“You’ve never shaved your head before, have you,” Luke asks.

“No.”

“OK, well, it goes by real fast.”

“Are these the ones you use on yourself?”

“The clippers? Yeah, but not everywhere.” He waggles his eyebrows. She gives him a playful slap on the hip. “What? You’re the one who likes things under control down there.”

He’s been patient with her in the bedroom—he’s only the second man she’s ever been with, and she can’t even remember the first guy’s name—but right before she shipped out, their shared anxiety about her imminent departure brought the heat between them to a boil. They went from slow, careful lovemaking to her tying his wrists to the bedposts and saying, “Just give me an hour to see where you’re sensitive,” to which he nodded enthusiastically. In those last few weeks, her inexperience and curiosity around sex became a kind of expeditionary hunger, and he was more than happy to be explored. Her memories of these last hungry couplings quieted her heart during the long periods of isolation and waiting that followed.

“What do you think?” he asks. “You want to leave a little or go cue ball?” He runs his fingers gently over the straw-colored fuzz.

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“What you want.”

“It’s your hair, baby.”

“Yeah, but they’re your fingers and the way you’re moving them right now is giving me chills, and let’s just say I’d like to have a head you enjoy touching now and then.”

He sets the clippers down on the counter, bends down, and kisses her gently on the forehead. Since he’s got no idea what she’s been through over the past few weeks, he’s probably trying his best not to rush it. “Only now and then?” he whispers.

“More than now and then.”

This time he kisses her on the lips, and suddenly she’s rising up off the chair. His arms encircle her, and she feels a surge of desire she’s afraid she might not be able to control.

Surviving, she tells herself, going into the belly of the beast and surviving—that’s the turn-on. But what if he knew? What if he knew that her actions had led to Davies’s death? What if he’d seen the rage she’d unleashed on the man, a rage that eventually caused him to bleed out?

Would he still be gentle and hungry with me at the same time?

Luke seems to sense these wandering thoughts during their kiss and pulls away slightly.

“This is weird,” she says.

“Making out in the bathroom when you’re covered in loose hairs?”

“That’s . . . sort of weird, yeah. But no, I . . . I feel good, Luke.”

“Of course you do. I’m here.”

“Yeah, there’s that. But . . .”

“But what?”

“I kinda blew up.”

Luke just stares at her, but he doesn’t pull away. Still, his serious expression is a bit much for her to stare at while they’re nose to nose.

“Blew up how?”

“There was a booby trap at the site. Where we were . . . working. And I walked into it and . . . boom.”

For a while he doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t let her go, either. She’s reminded of the first time he’d witnessed her power, reminded of the way he’d stumbled to the nearest trash can and emptied his stomach into it. Should she expect a similar reaction now? Or is this fear widening his eyes and tensing his mouth and making his chest rise and fall with breaths that look too shallow for his broad frame?

She knows he wanted to be there, and she’s afraid he’ll try to make the case again now. What will she say? She’s probably already told him too much. What’s the difference between telling him about the explosion and telling him that Davies didn’t survive the night?

Simple. One paints her as a miracle. The other, a murderer.

“Jesus,” he whispers. “I wish . . .”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

There it is, she thinks. He wishes he could have been there. But what would he have done? Sat in some control room, gradually seeing her as less than human.

“But you’re OK.”

Relieved they seem to be moving on from his unspoken question, she says, “I guess, yeah. They poked and prodded me for a day and ran all kinds of tests. But . . .”

“All right, careful. I don’t want you to say anything that will earn you the wrath of Cole.”

“I was on fire from head to toe. I passed out right away. But by the time the medics got to me, my wounds were closing. In any other circumstance, they would have been fatal.”

For a while they just stare at each other, neither one moving, as they process the profound weirdness of yet another profoundly weird development.

“And you feel . . . better?” Luke asks, eyes wide.

“Healthier,” she says. “More energetic.”

“You don’t think it’s because . . .”

“Because what?”

“You enjoyed it?”

The question moves through her like the first chill from a fever.

I didn’t enjoying hearing the news that Davies was dead, she thinks, but I didn’t actually shed a tear over him, either. It’s like an absence of feeling. Do I have to name it? Can I just let it be an absence?