Chapter 21
Amy
The nightmare comes back three nights later.
This one starts in the alley, except in the dream, I never surface.
The hands that find me in the dark have no face attached to them.
I fight the way you fight in nightmares—when your limbs are made of water, and your voice is swallowed before it clears your throat.
The horror of struggling hard and moving nothing.
I come up gasping.
The room assembles itself slowly. Lamp off. Streetlight through the curtain. The ceiling. My own hands, fisted in the duvet. My heart is so loud I can feel it in my ears.
I sit in the dark for twenty minutes, with adrenaline still running and the shaking not stopping, and at some point, I stop trying to manage it and just sit inside it, the way Dr. Osei taught me. Sometimes you don’t manage it. Sometimes you wait.
My door opens.
I know his footsteps. I have known them for weeks, their weight, their pace, what they mean. Safe. Safe. Safe.
Saint crosses to the bed without turning on a light, without asking, and sits beside me. He takes in my face and the shaking.
He puts his hand on the back of my neck, just his palm, curved against the nape, his thumb making one slow pass across the top of my spine. The shaking gets worse before it gets better, which is always what happens when something held too tightly is finally given room.
After a while, he says, “Come here.”
He has made room beside him. The offer is clear. So are the terms. His posture says, “Your choice. Your pace. I will not move an inch until you do.”
I move toward him.
The night before a memory I can’t forget. The way he made me feel but I try to push it away. I don’t want to get swept away. It’s not a secret girls talk about him. It makes me wonder how many he’s had sex with, but I push those thoughts away because he’s here.
He settles us with his arm across my waist, my back against his chest, the line between us drawn clearly without words. His chin comes down on the top of my head. I feel him breathe. The shaking stops.
I don’t know when I fall back asleep, but I know when I wake.
Predawn. Gray and still. His arm still heavy across my waist, his breathing slow at my back.
He’s awake. I know this without asking. His body has the quality of Saint at full attention, not the loose weight of sleep.
“How long?” I ask
“I’ll always stay when it happens,” he replies.
I turn over.
We are close enough that turning means facing him directly, my face a few inches from his chest, his arm shifting to accommodate without pulling away.
In the gray light, his face is softer than I have ever seen it, the armor thinned by the hour, the careful blankness gone. He looks tired in a deep way. He looks like someone who has never been cared for.
I reach up and touch his jaw. Just my fingers against the roughness of it. He goes very still in the way he does when I do something he wasn’t prepared for, not rigid, not afraid. Arrested. Like every part of him has redirected toward the point of contact.
“I should let you sleep,” I say.
“I don’t sleep.”
“You could. Try.”
He looks at me for a long moment. Then, slowly, he closes his eyes.
I watch his face while he tries. The deliberate breath in, the held exhale, the slight easing of the line between his brows.
Something in him loosening by degrees, reluctant and then not, letting go of the vigilance the way you let go of a breath you have been holding too long.
My hand is still on his jaw. My fingers touch the tips of his long hair.
After a while, his breathing changes, and the tension leaves his shoulders entirely. I feel the moment he actually goes under, brief, shallow, but real. He falls asleep, for the first time, in my presence, with his arm still across my waist.
I stay awake and watch him. I place a soft kiss on his cheek.
He wakes twenty minutes later.
I know because his breathing shifts, and his eyes open. He finds me immediately, no searching, no adjustment. He just finds me the way he always finds me, like I’m the only fixed coordinate in whatever room he occupies.
We look at each other in the light.
Something has changed. I feel it in the air between us, something that has been building for weeks and has arrived at its natural conclusion in the predawn of this morning, in this bed, with his arm still around me.
I close the distance.
I press my mouth to his like he did the other night.
He is still for half a second, but then he kisses me back, and it is nothing like I expected and everything I should have known it would be.
It’s not like the first time. This time it’s slow.
Devastatingly slow. The way he does everything.
Deliberate, unhurried, like he has all the time in the world and has decided to use every second of it and no one can stop him.
His hand comes to my face. The back of his knuckles against my cheekbone, then his palm cupping my jaw, tilting my face the way he wants it.
I let him.
I feel the warmth of letting him, the choice of it, the profound difference between being moved by someone who is asking and being moved by someone who is taking.
He is asking. Every slow, precise movement is a question.
I keep answering yes.
When he pulls back, I am breathing harder than I should be from a kiss.
He looks at me. His thumb traces the line of my jaw.
“Amy,” he says.
“Saint.”
His eyes are very dark in the low light.
“You want it,” he says. It is not a question, but he waits for the answer anyway, because that is who he is.
“Yes. I want it.”
He moves.
He rolls me onto my back with a care that makes something in my chest ache, the care of a man who understands that there is a history attached to the body beneath his hands and is treating that history as information rather than inconvenience.
He braces above me, his forearms on either side of my head, and he looks at me for a moment in the morning light with an expression I don’t have a name for.
Then he dips his head and puts his mouth to my throat.
I close my eyes.
He works his way down with that same devastating patience, my collarbone, the curve of my shoulder, the hem of my shirt pushed up by hands that are warm and certain and careful at the edges of my sleeves, careful in a way that tells me he knows, he sees, and has chosen to say nothing about it except with the deliberateness of where he puts his mouth and his hands.
He settles between my thighs.
He looks up at me from there, which is something I was not prepared for.
The weight of his gaze from that position, dark and fixed and entirely focused, the same quality of attention he gives everything, concentrated now into a single point.
I nod.
My throat is tight.
He presses his mouth to the inside of my thigh.
I swear I stop breathing.
He takes his time.
He takes an extraordinary, unhurried, meticulous amount of time, working his way toward the center of me with the patience of someone who has decided that the destination matters less than the getting there, who treats every small sound I make as instruction, who adjusts without being asked, and who reads me the way he reads everything, completely, without flinching or missing anything.
When he makes me come, I say his name the way he says mine. Like a coordinate. Like the only fixed point.
He doesn’t stop.
He takes me apart with his mouth again in the predawn quiet of my dorm room, slowly and precisely and with the quality of someone who has been thinking about doing it again and has decided to be thorough. My hands find his hair. He lets me hold on. Fucking me with his tongue.
My hands fist the strands of his long hair like I’m on a ride that I don’t want to end.
When I come apart, I don’t shake. My orgasm moves through me in a long, rolling wave that starts at the base of my spine and spreads outward. I press my face into the pillow, and I make a sound I have never made before. A sound that belongs only to him.
He tastes me, slow and deliberate, as if he is memorizing the ingredients for his favorite dessert.
Then he moves back up the bed, and he pulls me against his chest again, my back to him, his arm across my waist, and he is warm and solid and present, and he says nothing.
I say nothing.
We lie in the quiet morning, and I feel my own heartbeat slow and the warmth of him at my back.
I close my eyes.
Saint presses his mouth to the back of my head, once, very quietly, and then he is still.
I fall asleep.
I wake up alone.
The sun is up. His side of the bed is cool. On the pillow where his head was is a single folded piece of paper.
I pick it up.
You didn’t cry out this time.
— S
I hold it against my chest.
I look at the ceiling for a long time.
Then I get up, get dressed, and head to breakfast. I sit in the dining hall, and I think about what it means that the most seen I have ever felt was in the dark, without a single word about any of it.
I look at the note.
He stayed.