28. Esperr
ESPERR
There’s a pressure building behind my left eye, and I don’t like it.
When I stepped into the shower, I noticed it: a dull, insistent throb that hasn’t decided whether it’ll stay manageable or take over the entire day.
I’m hoping for a manageable one, but I’m also not optimistic.
The couch is cold when I drop into it, sending a shiver down my spine. Tucking my feet underneath me, I reach over and grab the remote, turning the TV on. My hair is still wrapped in the towel, a damp weight at the back of my neck that I have no energy to deal with right now.
I keep my expression easy, or at least I try to. The headache is mine, and I have no interest in it becoming a conversation.
Clicking through the channels, I find the news and leave it at that.
The screen fills with the radar—a mass of white and gray sitting over the entire region like it’s permanently going to be there.
The anchor is saying something about record accumulation, about roads that haven’t been touched in two days, and that people need to stay where they’re at.
I don’t hear Zyran move—that’s still something I’m adjusting to, the way he just fits into my space. At first I hated how I didn’t hate him here, but now, I’m weak at doing anything about it.
The couch dips slightly, and then his hand appears at my periphery, a mug extended toward me with steam curling off the top.
The smell hits me, and I smile before taking the mug from him. Wrapping both hands around it, I let the warmth bleed through my palms and hope that a little caffeine will cure the headache brewing.
“Thank you,” I mumble, scooting to the middle of the couch.
Peering over at him, my gaze drops to the spot I was just in and then back up to him, hoping he doesn’t make me ask him to sit down. Thankfully he doesn’t and settles in beside me.
The anchor moves onto something else—flooding two states over, a pileup on an interstate that’s been closed since yesterday, and for the first time I find myself actually watching instead of just staring at the screen.
“They were talking about another two days,” I mutter, taking a sip of my coffee.
I smile when I swallow, not realizing how much he paid attention to how I make mine.
Zyran makes a sound that is somewhere in between agreement and dismissal, and I’m learning that this is how he communicates most of the time.
“Does that bother you?” I ask, peering over my shoulder.
He glances down, a brow raised as if he is saying ‘are you kidding me?’ before he answers me. “No.”
I smile, feeling like a giddy little girl, and look away before he can see how red my face becomes.
I drink my coffee while we watch the news, and at some point he shifts besides me, and I feel him immediately. Before we weren’t touching, but we definitely are now. I don’t turn around, keeping my eyes on the screen like I’m very interested in the flooding two states over.
I’m not interested in the flooding at all.
“The towel?’
I reach up and touch it as if I had forgotten it was there at all.
“Yeah?”
“It’s been up there for a long time.”
I shrug one shoulder, aiming to be more casual than I feel with my heart nearly beating out of my chest.
“Sometimes I just don’t have the energy for it.”
I’m met with silence, and then suddenly he gets up from the couch and heads down the hall.
I open my mouth to ask him what he’s doing when I hear the soft sound of the bathroom cabinet, and then he reappears.
Zyran still doesn’t say anything as he sits back in his spot, and then he’s pulling the towel loose, dropping it onto the floor in front of him.
My brows pull together, and I go to turn my head when I feel the first slow drag of the brush through the end of my hair, working out the knot there before moving up.
I got very still—not because it’s unwelcome, but because it isn’t.
That’s the part that I don’t know what to do with.
I can’t remember the last time someone did something like this for me, something so small and unnecessary, something that didn’t need to happen.
There was no reason for him to get up, no reason to brush my hair.
But he did it, just like how he made my coffee—he doesn’t make a big deal out of it, and I honestly don’t know how to sit with that.
My head still aches, but for a moment I had forgotten about it.
The news keeps going and his hands keep moving, though I know that it’s been all brushed through. I stare at the screen and breathe, trying to figure out when exactly I stopped being someone who keeps people at a safe distance.
The TV murmurs something about road closures, and the wind picks up outside, rattling the windows before it settles back into that low constant howl that’s become background noise by now.
Neither of us says anything for a while, and somehow that doesn’t feel wrong, like I’m enjoying the quiet for the first time.
Zyran’s hands move through my hair slowly, working through the ends with the kind of patience I haven’t seen in a man before, and I’ve completely given up on pretending to watch the news.
“It was a trap,” he whispers. His voice is low enough for a second that I question if I’d imagined it.
And then he continues, “something we should’ve seen coming.
But we all wanted to protect her… it made us stupid.
” His hand stills on my head for a moment before he keeps going. “We got completely blindsided.”
I hold my breath, biting down on my tongue, waiting for him to continue.
“Raiden was the one who pushed to go in. That should’ve been my first sign,” he sighs. “He wanted to be the one to do it himself, for her, and I understood that, so I didn’t push back the way I should’ve.”
I wrap both hands around my mug even though the coffee has gone cold.
“We got maybe thirty seconds inside before any of us realized that they were already positioned, already waiting. It happened so fast.” He pauses, and the brush slows, but he doesn’t stop.
“We fought, but I ended up taking a shot and went down. By the time I could get my head up, I only saw them dragging Raiden out. There wasn’t a single thing I could do about it.
” Zyran says that last part the same way he does everything else, flat and measured, completely detached, like he’s just reciting details.
I’ve been around enough grief to recognize the shape of it, the way it sits in a person’s chest and changes the weight of everything they carry.
My mother used to get quiet in a particular way around the anniversary of her sister’s death—not sad exactly, just heavier, like the air around her had thickened.
I learned early not to ask about it but to stay close and not make it worse.
“I was stuck in a hospital bed while Sybil, my brother’s girlfriend, who had no business walking back into that house, went and got him herself.
” Something shifts in his voice, not anger exactly, but close to it—but it’s the kind that’s inward.
“Raiden needed me, and I was flat on my back being monitored, and she had to be back in there alone because of it.”
I think about what that does to a person—not just the helplessness of going down, but waking up and finding out the cost of it.
Finding out someone else paid it for you.
“She got him out,” I say carefully.
“She did,” he mutters. “Doesn’t make it easier to swallow.”
The brush stops, leaving me to stare at the TV for a moment, the weatherman pointing at a map that hasn’t changed in three days, and I feel the words settling into the room around us. The guilt in them, the way he’s beating himself over not being the one to save his brother.
I don’t think about it too hard before I’m shifting and turning around; he frowns for a second before I’m climbing into his lap and tucking myself against him.
My head finds the curve of his shoulder like it knows where it’s going.
Zyran goes still underneath me, but I don’t question it—I’m learning he’s still not because he doesn’t want it but because he’s waiting for me to be okay with it.
Reaching up, I rest my fingers against the side of his neck, finding where his scar is. His pulse is steady under my fingertips, and in a way it’s more grounding than I ever thought possible.
“For what it’s worth, I’m glad you’re here.”
Zyran doesn’t say anything.
But after a moment he shifts, sliding down against the couch cushions, his arms coming around me. His heartbeat is steady under my cheek, and I let my eyes close, trying to just exist in this for just a minute.
But the ache behind my eyes has other ideas.
The pain sharpens slowly, the way it always does when I’ve been ignoring it for too long.
It spreads up through my temple and settles in with the kind of patience that tells me it’s not going anywhere.
I press my face a little further into his shoulder, trying to block out some of the light, hoping that it will help. It doesn’t.
I don’t say anything about it, not wanting to ruin this moment.
The first thing I’m aware of is the pain.
It’s the slow, relentless pressure that makes the inside of my skull feel two sizes too small. I become aware of it before anything else—before the sound of the TV, before the warmth underneath me, before I remember where I am.
I shift and immediately regret it, the movement sending a dull throb through my temple that makes me go still again. My eyes are heavy, and the light feels wrong, too much of it, even filtered through the grey of the storm outside.
“Hey.” Zyran's voice is low but too close. I feel his hand at my shoulder, not shaking me, just there. “What’s happening, Esperr?”
I exhale slowly through my nose but keep my eyes closed and my face pressed against his shoulder.
“Headache,” I mutter, my voice coming out rougher than I expect. “I… migraines.”
There’s a moment of silence before he’s asking, “How bad?”