore — it was late, but she'd give anything to avoid being cooped up with Jarod and everything they were both avoiding saying out loud. If they had gone out on the town, though, they would have risked someone from the port terminal spotting them together and ruining their week of work.
"I'd give my left nut not to have to sleep another night in a cheap hotel," said Parker, hanging her coat and scarf up in the closet. "Please tell me we can wrap this job up soon. There's only so much time I can spend sitting on my thumbs."
Jarod sat down on the bedspread, busying himself with his bootlaces.
"Two more days on the outside. I have it down to two of the men."
"Which two?"
When no reply was forthcoming, Parker abandoned the task of attacking the thermostat to look his way.
"This man… whichever one he is," said Jarod. "All he's doing is preventing the Centre from importing whatever it likes. Materials they could use to design weapons, plan assassinations, engineer dangerous substances… The sky's the limit. Or, to be accurate, the sky is not the limit, since apparently, we're helping the Russians go to space now."
"Are you getting to a point?"
"Yes. My point is that this is a good man. What do you think the Centre will do to him if I identify him as the mole?"
"Realistically?" Parker tossed her phone from hand to hand. "Two months ago, I would have said the Centre would have him fired and blackballed. Now, I'm not so sure. Daddy's pretty fired up about the last ship from South Africa getting impounded. I don't like it, but they might have the guy whacked."
"They'd kill him? For this?"
Parker shrugged. "Maybe. Maybe they'd just destroy his career. Neither is great. Both are likely better than what the Centre would do if you refuse to hand over the name."
Jarod straightened and an edge of flint appeared in his eye. "Is that a threat?"
"Of course not," said Parker, with a noise of exasperation. "It's a reminder. It's reality. You can't save this guy by disobeying the Centre directly."
She saw him register what she wasn't saying: but you can save him. He looked at her like she'd just shapeshifted into someone else entirely.
"I lied," he said slowly, testing the words out. Testing her out, to see how she'd react. "I already know who the mole is."
Parker nodded. "I thought you might. Why do you need more time, then?"
He was trying to decide whether he could trust her. There was nothing she could do but wait and see if she would pass the test.
"To warn him," he said finally. Parker let out her pent-up breath. Passed. "And possibly to connect him with this reporter who's been visiting the port. She seems to know a lot about the Centre."
"Right. I met her. Emily."
The next bit stuck in Parker's throat. Telling Jarod who Emily was to him… it would pose an enormous distraction to the mission. On the other hand, if Jarod found out later that she'd known and never told him, he would never forgive her. The Centre's trust versus Jarod's… it shouldn't be a contest, but it was.
"You seem remarkably okay with the idea of me sabotaging this mission," said Jarod, interrupting her mental pros vs cons list.
"Nobody's more surprised than me," said Parker, taking her earrings out as she spoke. "I care enough to stay in the Centre's good graces, to a point. I don't care about the Centre getting what it wants, I don't care about our bottom line or our long-term success. I just want to do my job to the letter of its requirements and get out as soon as I can. They said we had to get the name. They didn't say we couldn't warn the guy along the way."
The way Jarod looked at her then, like she was a new day dawning.
"You know, if you ever switched sides in earnest, you would be incredible."
Parker shot him a dry smile. "I already am, thanks. If I switched sides 'in earnest', I'd be dead within the month."
"Alone, maybe," said Jarod with a conciliatory head tilt.
"That's all piss and dreams for now. As for the job in front of us — we could take the mole to see your reporter tomorrow, be back in Blue Cove in time for dinner."
There was a unique joy in catching Jarod off guard.
"You want to come too?"
"Sure, why not?" She grabbed a bathrobe from the back of the bathroom door. After a hovering moment of hesitation, she nodded at the desk. "Sydney faxed me some material from your file yesterday. Feel free to take a look. Page eight, in particular, should be informative. I'm taking a shower."
Halfway through shampooing her hair, she heard the door to the hotel room close. When she emerged from the bathroom in a billow of steam, towelling off her hair, she found the room empty of Jarod and full of the sound of rainfall, great fat drops lashing the window to within an inch of its life.
"He'll be back," she said to a vacant room.
He was. Half an hour later, Parker answered the door in her pyjamas. Jarod dripped onto the ugly hotel carpet.
"I went to the Baltimore Sun offices — she said she works there. Nobody was there, only cleaning staff."
"Good for them," said Parker dryly. "You couldn't catch me at the office at this hour, either."
He shouldered past her into the room, movements jerky and snappish.
"You could have told me earlier," he bit out.
"I could have," she agreed. She refused to be drawn into a fight. "And I didn't. I told you now, instead. You'll see her tomorrow."
"You don't know that."
"Emily has shown up the last two days in a row. Did she get everything she wanted?"
"… No."
"Then you'll see her tomorrow."
He stared at an undefined point somewhere in the region of the baseboards, paralyzed by pent-up energy. A moment later, he snapped out of it with a gasp of effort.
"Yeah," he said. "Yeah. You're right." He laughed humourlessly. "I can't believe I didn't recognize her."
"You've seen her before?" This was news to Parker.
"A little over two years ago. It was through a car window and only on profile, but — ah, I should have recognized her."
"Wish in one hand, shit in the other," said Parker.
"What?"
"Nothing. It can wait one night."
With an unerring knack for timing, Parker's sleeping brain chose that night for a final showing of her new favourite nightmare.
She knew it back-to-front by now, such that the slight variations were especially conspicuous. This time through, she found her dream-bed had been chopped in half, and the other half had a safety vest and a cable-knit sweater draped over the foot of it.
Empty shower. Blood on the floor. Body on the porch, leaning against the stack of firewood. Check, check, check.
This time, instead of speaking, the corpse of Jarod roared in terror.
Her eyes slammed open and she lay there, rigid, confused in the dark of the hotel room. What had woken her up? Then it came again — Jarod, shouting in terrified grief. Without the benefit of a wall between them, she could now make out the words.
"No! No, no, no. Miss Parker, no. Please, no, I didn't, I couldn't have… Miss Parker!" he babbled, twisting his sheets in knots around himself.
By the sounds of it, she had died another grisly death in his dreams, just as he had in hers. The pain in his voice was too horrible to listen to. She slid out of bed and flicked on the bedside table lamp, leaning on the bedside table for support.
The way Jarod was thrashing around, trying to wake him up would be an excellent shortcut to getting hit in the jaw. She couldn't just let him carry on, though — his QSM symptoms kept coming earlier and earlier, and if Cox was right, they owed the trend to stress. He needed to calm down, now.
He wouldn't thank her for this.
She climbed up onto his mattress and slid on her knees to his side. His arms had stopped their pinwheeling, but his head continued to jerk this way and that, his breathing harsh and heavy as his words degraded into nonsense. She put a hand on his bare shoulder and shook him gently.
"Jarod, wake up," she murmured. "Wake up, it's okay."
Still asleep, one of his hands caught hold of her arm and, at the sound of her voice, he sobbed. His body started to twist and thrash once more, almost throwing Parker off the bed. Ignoring the stabs of pain it elicited, she threw her leg across his chest and straddled him, leaning her whole weight into keeping him still.
"Jarod! It's okay, I'm — I'm okay, I'm fine. Wake up!" she said, louder this time. She took his face in her hands. "Come on, Jarod. Wake up. Wake up!"
It was her hands that did it, finally. Jarod's eyes flew open and stared back at her uncomprehendingly. His chest moved like a pair of bellows, panic lending his breathing a strident wheeze.
"But—" he said, and nothing else. His confused gaze darted around her face.
"It's me, I'm alive, it's okay," she insisted, over and over. "It was just a dream."
One of his hands found her throat and softly traced a line down and to the left, just past the edge of her collar, and he stared in wonderment at the bare skin there, like he was expecting to see a wound. Had dream-Jarod stabbed dream-Parker there, perhaps?
"You didn't hurt me. I'm okay."
At the same time, a similar refrain sounded in her mind, set off by the sight of Jarod's body lying against the wood stack on her porch: You're okay, you're alive, you're fine.
Jarod's fingers ran through the hair falling across Parker's face, smoothing it away until he could see her face clearly by the slivers of moonlight poking through the window blinds and the dim glow of the bedside lamp. He smiled and closed his eyes in relief.
"You're okay," he said, voice rough from yelling. "You're okay."
"Yeah," she breathed.
They were both okay, and alive, and fine, and together, and the only sound was their co-mingled breathing. The rain had stopped. She could feel his heartbeat against the skin of her thighs. She didn't think much about it, but leaned down on pure instinct and pressed her warm mouth to his.
He didn't respond, so she did it again, and again, getting progressively drunker off each hit. God, she'd wanted this for so long. The third time, he threw off his shock, came alive and met her kiss eagerly. He pushed himself up on one elbow, the better to close the distance between them, and she grinned into the next kiss. Her mind had done its best to guilt-trip her for wanting this, but dammit, she wanted it and she was taking it.
"Hmm," she hummed against his mouth, her lips parting to taste more, feel more. "It's about damn time."
Jarod let his head fall back on his pillow and a soft, surprised laugh tumbled out of him.
"'About damn time'?" he repeated, his tone teasing.
"Don't give me that," she returned, curling her fingers along his jaw, around the back of his neck. "It's been a long time coming for both of us."
He didn't deny it, but let his mouth travel lower, mouthing at her neck, at her throat, at the fatal wound that wasn't there. Her eyelids fluttered closed, focused on the feeling of it, the fact of it, of Jarod kissing away a hurt he'd never inflicted.
"I wouldn't hurt you," he whispered, so soft that she wasn't sure he'd meant her to hear it. "I couldn't."
Days later, she would forget this part of it — the sweet kisses, the soft reassurances, the feeling of coming home. She wouldn't remember it until much later.
Her hips moved unconsciously, dry-humping like a teenager, and she sought more skin. She trailed her fingers down his bare chest, until — Jarod gasped and barked out a laugh.
Parker opened her eyes and pulled away slightly. "What, what is it?" She heard her voice, the bare impatience in it, the need, and wanted to hide her face in the crook of his neck.
"Your hands," he said, laughter trailing off into a mischievous smile. "They're cold."
"Oh," she said, and dissolved into quiet giggles. "Sorry."
She rubbed her hands together to build up friction, but it wasn't enough. Her slim fingers had never had very good circulation. Jarod caught both hands in his larger ones, cupped them to his mouth, and blew on them until they were warm.
I could have you, given the chance, she thought at him, and the have in her mind sounded a little like another word, two letters off… though she wouldn't remember that part later, either.
She placed her hands on his chest once more.
"Better?" she asked.
"Much." His own hands cupped her waist, thumbs tucked under the hem of her top. "How are mine?"
"Too shy."
He took the hint and allowed his hands to explore further, questing upwards, freeing Parker from her camisole in the name of a fair playing field. A triumphant smile spread across her lips at the look on Jarod's face, at once reverential and hungry. His mouth followed his hands, pausing to trace, encircle and suck, so light it made her breath hitch and stutter. Her head, suddenly heavy and light at the same time, sagged against her shoulder for a moment, overcome with want.
More hands, now — she folded hers around his and guided them to her, between her legs, over cloth, then under it. She was the one guiding, though from the synchrony of their vector, they both knew where they were going. He was just letting her lead. A thumb, a finger and then two, crooked and intent on beckoning her towards him, and she lost herself in it. She let her eyelids fall closed again, a fine set of blinders to block out the mission, the Centre, the inadvisability of what they were doing. She gasped and laughed and even (though she'd deny it later) whimpered, and when she opened her eyes again, Jarod was watching her like her every response was a discrete, arcing firework.
More distraction, urgently. Her hand dipped impatiently beneath the elastic waistband of his pyjama pants, finding him as eager as he'd been since he first met her kiss. Jarod's mouth fell open, slack in heady disbelief, and he groaned in response to her confident touch. The two of them wrestled with the sundry layers of cloth between them until skin was flush against skin.
Skin, miles of it; Jarod, ever the pathfinder, set about tracing a Northwest Passage with his mouth, but ran aground on Parker's impatience. No time for this, not now that she could feel him under her, no cloth to separate them. Some necessary rummaging in the purse on the bedside table, and the air filled with a chorale sigh, drawn forth as she lowered herself onto him, first in tentative stages, then all at once.
"God," said Jarod under his breath. He trailed his hands down her back, fingertips tripping along the notches in her spine. "You — this is, you're incredible. Good?"
"Yeah," she gasped. Deep breath in, out through pursed lips. "Really good. Full."
She tried to move then, watching how they came apart and back together. One, two — then, like a bucket full of ice dumped down her spine, her leg announced itself with a lancing pain from knee to tailbone.
She could have sobbed. Not now.
One moment, the words — not now, Jesus Christ, how dare this happen now? — flickered across her consciousness. The next, Jarod snaked an arm around her lower back, pulled her close, and deftly flipped their positions. Suddenly, her head was on Jarod's pillow and he was above her. Without pressure on the beleaguered nerves, the leg's complaints immediately fell mute. She hadn't had to say a word — finally, that big brain of his was paying off. The thought made her grin.
Picking up where Parker had left off, Jarod's hips moved tentatively at first. He watched her face, catching the reactions — subtle and not-so — to each variation, each angle and shift in weight, in the rhapsody unfolding across her features. He then leaned in for an insistent, all-consuming kiss and, without coming up for air, began to move with intent, slow and gorgeously deep. She moved to envelop him, her arms slipping under his to caress his back, her legs curling around him. Her lips broke from his and brushed against his shoulder again and again, quick and affectionate; he responded in kind, his mouth leaving a trail of kisses under her jaw.
As their dance sped up, she clung on for dear life, letting slip the occasional Jarod, the odd yes, the sporadic there. The act unfolded in an unnatural silence for the most part, but for a soundtrack of sighs and the whisper-quiet sliding of skin against skin.
She didn't let herself think about anything beyond the two of them moving together on a cheap hotel bed. There were several half-formed trains of thought ready to leave the station if she gave them the go-ahead, foggy shapes of guilt and dread and fear and a potential greater than she was ready for, shapes she wouldn't consent to define with words.
Surely someone should have stopped them before they got to this point. There should have been a line in her contract about it: don't fuck your asset. She would have been indignant about it at the time of signing, but damn, would it ever have paid off now.
A sudden brutal emptiness pulled a noise of outrage from her.
Jarod hushed her. "Hold that thought," he said, and pushed off the bed, taking the whole production further south. He urged her legs further apart with a gentle nudge of his head and, once there, gave what delights he could. She cradled his head in her hands as he worked, tracing with her fingers the line of his brow, the hollow of his cheeks, the angle of his jaw. The talents of his mouth provoked louder and louder approval until she had to fold her arms over her mouth to keep from waking the birds. Brought over the edge on the end of his tongue, she was left panting, hips squirming and thighs shivering and voice raised in a thrilling bliss.
To the edge and over and back around for seconds — they didn't (couldn't) stop until both were touch-shy and raw and sensitive and their eyelids sagged and their muscles protested their exhaustion. After another generous gift between her thighs, Parker's fingers scraped at Jarod's shoulder until he rejoined her at the head of the bed. He curled around her and draped a possessive arm across her cooling belly.
Parker laughed. "You look so damn smug," she observed. "But then, what else is new? I suppose you think you earned that look?"
He ignored her teasing. The referenced smug look grew into something more earnest. "That was…" He smiled into his pillow. Some inarticulate groan of contentment rumbled through the fabric. "What I imagined it would be… hm." He sighed. "Had nothing on the real thing."
Her face broke open in delight. "So you admit you've been thinking about it?"
"Like you said." Jarod gave a one-shouldered shrug. "It's been a long time coming."
"I wonder if it would have been any consolation to me during our cat-and-mouse days, if I'd known you were cranking it to the memory of my face after every near miss. Probably not."
She was deliberately distracting him from his earlier earnestness with juvenile wit; thankfully, he didn't seem to mind. His laugh was loud, long, and almost immediately muffled by the crook of his elbow.
"I'm not sure I admitted to all that," he protested through dying giggles.
"And you didn't deny it, either." She pushed herself onto her hands and knees, wincing from the pain in her leg for the first time since Jarod's mid-coitus flip manoeuvre. "I'll be right back."
Parker tottered to the bathroom on legs even more wobbly than usual, forgoing the cane. She didn't think she could stomach the bizarre image of herself, completely nude save for a length of beech wood. Counter to her casual promise, she was not "right back". She took her time in the bathroom, letting the harsh overhead lights illuminate and cast into judgement the series of snap decisions she'd made to lead her to this point. The urge rose to pinch herself on the arm to check whether this was the surreal second act of her recurring nightmare, where the victim came back to life and tempted her to a roll in the sheets. When she finally braved the main bedroom once more, Jarod had fallen asleep, a sheet barely preserving his modesty. She watched him, letting her gaze alight indulgently on the strip of bare, pale thigh left uncovered by the sheet, his fingers curled around the edge of the sheet like a knight clinging to a token of the lady's favour, the mildest hint of a smile on his relaxed face.
She couldn't put this in the same category as the string of one-night stands she'd entertained following the death of Thomas. Part of the appeal of those had been that she'd never see them again. If the Centre had their way, Parker couldn't avoid bumping into Jarod, talking to Jarod, working with Jarod most hours out of her waking life, for the rest of her career. This was something different. The question of how different sent her mind up a dangerous tributary, with plenty of rocks and rapids to trip her up. Worse yet, she had a feeling that Jarod would come up with a different answer than she would.
Parker hesitated at the foot of Jarod's bed, then slid into her own bed without bothering to recover her pyjamas. She pulled the sheets up around her ears and faced the window.
The nightmare on the porch by the wood pile did not resume. In fact, though she'd be troubled by many more nightmares in a lifetime's worth of nights, she'd seen the last of that one.