Chapter 9 #2
He has a point. I built the wall to standard human specifications, and Casey Welling does not operate within standard human specifications.
His arm span is approximately six feet four inches, which I know because I measured it during a consult case when he was holding a child and I needed to calculate the angle of his reach and that is a perfectly normal clinical observation that I made for entirely professional reasons.
I walk to the left side of the bed, and stand beside it.
I look at the pillow wall. I look at the narrow strip of silk-covered mattress that makes up my sleeping territory.
I look at Casey, who is still on his phone, his face soft in the lamplight, the wet curls drying into their usual chaos, and he looks warm and enormous and at ease, as if sharing a bed with me is the most natural thing in the world, as if this is just what we do, just another Friday night.
The casual, devastating domesticity of it hits me so hard that I have to grip the edge of the nightstand to stabilize myself.
I get into bed.
The mattress is extraordinary, of course.
It is a custom-made, hand-stuffed, absurdly expensive mattress, probably filled with the feathers of some rare, ethically sourced bird that my mother has personally approved.
It absorbs my weight with a softness that feels like sinking into a warm cloud.
On the other side of the pillow wall, I feel the mattress dip under Casey.
The bolsters shift slightly and the sleeping pillows resettle.
We are in bed together.
This sentence repeats itself in my brain with the relentless, pounding clarity of a surgical alarm.
We are in bed together. In my family's estate.
In Rajasthan. Under a Mughal-painted ceiling.
With moonlight on the balcony and a barrier between us that suddenly feels like the most absurd, most fragile, most transparently desperate construction project in architectural history.
“Goodnight, Arjun,” Casey says, and he reaches over and clicks off his lamp. His side of the bed goes dark. The room settles into shadow, lit only by my brass lamp and the silver moonlight coming through the balcony doors.
“Goodnight,” I reply. My voice is steady. My hands are steady. Everything about my external presentation is flawlessly steady, and internally, I am vibrating at a frequency that would be detectable by sensitive laboratory equipment.
I turn off my lamp. The room goes dark.
I lie on my back. I stare at the ceiling.
I can hear Casey's breathing, slow and deep and already beginning to lengthen toward sleep, because of course the man falls asleep in four minutes.
Of course he does. He is a golden retriever in human form and golden retrievers do not lie awake at night conducting catastrophic risk assessments about shared sleeping surfaces.
I do not sleep.
I lie perfectly still, my hands folded on my chest like a man in a sarcophagus, and I catalogue every sensation with the obsessive, granular focus of a brain that refuses to shut down.
The silk against my skin. The warmth of the room, dry and fragrant.
The subtle vibration of Casey's breathing transmitted through the mattress like a seismic reading.
The fact that my pillow smells faintly of sandalwood, and his pillow, on the other side of the fortification, smells of the estate's guest soap, which is vetiver and cedar and something else, something that is just him, and I can smell it through the pillow wall because the pillow wall, despite my engineering, is permeable to scent.
I did not account for scent. This is a design flaw.
One hour passes. Then two. My body is exhausted, still carrying the accumulated fatigue of a fourteen-hour flight and eighteen hours of sustained psychological crisis, and every muscle is begging for sleep.
My brain ignores them all. My brain is running post-operative scenarios for a surgery that hasn't happened yet, except the surgery is tomorrow's dinner and the patient is our cover story and the margin of error is so microscopic that a single wrong word could rupture the entire operation.
Beside me, through the wall, Casey shifts.
It is a small shift. A readjustment. The kind of movement a body makes when it is deeply, comfortably asleep and is simply settling into a new position.
Then another shift. Larger this time. The mattress dips. A bolster slides two inches to the left.
Then a sound. A soft, contented sigh, like a man sinking into a warm bath.
Then the pillow wall begins to move.
It does not collapse. Collapse implies a sudden, fatal structural failure.
What happens is slower, more insidious, more inevitable.
The bolster at the centre starts to lean.
One of the sleeping pillows slides downward.
A decorative pillow, despite its purely cosmetic assignment, is pushed sideways by the advancing pressure of something massive and warm on the other side.
Casey is migrating.
He warned me. He specifically, explicitly warned me, in his kitchen in Kensington Market, with Oliver at his feet and coffee in his hand. He said: I run hot and I tend to migrate. He said: toward heat sources. He said: the pillow wall might have a structural integrity problem.
He was correct. The structural integrity problem is currently manifesting as an unconscious Canadian hockey player slowly, inexorably, gravitationally bulldozes through my fortification.
I should wake him. I should nudge his shoulder and redirect him back to his side and rebuild the wall with reinforced specifications. This is the strategically sound, emotionally responsible, operationally correct course of action.
And yet, I do not move.
I lie there, rigid as a surgical table, and I let the wall fall.
It takes approximately twelve minutes. The bolsters go first, pushed down into the gap between the mattress and the headboard.
Then the sleeping pillows, displaced one by one as Casey's enormous frame expands into the newly available territory like a warm weather system occupying a low-pressure zone. The decorative pillows scatter.
And then there is nothing between us.
Casey, in his sleep, with his eyes closed and his face slack and peaceful and his breathing deep and steady, rolls the final distance and settles against me.
His chest presses against my side. His arm, that massive, heavy arm, drapes over my waist and pulls me in with a gentle, unconscious certainty, as if his body has been waiting to do this and is simply, finally, arriving at the destination it always intended as he pulls my back tightly against his chest.
He is warm. He is so warm. The heat of him presses against the entire length of my back, from my shoulders to my calves, and it is not uncomfortable nor is it oppressive, it is the opposite of those things.
It is like being wrapped in something that has been heated specifically for me, something that fits the exact dimensions of my body, and I can feel his heartbeat against my back, slow and steady and sure.
His breath stirs my hair. His arm tightens fractionally around my waist. His hand comes to rest against my sternum, palm flat, fingers spread, and I can feel my own heartbeat hammering against his palm. If he were awake he would feel it too, and he would know, he would know everything.
I cannot breathe. I cannot think. Every framework I have ever built, every emotional defence I have ever constructed, every wall and protocol and carefully maintained margin of error, is dissolving under the weight of a sleeping man's arm around my waist and the sound of his breathing and the devastating, world-ending, unbearable feeling of safety when being held.
I have not been held like this in years.
Correction; I have never been held like this before.
Nobody has ever wrapped themselves around me in the dark and pulled me close with such gentle, unquestioning certainty.
Nobody has ever made me feel like the space beside them was built specifically for me to occupy, as if my sharp angles and rigid edges and cold, careful architecture are not obstacles but simply the shape of me, and the shape of me fits perfectly.
Something behind my eyes burns. Something old, and tired, and locked away in a room I never open.
I close my eyes. I press my lips together. I do not make a sound.
And I do not move his arm.
I fall asleep. Despite everything, despite the hammering pulse and the burning eyes and the complete, comprehensive collapse of every boundary I have drawn, the exhaustion wins.
Casey's presence pulls me under like a tide, and I sleep, and it is the deepest, most total, most undefended sleep I have had in months, possibly years, possibly ever.
I dream of nothing. For the first time in as long as I can remember, my brain stops running scenarios.
It just stops. There are no surgical margins.
No risk calculations. No tragic outcome projections.
There is nothing but warmth, and darkness, and the slow, steady drumbeat of someone else's heart resonating against mine.
I wake up with my face pressed against Casey's chest.
At some point during the night, the migration has completed its full orbital trajectory.
I have turned in my sleep, turned toward him, toward the heat, and now I am curled against his front with my forehead against his collarbone and my hand fisted in the cotton of his t-shirt.
His arm is still around me, heavier now with the deep weight of sleep.
One of his legs has hooked over mine, an anchoring, possessive tangle that pins me against him with a gentle, immovable certainty.
His chin is resting on top of my head. His breathing is slow and deep and even.
I am inescapably surrounded by Casey Welling.