24. Esperr
ESPERR
Iwake up with an arm around my waist. It’s so heavy and warm and completely unfamiliar that I almost rip it off of me.
Almost, but I don’t. And I think that’s the part that I can’t quite explain to myself in the gray morning light—that I woke up with a stranger’s arm around my waist, and my first instinct to move it off of me came and went just as quickly.
It’s as if he’s not a stranger anymore, and I’m not even sure how to handle that.
I lie there and listen to him breathe. Completely even and slow behind me, chest rising against my back with this particular rhythm that I find oddly calming.
I know I should get up and make coffee or make something for breakfast—though the only thing I know how to make is toast, and that’s even a stretch.
Holding my breath, I do my best and start to turn onto my back. Slowly and carefully, doing everything in my power not to cause too much noise or movements.
It takes longer than I’d like for me to finally settle onto my back, his arm resting across my stomach.
When I peer over at Zyran, his eyes are still closed, chest rising and falling in easy breaths.
My gaze falls to the line of his jaw, to the scar along half his jaw that I haven’t noticed until now, to the way he looks different when he’s not watching everything.
In a way he looks younger, like sleep has stripped something back that he keeps carefully in place when he’s awake.
The memories flash through my mind. The nightmare that drew him under, and the way he grabbed my wrist when I touched him—fast and reflexive, but gone just as quickly.
I even told him about my father, about the whistling tunes that Dad would make up. I’ve never told anyone that, not even Oliver. That life is no longer a part of me; it’s a door that I keep closed because opening it means feeling things and feelings; it means?—
Zyran’s arm that’s wrapped around me tightens, pulling me a half an inch closer.
“Quit thinking so hard.” His voice is low and rough with sleep, hot in a way that for a split second I think about jumping his bones.
“I’m not thinking,” I rush to say, distracting myself from the third leg poking my hip.
I pray that he says something else, anything to get my mind off what’s happening, but he doesn’t. The silence that follows is very loud. To make things worse, when he opens his eyes, he notices that I’m already staring at him.
My face heats, and I’m on the verge of throwing up.
“I mean—” I start.
“I know what you meant.”
“I was just?—”
“Esperr.”
I shake my head, needing to get away from this conversation now. “It’s fine, it’s a normal, biological?—”
“Esperr,” Zyran growls.
I close my mouth, our gaze meeting. Something sits just behind his expression that he’s clearly working very hard to keep from becoming a smile.
His jaw is tight with the effort of it, and I watch him lose that battle incrementally.
The corner of his mouth gives first, then the other side, until he turns his face into the pillow like that’s going to hide anything.
Then his shoulders shake, and his grip around my middle tightens.
“You’re laughing,” I say flatly.
He says nothing, just giggling into the pillow like a little school girl.
“You’re actually laughing at me right now.”
“I’m not laughing,” he says into the pillow, which is an absolute lie. He’s definitely laughing at me.
I shove his arm off me and sit up, pulling my knees to my chest, staring at the wall because my face is doing things I refuse to let him see.
Zyran’s still laughing quietly into my pillow like he’s trying to keep it contained and failing completely. I’ve never heard him laugh like this; it’s low, unhurried, and carefree. I can’t help but glance over my shoulder at him, a smile spreading across my lips before I begin to laugh too.
He’s already staring at me, and I shouldn’t be surprised; Zyran seems to always be looking at me. To some, him watching while I laugh would make the situation worse. My laugh is unguarded and freeing—something I’m not used to. And he’s the reason behind it.
I mean, this is the man who showed up at my door in a snowstorm with a cart full of groceries and slept in my bed without asking and is currently the reason I’m wet between the legs.
“You should do that more.”
My laugh dies off and I frown, confused. “Do what?”
“That,” he nods toward me. “The laughing, the…” he pauses, like he’s picking what word he wants to use carefully. “The carefree thing.”
My face, which was already a tad bit red, warms immediately; I’m probably the shade of a tomato now. “That’s embarrassing.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Oh, it absolutely is; you don’t just… you can’t tell someone they’re being carefree, that’s—” I shake my head, words not coming to me, and I’m not sure how I can explain the reasoning for my being embarrassed. It’s not exactly because he’s calling me carefree, but more because he noticed.
Zyran sits up slowly, elbows on his knees, looking at me with something I can’t quite put my finger on.
“When’s the last time you laughed like that?
” He asks, and for a second I wonder if it’s a question he doesn’t really care for an answer to.
But he always has that look in his eye, the one that tells me he’s serious, that he wants to know what is actually going on inside my head.
And that alone terrifies me.
Not because of anything else but the fact that I know I’m developing feelings, or already have, and don’t want to deal with them.
So I do what I do best: ignore it and climb to my feet. “Coffee?” I ask, but don’t wait around to hear his answer before I’m basically running out of my bedroom.
The kitchen tile is freezing, and it sends a little shiver through me, down to my bones. Though I’m grateful for something immediate and physical to focus on because my chest is doing that thing—the squeezing, pulling, the oh no thing that I have spent a very long time learning how to outrun.
Moving on auto pilot, I grab my old trusty coffee pot and fill it with water. Behind me I can hear him in the bedroom, the soft sounds of him moving.
Nope.
Don’t think about him.
I focus on the water filling up, the cold coming up through my feet, and the grey light coming through over the sink, and not on the fact that not even thirty seconds ago I was laughing in a way I haven’t laughed in years.
And to the fact that he noticed and asked about it—fuck, even the way he looked at me like the answer actually mattered to him.
Blowing out a breath, I move to the coffee maker and fill the tank up before shoving it onto the burner, filling the thing with a coffee filter and then coffee grounds.
The thing about feelings is they don’t ask permission; hell, they don’t even knock, they just shove themselves down your throat until you’re forced to swallow them.
That’s what I hate about them most—they don’t wait until you’re ready or until the timing makes sense or until you’ve done a thorough risk assessment of the person sitting across from you.
Nope.
They just show up, quietly, and in the middle of an ordinary morning.
Just as the coffee begins to drip into the pot, Zyran appears behind me. I keep my back to him, eyes on the coffee pot, watching it like I’m studying for a damn test.
He doesn’t say anything, just moves into the kitchen the same way he moves everywhere else—unhurried, taking up space and so sure of himself.
I feel him more than I hear him, this awareness I’ve developed over the last two years that I absolutely did not ask for, some sense that tracks where he is in a room without my permission.
Zyran reaches past me for a mug, setting it next to mine. I stare at them, sitting side by side, and something cracks open just slightly in my chest, something small and stupid, completely disproportionate to two mugs on the counter.
This is how it starts, isn’t it? Not with anything big, just this, something so small.
“You take anything in it?” I ask, my voice coming out even, which honestly feels like a personal victory.
“However you make yours.”
I pause, just for a second, before I quickly recover and reach for the coffee pot. Right now I need a good and safe distraction.
It’s such a small thing, and it shouldn’t do anything, but for some reason I’m holding onto it.
I make mine with too much sugar and a splash of whatever creamer I have left, which currently is the vanilla kind that was on sale and not the one I actually prefer. I’ve been meaning to get the other one for three weeks but keep forgetting.
Why am I thinking about creamer right now?
With quick and efficient work, I make both coffees before turning around and holding it out to him.
I watch him with a careful eye, waiting for him to say something about the color of it, about the sweetness, or really anything else. But he doesn’t, just wraps both hands around it and takes a slow sip, eyes still on me over the rim, completely unbothered.
My brows pull together in a frown—I don’t know what to do with someone who just… I shake my head, having no idea what I need.
The kitchen is small enough that we’re closer than we probably should be for two people who are still technically strangers, but then again, he did sleep in my bed… again.
“How’d you sleep?” I ask because I need something ordinary to say, and that’s the most ordinary thing to ask in the morning.
“Better than I expected,” he answers, smiling.
I try not to read too much into what he’s saying, but I can’t help it, the way there’s a meaning sitting just underneath it.
“Good,” I nod, taking a sip. “That’s good.”
The silence that follows isn’t uncomfortable exactly, but the more I think about how quiet it is, the more my mind begins to overthink. So I move out of the kitchen and into the living room, sitting down on the chair.
Zyran follows me, going to the window first. “Still coming down.”
I take a drink, peering over the cup at the window. “Mmhmm.”
He doesn’t say anything else, just casually looks over the room before heading to the couch.
“You don’t have much,” he finally says.
I shrug, not sure how to take his observation. “I have what I need.”
“You have the minimum,” he meets my gaze with a knowing look. “There’s nothing on your walls, nothing on your shelves. Your kitchen has enough to get by,” a pause, a single breath. “You’ve been here three years.”
I shift in my chair, taking a drink so I have a second longer to think of an excuse. “I’m not really a stuff kind of person.”
“Or you never fully unpacked.”
The accuracy of that lands somewhere uncomfortable, and I take a long sip of my coffee and look at the empty wall across from me that I’ve walked past every single day for three years without once thinking about putting anything on it.
“You’re very observant,” I tell him instead. “Has anyone ever told you that’s annoying?”
Something passes over his face before he smiles, “Once or twice.”
“I bet,” I smirk, pulling my feet further under me. “And for the record, I’m not—it’s not that I never unpacked. I just—” I stop, cutting myself off.
Zyran’s head cocks to the side. And that’s the thing about him, he never fills the silence, never hands you an out, or lets you off the hook with a subject change.
He just waits, patiently and unhurried, like he has decided whatever is at the end of the sentence is worth however long it takes to get there.
I love it and hate it.
It’s infuriating.
“I never saw the point,” I finally mumbled. “In making it too much of a home.”
He looks at me steadily, nodding like he understands. “Because you knew you’d leave.”
“Because I always leave.”
The words come out barely above a whisper, much quieter than I ever intended. It’s more honest than I ever meant to be, especially with him. But in a sick and twisted way, I think I like it.
I want to spill all my secrets to him. I want him to know who I am and what I am, and I still want him to look at me like I hold the moon and sun.
“But you didn’t; you didn’t leave.”
“Not yet.”
“Three years is a long time for not yet.”
I glare at him over the rim of my mug.
He’s right, one hundred percent, and I hate that.
“Why’d you stay?” he asks.
I hold my breath because there it is, the question sitting underneath all of the other questions that are piling up.
We stare at each other for a long moment, silence stretching between us.
“I don’t know,” I hear myself whispering. And to do what I do best, I change the subject off of me. “How do you do that?”
He glances from the window back to me. “Do what?”
“Just—” I gesture vaguely. “Exist, you know, without needing to fill everything up.”
He seems to consider my question. “Learned to be comfortable with the quiet a long time ago.”
“Why?”
Something moves across his face; it’s brief and gone before I can figure it out. “Because noise got people killed.”
The casualness of it hits differently than he probably means it to. Not careless—just honest, the way he’s honest about everything thus far.
I look at him, studying, and I think he realizes what he just handed me because something shifts slightly in his expression. It’s not regret exactly, more like a man who just opened a door he wasn’t planning on opening just yet and is now deciding whether to step through it or slam it closed.
I’ve had things I wasn’t ready to say, so I don’t push, knowing what it feels like to hand someone a piece of yourself by accident and then wait to see what they do with it.
So I just nod once and unfold myself from the chair.
“I’m going to shower,” I tell him, climbing to my feet.
I get halfway down the hallway before I hear him calling my name.
Stopping, I peer over my shoulder, finding his eyes already on me, and for the first time, I don’t mind eyes on me, not when they’re his.
“Thank you.”
My brows pull together.
“For last night,” he clarifies.
I swallow around the lump in my throat before a smile spreads across my lips. “Don’t mention it.”