Free Only the Hunted Run by Neely Tucker Page B

she had giggled and it had come up through her nose and when he walked up she was facedown on the table, snorting and laughing, everybody howling, and she lifted her head and looked up and saw him and then sneezedand that sent them all into spasms, her leaning on the shoulder of Greg Marinovic, gasping and saying “Stopstopstop. My stomach hurts.”
    He had gone to the bar to get his drink and a fresh one for her. When he got back, he slid it across the table, and she looked up to see who was buying the round and it had pretty much been lust at first sight, the festive mood of the nation spilling into the air, a glossy-eyed giddiness infecting a tribe that reported war and death for a living. That they worked for the same paper but had not met gave him an excuse for chatting her up, and before Mandela was out he had taken a suite at the Kinton, a boutique hotel over in Rosebank, where prying eyes would not see them returning to the same room late at night or lingering for hours at the restaurant, sitting way too close, talking, whispering.
    It had been a fling, but an adult one, as an actual relationship was not possible, given they had jobs on different continents. They had drifted apart. She had been polite but distant when she saw him again in Sarajevo, during the Bosnian War. By then he was living, and very much in love, with Nadia. The shell took Nadia not long after that, then he was blown up by a grenade, and Alexis had been one of the correspondents who helped load him, unconscious and mangled, onto a chopper.
    Now they were based on the same continent, in the same building, feeling each other out, seeing if there were long-term commitments to be found underneath their shared attraction, that mysterious chemistry pulling them one to the other.
    She was saying, here—at least he thought she was saying—that as a friend who’d been through the bang-bang shit before, she damn well knew he would have needed somebody to talk with, drink with, calm down with last night after deadline, and that person could, or should, have been her. That’s what she was saying. He was pretty sure of it now. Since they were in the office, she was saying it from a polite, professional distance. Maybe she wasn’t as pissed as he’d thought.
    â€œWalk with me,” he said, turning down the hallway, “get a Coke out of the machine.”
    She did, the corridor empty, just the two of them and the paintings on the wall, and he felt his shoulders relax. He didn’t have to whisper, but he found himself doing it nonetheless. “If Josh wasn’t with me this summer, I would have knocked on your door, had a few drinks, talked it out with you in a hot shower. As it was, I got home, looked in on him, passed out on the couch.”
    â€œPassed out?”
    â€œNot drunk,” he said, cutting her with a glance, “tired. On the couch. Shattered, the Brits would say. Facedown when Waters, this fucker, calls me this morning. Ran in here after that. Same clothes as yesterday.”
    The office kitchen was fluorescent lighting, old linoleum, the smell of burnt coffee, crystals of spilled sugar on the countertop, yellow plastic chairs at a couple of brown tables. She pulled money out of her front pocket, waving him off. “I’ll buy hero boy a drink,” she said, fucking with him a little bit now, a smile reaching to the corner of her lips. “I wasn’t worried about your work on the story. I was worried, am worried, a little bit about you.”
    A Coke clanged down the chute. He fished it out, then pointed to the little pack of orange crackers with peanut butter stuck in between them.
    â€œSpot me?”
    She did, then bought herself a Coke, popped it open, slurping at the top to keep it from fizzing over. “Mmm. You can handle yourself, that’s not what I’m saying. But when we, when we’re working abroad, the big bads aren’t looking for us. It’s just that we