Chapter Thirteen – Lila.84
Chapter Thirteen – Lila
The heat woke me before anything else did.
Not the ordinary radiating heat of too many blankets or the flannel shirt I’d fallen asleep in, but something that came from the inside out, a burning at my collar and my jaw and the thin skin of my wrists, my pulse beating loud in my throat the way it beat when I had a fever that had gotten ahead of me.
I lay in my bed, praying it wasn’t a heat spike.
I was due to give birth in a week, was this an omegas way of preparing her body?
I got up. The floorboards were cold through my socks and I stood at the window for a moment with one hand on the sill and one hand flat against the curve of my belly, and I looked at the frost on the outside of the glass.
It laced the lower corners in the particular crystalline way of frost that had been building since before midnight, delicate and precise and indifferent to everything happening on the inside of the window.
I pressed my palm flat to the glass and felt the cold of it against my skin, and for a few seconds it helped.
Then the warmth came back up from my chest and into my face, my palm, the length of my arm, and I leaned my forehead to the glass and breathed.
Then the smell of the room reached me.
It was mine. I knew it the way you knew the smell of your own skin in the morning, immediately and without thinking, except it was not the ordinary version of it.
The floral scent I had carried my whole life, the one that had always been faint enough that I barely noticed it except when someone else did, had sharpened and sweetened into something heavy and unmistakable, a thing that filled the small bedroom the way cedar smoke filled a room, saturating everything it touched.
I breathed it in and understood, precisely and without the comfort of any ambiguity, what my body was doing.
I had heard of late-pregnancy heat spikes. I had never given them much thought. The sort of thing that happened to other people in other circumstances, the kind of contingency you filed under eventually and retrieved only when eventually arrived.
Eventually had arrived.
I gripped the windowsill with both hands for a moment and then resettled one hand on my belly, on the hard round weight of Hope, and I breathed through my nose in slow, deliberate counts.
The tremors in my legs were faint but real, a low hum of tension that I could feel in the backs of my knees and up through my hips.
My skin felt three sizes too small for everything it was being asked to contain.
“Alright,” I said, low, to no one in particular and to Hope in the way I said most things to her in the dark. “Alright.”
Cole appeared in the doorway.
He did not knock, which meant he had already been awake, which meant the smell had reached the hallway before I had registered the smell myself, and I understood from that sequence of facts exactly how far the situation had progressed while I was sleeping.
He stood in the doorframe with his shoulder against the wood, his brown eyes sharp and steady, and his nostrils flared once with the involuntary precision of recognition.
His jaw went tight. Not alarmed. Not aggressive.
Controlled in the way that required real effort, the specific quality of control that looked like composure but was held there by something.
I stared at him.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I said.
My voice came out rougher than I intended, scraped at the edges in a way that had nothing to do with sleep and everything to do with the fact that being looked at clearly when you were in this particular state was its own kind of exposure that I had not organized any defenses for.
He did not look away. He did not change his expression.
He held my gaze with the same steady patience he held most things.
“How long?” he asked.
His voice was low, shaped for the room rather than the hallway, and it did something to the base of my spine that I filed away without examining.
I hesitated. The hesitation lasted long enough that it became its own answer.
Rhett and Wade stepped into the hall behind him without a word.
They did not crowd the doorway. They stopped in the hallway and I could see them past Cole’s shoulder, and what I noticed first was what they were doing with their bodies.
Shoulders dropping. Hands loose at their sides.
The visible, deliberate settling of three men who had felt something hit their instincts like a hand on a door and had chosen, with full awareness, to keep the door shut.
Rhett’s jaw was working slightly, a small, contained tension in the hinge of it.
Wade’s hands had opened and closed once and then gone still, his eyes on my face rather than anywhere else, his breathing audible and even.
They had pulled back. All three of them, from whatever my scent had done to their instincts, they had pulled back, and they were standing in the hallway doing it again with each breath they took, and watching them do it made something in my chest come apart in a way I had not expected.
I had been managing this alone in the dark for the past hour.
I had been pressing my hands to frost-covered windows and breathing through my nose and telling myself I had it handled because having it handled was the only mode I knew how to operate in.
I looked at the three of them arranged in careful, considered order in my doorway, and I felt the particular exhaustion of a person who has been holding something for too long suddenly aware of how heavy it is.
Cole moved.
Not fast. Not with the urgency his instincts were certainly asking for, because I could see that in the set of his shoulders too, the particular held quality of a man moving at one-quarter of his actual speed out of respect for the choice he was making.
He crossed the room in a straight, unhurried line, and when he reached me he placed his palm flat between my shoulder blades.
The heat of his hand came through the flannel in a single, immediate wave and I exhaled through my teeth, an involuntary sound, the sound of a body receiving something it had been asking for without permission from the mind that housed it.
The warmth of him and the warmth already on my skin met somewhere in the layers of fabric between us and something in my spine unwound by a single degree.
I did not pull away.
I stood at the window with my forehead no longer against the glass and Cole’s palm warm and steady between my shoulder blades and the frost still lacing the outside of the window in its precise and indifferent way, and I looked out at the Montana dark and I let his hand be there.
The cold pressed in at the glass. The room held its sweet, heavy scent around all four of us.
My hand stayed where it was, curved against the weight of Hope, and I breathed.
The heat built in waves.
Not steadily, not like a fever that climbed to a peak and held there, in waves, the way labor pain was supposed to come, or so I had been told, except that this was not pain exactly.
It was heat and want and the specific, bone-deep restlessness of a body that had decided something without consulting the person living in it.
It crested and subsided and crested again, and between the crests I could think in straight lines, and during them I could only breathe.
Cole walked me to the edge of the bed when my legs informed me that standing was no longer a preference I had any authority over.
He did not make an occasion of it. His hand moved from my shoulder blades to my elbow, and the loss of his palm against my back was immediately notable, and he must have felt me register it because his grip on my elbow tightened fractionally and then he sat beside me on the edge of the mattress and put his hand back where it had been. I did not comment on this.
The room had darkened. I was not sure exactly when.
The winter dark came fast in January, pulling the light off the fields and out of the windows by late afternoon, and the lamp on the nightstand was on now, its small circle of warmth insufficient against the cold pressing in at the frost-edged glass.
Through the window the sky had gone the particular black of a Montana night with no moon yet, the stars hard and clear above the dark shape of the mountains.
The scent of the room had deepened. Mine, still, the heavy sweetened floral of it, and underneath it the warm outdoor smell of Cole at my side, the faint char of gunpowder that arrived with Wade, and the dark sweetness of black orchid that I had learned to identify without looking.
The layers of it sat heavy in the air and I breathed them in on the crest of a wave and let the wave do what it did.
Wade appeared in the doorway with a cloth in his hand.
He moved across the room without announcement, the specific quiet of a man who had made a decision and was acting on it, and he reached behind me and pressed the cloth to the back of my neck.
It was damp and cool, faintly scented with something cedar-clean that I recognized from his coat, and the cold of it against my skin was so immediate and exact that I tipped my head forward on instinct, the back of my neck fully open to it.
The world, which had been tilting at its edges, steadied.
I closed my eyes and breathed and let the cloth do its work.
Rhett sat down to my left.
His shoulder came against mine and he did not do anything about the contact, just let it exist, his warmth a separate and steadying thing alongside the heat still moving through me.
He began to speak in a low voice, not quite words at first, just a sound that ran beneath his breath and kept the same unhurried rhythm as my own breathing.
A murmur that asked nothing of me. His fingers found the strands of hair that had fallen forward against my face and he lifted them back, one at a time, with the light precision of a person who had decided what they were doing was not a gesture but a practical act, and who did not make more of it than that.
His voice kept going, low and steady, and I felt the spiral that had been tightening at the center of my chest begin to loosen its hold.
Cole had moved to the floor.
He had dropped to his knees at my feet without my noticing the movement, and now both of my hands were in his, my fingers loose inside his grip, his thumbs moving in small, unhurried circles across my knuckles.
The warmth of his palms was different from the warmth of the cloth, this was a living warmth, person to person, and it went through my hands and up into my wrists and I sat there and felt it.
I lifted my eyes to his and allowed my body to take charge.