Chapter 9 #3
I do not move. I do not breathe. I conduct a rapid, silent, comprehensive assessment of the situation with the focused desperation of a surgeon who has opened a patient and discovered a complication that was not on any of the preliminary scans.
His t-shirt is warm under my clenched fist. My face is pressed into the hollow of his throat.
I can smell him: vetiver and cedar and sleep-warm skin, and underneath it all, that particular scent that is just Casey, that I have catalogued without meaning to over two years of proximity, and it is everywhere.
It is all around me, and my body is so relaxed, so fully surrendered against him, that I know that I did not resist this.
I did not fight it. I did not wake up and rebuild the wall and retreat to my side.
I turned toward him. In my sleep, without walls or protocols or clinical detachment to stop me, I turned toward him and pressed myself against his chest and held on.
My hand is gripping his shirt like I am afraid he will disappear.
I hear the first bird call through the balcony doors.
The sky is beginning to lighten, the deep Rajasthani blue going grey and then pink at the edges.
In approximately forty minutes, the household staff will begin their morning preparations.
In approximately sixty minutes, my mother will expect us at breakfast.
I need to extract myself. I need to do it carefully, without waking him, without leaving evidence, without acknowledging that this happened.
Because if I acknowledge it, if I let myself sit inside the full, devastating weight of what it felt like to sleep in Casey Welling's arms, I will not be able to maintain this deception.
I will not be able to call this fake. I will not be able to look at this man across a breakfast table and pretend that he is a strategic arrangement and not the first person who has ever made me feel safe enough to stop thinking.
I begin the extraction. Slowly. Millimetre by millimetre.
I uncurl my fingers from his t-shirt, smoothing the wrinkled fabric with a reflex precision that is admittedly absurd.
I ease my head back from his collarbone.
I shift my hips away from his, navigating the tangled geometry of his leg around mine with the careful, controlled movements of a surgeon working in a confined space.
Casey murmurs in his sleep. His arm tightens.
I freeze. My pulse, which had been approaching something manageable, spikes back into arrhythmia. His face shifts, his brow creasing slightly, and for one terrifying second I think he is waking up, but then his expression smooths, and his arm relaxes, and his breathing deepens again.
I slip free. I slide to the edge of the mattress, put my feet on the cool marble floor, and sit there for a long, silent moment with my elbows on my knees and my face in my hands.
I look back at the bed. Casey has rolled into the warm space I left behind, his massive frame spreading across three-quarters of the mattress with the unconscious entitlement of someone whose body has always taken up exactly as much room as it needed.
The pillow wall is a demolished ruin, bolsters and cushions scattered across the silk like the aftermath of a small, soft war.
His face, in the dawn light, is slack and peaceful and openly, defencelessly beautiful.
I stand. I walk to the bathroom, and quietly close the door behind me. I turn on the shower, and I stand under the water, and I press my forehead against the cool marble tiles, and I allow myself, for thirty seconds, to feel everything I spent the entire night pretending I didn't.
Then I turn off the water. I dry my face. I look at myself in the mirror, green eyes red-rimmed, dark curls damp, jaw set.
Thirty seconds more. That is all I will permit.
I dress with my usual precision. I style my hair. I rebuild myself, piece by piece, in front of the mirror until the man looking back at me is the Dread Prince again, composed and clinical and betraying nothing.
Then I walk back into the bedroom and stand over the demolished ruin of my pillow wall, and the enormous, golden, sleeping man who bulldozed it.
“Casey.” I keep my voice controlled. The voice of a man who absolutely did not wake up tangled in this person’s shirt with his face buried in his neck. “Wake up. Breakfast is in forty minutes and we need to present a united front.”
Casey stirs. He opens one blue eye. He takes in the scattered pillows, the demolished fortification, the three-quarters of the bed his body has colonized, and then he looks up at me, standing over him fully dressed and rigidly composed. A slow, sleepy, devastating smile spreads across his face.
“Morning, Doc,” he says, his voice rough and warm with sleep. He glances at the wreckage of the pillow wall. “Looks like there was a structural integrity problem.”
“Get dressed,” I say, and I turn on my heel before he can see my ears, which are, I am certain, a shade of pink that would be visible from space.
His laugh follows me to the balcony, warm and rough-edged and full of something I am not going to examine, and I clasp my hands behind my back and stare at the gardens and wait for my fake fiancé to get ready so we can walk into the lion’s den together.