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The guards hit the floor in a heap, armor clattering against stone, blaster still smoking faintly in Micah’s hand. The corridor went quiet except for the hum of the overhead lights.
Michelle blinked at him. “You had that thing this whole time?”
“Emergencies only.” He holstered it, hands not quite steady. “That counted.”
“We should move before—”
“Wait.” He caught her wrist before he’d decided to.
She turned back, brow furrowing. “What?”
He opened his mouth, and nothing useful came out. His pulse was still going from the guard’s request, from the way she’d turned to him without hesitation and said pucker up like it cost her nothing, like it hadn’t sent his brain offline for a full three seconds before he’d panicked and reached for the blaster instead.
“Micah, we don’t have time to—”
“I didn’t want them watching.”
Michelle stopped. “What?”
“Earlier. When he asked us to—” He gestured vaguely between them, ears going warm. “I didn’t freeze because I didn’t want to. I froze because I didn’t want it to be that. In front of them. Like it was for their benefit instead of—”
He didn’t finish it. Couldn’t, really, not with her looking at him like that, like she was already three steps ahead of where the sentence was going and waiting to see if he’d actually get there.
“So.” He swallowed. “Sorry. For the delay.”
“Micah, what are you—”
He kissed her before he could think better of it, one hand still around her wrist, the other coming up uncertainly to her jaw like he wasn’t sure he was allowed. It wasn’t smooth. His nose bumped hers first, and he made a small, mortified sound against her mouth that she’d tease him about for the rest of his life if she remembered it, which she would, because Michelle forgot nothing.
For one terrible second he thought he’d miscalculated everything—the delay, the guards, the entire last however-many months—badly enough that she was about to shove him off and never let him hear the end of it.
Then her free hand found the front of his stolen jacket and fisted there, and she kissed him back before he had time to panic about it.
Something in his chest gave way at that, some tension he hadn’t clocked he’d been carrying since they’d gotten stuck on Labryn, since that mysterious shipping company and the robots and the Central Core. Since Jocelyn had told him to his face he was bad at this. His hand slid from her jaw into her hair, careless of the guard’s helmet knocking loose somewhere near his elbow, and he angled the kiss deeper without quite deciding to, chasing the shape of finally instead of thinking it through the way he thought everything else through.
Michelle made a soft, startled sound against his mouth, and then didn’t pull back either. Her fingers uncurled from his jacket only to grip tighter, holding him there like she’d been the one waiting on him and not the other way around.
When he finally broke the kiss, he didn’t go far. Just far enough to breathe, forehead nearly resting against hers, her wrist still caught loosely in his hand like he hadn’t remembered to let go.
“Okay,” he said, mostly to himself.
Michelle stared up at him, dazed in a way she was clearly furious about. “You planned that entire speech. While unconscious guards were on the floor.”
“I improvised most of it.”
“Micah.”
“I’ve thought about it before,” he admitted, too fast, like the confession had been waiting behind his teeth for months. “Not the—not this specifically, I hadn’t planned an ambush, but the general—”
“Micah.”
“Yes.”
“Shut up and let’s go before they wake up.”
He grinned, wide and a little stupid, and grabbed her hand instead of her wrist this time. She let him.
The Agency debrief room was loud in the way it always got when everyone made it back in one piece—Shiloh cross-referencing the stolen data against Elijah’s map, Josiah already halfway into a report to Gala about the laser hallway, Klaxi hovering near the door with a tray nobody had asked for. Micah dropped into a chair at the long table and tried to look like a man who had spent the last hour thinking about vault security.
He was not thinking about vault security.
Michelle sat two seats down, arms crossed, expression set in its usual unreadable neutral, and every time he glanced over she was already looking somewhere else. Which was normal. Which was fine. Except his ears kept going hot every time it happened, and he was fairly sure that wasn’t normal at all.
“So.” Judah dropped into the chair across from him, chin propped on one hand, entirely too pleased with himself. “Cousins.”
Micah kept his eyes on the table. “It came out wrong.”
Judah raised an eyebrow, “Did it, though?” He was enjoying this way too much.
“Judah.”
“I’m just saying.” Judah spread his hands. “You said cousins. She said dating. At the same time. That’s not a communication breakdown, Micah, that’s a Rorschach test.”
Michelle rolled her eyes, though her cheeks had gone a tint warmer, “Do you even know what a Rorschach test is?” She shot back, and Judah just stuck his tongue at her in response.
“We were... improvising.” Micah eventually said.
“Sure.”
Across the table, Michelle didn’t look up from the report she was very intently not reading. “Are we doing this now?”
“We’re doing this now,” Judah confirmed cheerfully.
Shiloh, without lifting her head from the map, said, “Leave them alone, Judah,” in the exact tone of someone who fully intended to keep listening anyway.
Micah risked a glance at Michelle. Her jaw was tight, the way it got when she was working very hard not to react to something, and for one horrible second he thought she was about to say something that would make this infinitely worse. Instead she reached over and stole his water without asking, which was such an ordinary, familiar thing that his chest did something complicated and unhelpful.
“You’re staring,” Judah said, delighted.
“I’m not.”
“You’re doing the face.”
“There’s no face.”
“There’s a face.” Judah looked to his left. “Josiah, is there a face?”
Josiah, mid-sentence with Gala, glanced over just long enough to say, “There’s a face,” and went right back to his story without missing a beat.
Micah dragged a hand down his own face like it might physically remove whatever expression was apparently living there. Under the table, out of anyone’s line of sight, Michelle’s foot bumped his once, deliberate. He didn’t look at her. He didn’t have to.
“I hate all of you,” he said, to the table in general.
“No you don’t,” Judah said, already reaching for the tray Klaxi had abandoned. “You love us. It’s very obvious. Almost as obvious as—”
“Judah,” Michelle said, flat, not looking up.
Judah raised both hands in surrender, grinning like a man who had gotten exactly what he wanted and knew better than to push his luck any further tonight.