Chapter Sixteen
I WOKE IN his arms in the daylight, and nothing was chasing me.
That was the first strange thing, the not running.
Every morning I'd come up out of sleep already braced, already bolting, the day a thing to survive before I'd even got my eyes open.
And this morning I surfaced slow, warm, heavy, into bright light coming soft through the blind and a steady heartbeat thudding under my cheek, and I didn't move, because I couldn't remember the last time waking up hadn't hurt.
It came back to me in pieces. The nightmare.
The scream that got loose. Eli at the edge of the bed with his hands open, and me, I'd pulled him in.
I'd fisted his shirt and hauled him down and made him stay, and he'd held me all night, on top of the blanket, every stitch of clothing on, a wall with a heartbeat between me and the dark.
And he was still here. Still under me, one arm heavy and sure across my back, his chin tipped down toward the top of my head, his breathing slow.
Awake, I thought. He'd kept watch the whole night. Of course he had.
I should have been afraid. That's what I kept waiting for, the fear to come, the wall to slam up, the old animal in me to scramble back from being this close to a man, this open, this undefended in the light where he could see all of me. I lay still and I waited for it.
It didn't come.
What came instead I had no defense against at all, because I'd spent four years building every wall I owned against danger, and not one of them was built for this.
It came up through me slow and warm, the way the heat comes back into a hand you didn't know was frozen until it starts to ache, and it ached, God, it ached, and I lay there in the gold light with my ear over his heart and let myself, for the first time in longer than I could count, simply look at the thing I was feeling instead of shoving it down a hole.
I loved him.
I love him. Present tense, plain as the light.
Not gratitude, though I was grateful. Not the safe small fondness you have for the person who keeps you alive.
I loved Eli Rourke the way you love the one person, the bone deep way, the way that doesn't ask your permission and doesn't care what it costs.
I'd loved him before. That was never a secret; even four years down in the fog I'd known it was there, the way you know there's a rock at the bottom of a lake.
I'd buried it. Packed the dirt down hard over the top of it and stopped walking out to the spot.
Somewhere along the way I'd let myself believe that was the same thing as it being gone.
It was not the same as gone. That was the thing that turned me still and wide-eyed at the ceiling, not that I'd loved him, which I had always, always known, but that I'd never once managed to kill it.
I'd only buried it alive. And it had been down there the whole time, all four years, breathing in the dark, waiting for a morning exactly like this one to come pushing back up through the dirt toward the light.
I lay there and I traced it backward, the way you trace a thread to find where it started, and what I found stopped my breath.
I'd started coming back before I ever knew I was coming back.
I'd thought the thaw began the day he carried me out of that place, but it didn't. It began before.
It began on a gray ordinary afternoon a while before the end, when I'd been sitting in that day room turned to flat nothing, four years deep in the fog, and a shadow had fallen across the table and I'd looked up and it was him.
Eli. Back. After years of nothing, years of a empty chair where he used to sometimes sit, years I'd decided meant he couldn't stand the sight of what I'd become, there he was again, folding himself down too big for the plastic chair, brown eyes wrecked and trying not to show it, saying my name like it still meant something.
I hadn't known what it did to me. I'd been too far under to know.
But I knew now, looking back with the fog finally gone: that was the day.
That was the crack of light under the door.
Something in me that had been sitting in the dark for years lifted its head at the sound of his voice and thought, faint, before I could stop it or name it—oh.
Him. He came back. And started, in secret, in a place too deep for me to see, to climb toward the light.
He woke me up. Not in that room, not with the rescue, before all of it.
He woke me up just by coming back. By being the man I'd loved walking back through a door I'd given up watching.
The living started there, in the worst place in the world, the day I saw him again, and I'd been too buried to feel it happening, and it had happened anyway.
"You're awake." His voice rumbled up through his chest, careful, quiet.
I felt him go a little tense under me, and I understood it, he was braced for me to pull away.
To be embarrassed. To remember to be afraid of having spent a night in a man's arms. He'd given me the night and now he was bracing to give me the room to take it back.
I didn't take it back.
I lifted my head and I looked at him, really looked, in the plain gold daylight with nothing chasing either of us, the strawberry hair gone darker, the lines the years had put around those brown eyes, the careful, the gentle, the held-back want I could see now that I knew to look for, the whole big aching restraint of him.
The man who I somehow knew had loved me so quiet and so long he'd built his entire self into a wall I could stand behind and never once asked to stand in front of me.
"You came back," I said.
He blinked. "Last night? Bee, I never—"
"No." I put my hand against his chest, flat, over the heart I'd slept on.
"Before. At Crestwood. You came back. After all those years you came back, and you started coming every week, and—" my voice caught, and I made it keep going, because this was true and he needed to have it, "—and that's when I started waking up.
I didn't know it then. I thought I was just enduring it like always.
But it was you. You walked back through that door and something in me that I'd given up for dead opened its eyes. You started me living again before you ever got me out. I just figured that out this morning.”
I have never seen a man hold so still. Like if he moved, I'd vanish. His eyes had gone bright and his throat worked and he didn't trust himself to speak, and his hand came up slow and covered mine where it lay over his heart, pressed it there, and held it.
"Bee," he managed, and it was half a word and half a prayer.
I didn't say the rest of it. I love you—I had it right there, full and true and finally mine to give, and I held it back, not out of fear this time but out of something better: it was too big to spend on a morning.
I wanted to say it to him when I could give it whole, standing up, in the light, a gift and not a confession dragged out of a nightmare's wake.
So I kept it, warm in my chest, mine to keep until I was ready.
But I let him see it. I looked right at him and let it be all over my face, the thing I wasn't saying yet, and I watched him see it, and I watched him understand that I was keeping it on purpose, to give him later, better.
"Take your time," he said, rough, like he'd read the whole of it off me. "I waited this long. I'd wait the rest of my life. You hear me? There's no clock on this. Not from me. Not ever."
And I stayed there in his arms in the gold morning light, not running, not bracing, not shoving a single thing down into the dark, just letting myself love him in the quiet, full and aching and alive, holding the words until the day came I was ready to put them in his hand.
I'd spent four years certain the living part of me was dead and buried.
Turned out I'd only buried it. And it had been breathing the whole time, down there in the dark, waiting for the sound of him to come home.