Chapter Fifteen – Lila.95
Chapter Fifteen – Lila
The smell reached me before the cold did.
The warm, sweetened drift of something that had settled into the pillow beside me overnight, something Alpha-deep and specific, something that had no business being in my bedroom in the grey pre-dawn and was there anyway.
I lay still and looked at the ceiling and did not move my hand, which was flat against my belly the way it always was when I woke, automatic and searching, checking before I was fully conscious of checking.
The sheets were damp against the backs of my thighs.
The room held the particular closed-in warmth of a space that had contained more heat than it was built for, and beneath the heavy sweetness of my own scent, the floral weight of it, still clinging to the air, to the fabric, to my skin, there were other things.
Gunpowder and cedar and black orchid and the warm outdoor smell that I had stopped trying not to know.
All of them layered into the room around me like the memory of something I had not yet allowed myself to think about clearly.
I pulled myself upright. The cold caught me at the shoulders the moment I moved out of the warmth of the covers, and I sat at the edge of the bed for a moment with my feet not yet on the floor, one hand still pressed flat against the curve of Hope.
The room was dark except for the thin grey seam of pre-dawn coming through the gap in the curtains.
The frost was still on the glass, I could see it from here, the crystalline lace of it at the lower corners, holding the night chill in its geometry while the rest of the world began, reluctantly, to consider morning.
Then I made the mistake of looking at the mirror.
The wardrobe mirror caught me in the grey light the way mirrors caught you when you had not prepared yourself: all at once, without the small adjustments and deliberate compositions of a person who had made peace with their own face.
My hair was loose and tangled across my shoulders, flattened on one side, and my face was flushed in the way it flushed when I had been too warm too long, color sitting high in my cheeks and across my throat.
The worn cotton of my nightgown pulled tight across my belly, the visible, unmistakable weight of Hope under it, and above that, my own face looking back at me with something in it I recognized immediately and wanted nothing to do with.
I looked away.
The guilt arrived the way things arrived when you had been keeping them at the door all night and had finally fallen asleep: not slowly, not with any of the mercy of incremental awareness.
All at once, a full chest-tightening wave of it, the breath-shortening recognition landing without warning and sitting heavy.
Last night had happened. I had let it happen.
I had wanted it to happen, that was the part I could not argue my way out of, the part that sat in my chest like something lodged and immovable.
I had wanted it with a clarity that my own body had made impossible to pretend otherwise, and I had been held by three men who were not Ethan, who were never going to be Ethan, and Ethan was still dead.
He was still dead.
My hand came up on its own and pressed the back of my wrist to my mouth. My shoulders began to shake.
I did not try to stop it.
I slid off the edge of the bed and the cold floorboards came up through my socks the moment I touched them, that clean, indifferent cold that had always lived in the wood of this house.
I put my back against the mattress and drew my knees up as far as Hope allowed, which was not far, and I pressed my forearm against my mouth and I cried.
Not the controlled, muffled crying I had managed in the difficult months before this, the careful, efficient kind, done quickly in the shower or in the truck cab or in the dark of the barn with my forehead against a horse’s neck.
Not that. This was breathless and full-body, the kind that shook my shoulders and closed my throat, the kind that my body had apparently been storing since November and was now prepared to release without my consent.
I muffled it against my forearm but could not stop it, and after a moment I stopped trying.
I whispered to Hope because she was the only one there, and she had heard everything else.
“I’m sorry.” The words came out cracked, barely shaped.
“I’m so sorry. I don’t, I don’t know what I’m doing.
I don’t know what last night was. I don’t know what it makes me.
” I pressed my forearm harder against my mouth between sentences, trying to slow the breathing, failing.
“Your daddy was the only one. He was my first and he was my only one, and I loved him, and I still love him, and he’s,” My throat closed over the rest of it.
I waited. “He’s not here,” I finally said.
“He’s not here to know about you. He’s not here for any of it, and I’ve been pretending that I’m fine with that, that I can just keep going, that I know how to do this, and I don’t. I don’t know how to do any of this.”
The cold pressed up through the floorboards into the backs of my thighs. Hope did not move, which was fine. She moved on her own schedule and she owed me nothing, least of all reassurance.
I had not let myself think about the morning I found out about her.
I had been putting that memory away since the moment it formed because it had too many sharp edges to handle in any practical window of time, and the practical windows were the only ones I had been operating in.
But it was there now, in the grey pre-dawn on the cold floor of my bedroom, the way blocked things were always there when the other structures collapsed: the stick in its small plastic window, the number that had taken its time resolving, and my hand shaking so badly I had sat down on the bathroom tile with my back against the tub and stared at it for a long time.
I had thought, in the way you thought things before you understood their full weight: he’s going to laugh.
He’s going to do that real laugh, from low in his chest, the one that surprised the people near him into turning their heads.
And then the understanding had followed, which was that he wasn’t going to do anything. That he had been three weeks gone by then, and that the laughter I was already anticipating had nowhere to go.
I had never cried for that specifically.
I had not allowed it. There had been too much to do, too many things requiring the composed, capable version of me, and the grief of that particular loss, the grief of his not being there for the stick, for the first appointment, for the shelf he’d measured and the name he’d already given her, had been folded up and put somewhere I could not afford to go looking.
I went there now.
I was not quiet about it. I had my forearm pressed against my face and I was crying in the ugly, breathless way of someone who has been trying not to for a very long time, and my shoulders were shaking and my chest hurt, and the cold of the floorboards was the only thing grounding me to the room.
The door opened.
I heard it but could not do anything about my face in time.
The cold came from the hallway first, the specific quality of air that had been sitting in an unheated corridor, and then Cole was in the doorway.
He was already dressed, boots, denim, flannel, which meant he had been up for some time, and he was carrying a mug in both hands.
Coffee, from the smell of it. Black, from the colour, and still giving off the thin curl of steam that meant he had made it recently and for no abstract reason.
He had made it for me.
He stood in the doorway and took in the scene, me on the floor, red-eyed, still in my nightgown, back against the mattress, one hand on my belly and one forearm across my face still wet from where I had pressed it there, and his expression changed in the way his expressions changed when something landed fully: a small, controlled settling, everything going quiet and internal, and no part of him showing alarm or pity or the impulse to immediately speak.
He set the mug on the nightstand.
Then he lowered himself to the floor.
He did not choose the armchair or the edge of the bed.
He sat down on the cold floorboards with his back against the mattress, the same way I was sitting, and he positioned himself close enough that his shoulder was almost touching mine.
Not touching. Almost. Close enough that the warmth of him reached the sleeve of my nightgown without requiring contact.
He did not say a word.
He just sat there, with his long legs stretched toward the wardrobe and his hands quiet in his lap, and looked forward at the far wall the way you looked at something you were giving your full, unhurried attention to.
I looked at the side of his face for a moment. He did not look back at me.
I looked away.
Rhett appeared behind him. He had been there for some time, I thought, he had the careful, quiet quality of a man who had been standing in a doorway doing the work of deciding what to do, and had decided.
He was carrying a blanket, one of the old wool ones from the chest at the foot of the hall.
He came into the room without speaking, without the easy drawl or the pre-emptive deflecting grin that I had come to recognize as his first instinct in rooms that required something from him.
None of that. Just the blanket and the quiet.
He draped it over my shoulders.
His hands adjusted it at the collar without lingering, the way you adjusted a blanket on a person who needed warmth rather than gesture, and then he sat down on my other side.
I felt the warmth of him on my left and Cole on my right and the black orchid scent of Rhett close, and I stared at the floor and pressed my lips together and breathed.
Wade came last.