Chapter Fourteen #3
His eyes held mine long enough that the room felt considerably smaller all of a sudden.
Then Wolf reached past me toward the second locker.
I went still. His arm passed beside my shoulder, close enough that the hair along my forearm lifted anyway, and he pulled a folded gray blanket from the lower shelf.
“Bed,” he said.
“You really need another tone.”
“Why?”
I glanced from him to the shirt I was wearing.
His eyes narrowed slightly.
“I hate you.”
“Get in bed, Mercer.”
My stomach tightened again at his words. I walked toward the bed because the alternative was explaining why his commands had suddenly become complicated. Wolf dropped the folded blanket onto the open floor beside the wall.
I stopped.
“No.”
He looked up. “We already settled this.”
“The group settled that I was sleeping in here. Nobody agreed you were sleeping on bare concrete.”
“It’s one night.”
“Take the bed. I’ll take the floor.”
“No.”
“We could share it.”
The words left my mouth before I had time to evaluate them.
Wolf went very still.
I did too.
The bed was not large. It was technically wide enough for two adults if both of them had extremely disciplined ideas about personal space, which Wolf probably did and I currently did not trust myself to maintain.
I looked at the mattress.
“I-I mean like to sleep,” I said.
“I know what you meant.”
His voice had gone lower.
That did not help.
“You’re the one acting like I proposed a crime,” I replied.
“I’m not acting like anything.”
“You stopped moving.”
“So did you.”
I opened my mouth and then closed it. Wolf looked at the bed, then at me in his shirt.
“Floor’s fine.”
I heard the finality and recognized it for what it was.
He was not refusing because the bed physically could not hold us.
He was refusing because he knew exactly what being in it together would mean after yesterday’s conversation, the kitchen this morning and the fact that he had just worked out I was naked under his shirt.
I let him have the boundary without arguing it into the ground.
“Fine. But take the extra pillow.”
Wolf reached for one.
I climbed into his bed.
The mattress was firmer than mine. His sheets smelled faintly of clean cotton, cigarette smoke and the same woody scent caught in his shirt, except stronger here where it had been pressed into the pillow and blanket night after night.
Every choice I had made in the previous five minutes seemed much more questionable from beneath his sheets.
Wolf unfolded the gray blanket on the floor and put the pillow at one end. He removed his socks and set them beside the wall, then took his watch off and placed it carefully beside the phone on the desk. I watched him longer than I meant to.
Without boots or tactical gear, he moved differently. Quieter. The plain black mask looked almost stranger with sleep clothes than it did with a rifle across his chest, as if that piece of Wolf had followed him somewhere the rest of the uniform had not.
He caught me looking.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re staring.”
“You say that like you don’t.”
His eyes dropped briefly to the blanket over my legs.
“Go to sleep.”
I rolled onto my side and rested my head against his pillow. “Do you actually sleep?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve never seen evidence.”
“You aren’t usually in my room at night.”
I tucked one hand beneath the pillow. “Fair.”
Wolf reached for the lamp. I looked at the covering still hiding the lower half of his face.
“Wait.”
His fingers paused against the switch.
“You sleep in that?”
His eyes held mine.
“The mask,” I clarified, since precision had become the only way to make the question worse. “You don’t actually sleep in it, do you?”
“No.”
Neither of us said anything for a beat. Neither of us seemed interested in acknowledging the obvious next problem.
“Right,” I said.
He switched off the lamp.
Darkness filled the room.
The blinds let in only a narrow strip of security light from outside, enough to separate the desk from the wall and leave Wolf’s body as a dark shape beside the bed. I heard him lower himself onto the blanket.
Then fabric shifted softly.
It was a small sound, nothing dramatic, but my entire body noticed anyway. He had taken the mask off.
Wolf was lying less than six feet from me with his face completely uncovered and I could not see him. The darkness suddenly felt far more deliberate than it had a minute earlier.
I lay on my back staring toward the ceiling I could barely make out.
My phone sat on his desk, within reach if I leaned far enough.
One touch would light the room for a second.
Enough to see him. Enough to finally know where the scar began and how far it traveled, what his entire face did when he wasn’t hiding most of it.
I left the phone where it was.
The shirt shifted against my bare stomach when I settled deeper into the bed. I became aware again of the fact that I had nothing underneath it, which felt ridiculous in the dark because Wolf could not see that either.
“Mercer.”
His voice sounded different again without fabric over his mouth. It was clearer around the edges, the low register less muffled and suddenly more human than the voice I was used to hearing through the mask.
“I’m not looking.”
Silence.
“I didn’t say you were.”
“You were thinking it.”
“Go to sleep.”
“You sound different.”
Another pause.
“Mercer.”
“Fine.”
I closed my eyes.
The compound settled around us. Pipes shifted inside the walls and somewhere outside a door closed as Bear probably finished dealing with my room for the night. Wolf’s breathing gradually slowed from a pattern I could hear into one I had to listen for.
Mine took considerably longer as I finally drifted off.
◆
I woke to a voice.
For several seconds, I could not place the room. The sheets smelled wrong, my legs were tangled beneath a heavier blanket than the one on my own bed and there was a low sound somewhere beside me that did not belong in sleep.
Then the voice came again.
“Move.”
Wolf. I opened my eyes.
He was still on the floor, but every part of him had tightened. His shoulders were rigid beneath the black shirt and one hand had twisted into the blanket under him. His breathing came too fast, each inhale catching before it fully settled.
“Wolf?”
Nothing.
His head turned sharply toward the wall.
“Get them out.”
The words came rough enough that I stopped moving. I had heard Wolf angry. I had heard him command through gunfire and talk over police radios while people bled around him. That voice always had control built into it.
This one did not.
“Wolf.”
His hand moved across the blanket as though reaching for something that was not there.
“Move. M-move please,” he whimpered.
I pushed the blanket off my legs and sat on the edge of the bed, keeping my feet tucked beneath me. Touching him while he was trapped inside whatever he was seeing seemed like the kind of decision that ended with both of us on the floor.
“You’re at the compound,” I said quietly. “Stuttgart. You’re in your room.”
His breathing did not change.
“Wolf, wake up.”
His shoulders jerked.
“Br- Brad-,” he whispered.
Was that someone’s name?
In the thin strip of light from the window, I could make out only pieces of his profile: the line of his forehead, the side of his nose and the heavier shape of his jaw. It was more than I had ever seen and still not enough to become a face I could carry into daylight.
He said something else I could not understand.
Then, clearer, “Go.”
I lowered one foot to the floor.
“I-I’m going to turn on the lamp, okay?”
No response.
“Wolf, I’m turning it on.”
I reached toward the switch.
His hand closed around my wrist before my fingers got there. The movement was so fast that I sucked in a breath.
His eyes were open.
Or close enough to open that they fixed on me through the dark while his grip stayed hard around my wrist. Every tendon in his forearm stood out beneath my other hand where I had braced against him on instinct.
“It’s me Wolf,” I whispered.
“Mercer.” My name sounded rough and uncertain in his uncovered voice.
“Yes, it’s me. Mia.”
His fingers loosened immediately.
I pulled my wrist back without moving away.
Wolf sat up. One hand came toward his face and stopped halfway when he remembered the mask was gone. He turned his head from me so quickly that the movement told me exactly how awake he was now.
“Just give me a second,” he muttered.
I looked at the wall instead of him. “Of course.”
He found the mask somewhere beside the blanket. Fabric moved in the dark, followed by the soft scrape as he pulled it into place.
Only then did he turn back but his breathing was still too fast.
I kept my voice low. “You know where you are?”
His stare sharpened.
“That’s not me being an asshole,” I assured him.
“I know where I am.”
I looked toward the desk. “What time is it?”
“Why?”
“Because I’m trying to get your brain to do something boring.”
He glanced toward the phone. “Three something.”
“Close enough.”
“I’m fine, Mercer.”
“You were talking in your sleep.”
“I gathered.”
“You grabbed me.”
His eyes immediately dropped to my wrist. The skin was pink where his fingers had closed around it, but the pressure had lasted only a second.
“Did I hurt you?”
“No.”
He looked back up.
“You just startled me,” I added. “That’s all.”
Wolf watched my face long enough that I knew he was checking the answer rather than accepting it because I had given him one.
Then he nodded.
I let my feet touch the floor and sat on the edge of the bed.
“Do you want water?”
“No.”
“Do you want me to shut up?”
“Usually.”
The familiarity in the answer loosened something in my chest.
I looked toward the cigarettes on the desk. “Balcony?”
His eyes followed mine and he stayed quiet.
Then he stood and picked up the cigarettes and lighter while I pulled the hem of his shirt lower over my thighs.
His attention dropped and I caught it.
“Still naked under here,” I said before I could decide whether that was a sentence I wanted to say aloud at three in the morning.
Wolf’s eyes returned to mine.
“I know.”
He opened the door.