Chapter 16
I know where I am before I open my eyes.
Cold wood. Whiskey. An older, mature alpha scent that has my senses coming to life.
Vincent's room. Vincent's bed. I’m waking up here for the second time in a week.
Three days ago I fell asleep on his chest in here. Feels like it happened to somebody else.
My whole body aches. Not the sick kind—the used kind.
Hips, thighs, lower back, a deep soreness in places I've never once been sore.
There's a bruise on my shoulder the size of a fist. My throat is tight and hot.
I lift my hand to the spot and my fingers find a ridge of scab where the skin should be smooth.
I press it.
Something pulls behind my sternum, hard enough that I make a sound out loud.
Oh.
Oh, God.
It all comes crashing back. Calder's hands. Calder's mouth. Me begging—not asking, begging, saying please over and over like I’d die if he didn’t fuck me.
Everything I said–I'm yours. Just keep me. Please keep me.
I press on the mark again and hiss.
His teeth. The blood on my fingers. Then everything going south.
I put both hands over my face and lie there.
The worst part of it all isn't even the bite. I want it to be the bite. The worst part is that I remember every single thing I said, and I meant all of it when I said it. I meant every damn word.
I don't know how much of that was the heat and how much of it was me. There's no line. I keep searching for one but every time it evades me.
Who am I? What do I even want?
And what the hell am I doing here?
As for the present… I'm in Vincent's bed. Which means somebody carried me here.
There's an empty chair pulled up next to the bed.
I'm still looking at it when the door opens and Vincent comes in with a tray.
"You're awake." He stops in his tracks. His cheeks and jaw are dusted with about two days of hair growth. He’s got bags under his eyes and looks like he hasn’t slept in a week.
My heart skips a beat when I see him.
"Uh, how's the head?"
"Fine. I—" My voice is wrecked. I try again, reaching for my temple and rubbing. "Fine."
It’s everything else that’s killing me.
He sets the tray down on the nightstand. Toast, cut in half. A glass of orange juice. A bowl of something with steam coming off it. My heart pills bottle is lined up next to a glass of water.
I wait for him to sit down in the chair, drag it closer to the bed. Or maybe he’ll sit on the edge of the bed next to me and I’ll be able to feel the warmth of his thigh.
I exhale a sigh of relief, imagining being close to him.
But he doesn't sit.
He straightens up and takes two steps back, stands there with his hands in his pockets.
Our eyes lock and the distance between us feels like miles.
"Eat the toast first," he says. "Slowly or you'll be sick."
I push up so I’m sitting against the headboard. "How long was I out?"
"Two days. Most of a third."
Three days? I try to find something in that space that I remember but there's nothing. Just heat and Calder and the floor, and then this.
"The doctor came out," Vincent says. "You were dehydrated and your heart was going a little crazy. He gave you something to stop the—" There's a pause so small I almost miss it. "—the cycle. It'll hold a few weeks."
"Oh." My cheeks flush a little bit as I realize what he’s talking about.
He continues on without losing stride. "Your heart medication's changed. New dose. It's on the label."
I reach for it. "Okay."
Vincent nods, the moment becoming more tense. "There's more juice downstairs too if you want it."
Then he stops talking, and stays exactly where he is, halfway to the door.
I feel a little silly. In his bed, being doted on… again. But even sillier is this weird, awkward silence. I wish we could go back to talking under the moonlight. When both of us were a little more open.
Or maybe, maybe I can be brave and be open now. Cut through all this tension between us and make things right again.
"Vincent."
He rolls his lips between his teeth. "Mm."
"Can I, uh… ask you something?"
He nods. "You can ask."
I set my pill bottle down and play with the fluff of his blankets. "Are you angry with me?"
His head comes up. "No."
"Okay. It’s just—" I keep my eyes down because I can’t do this and look at him at the same time. "You won’t come near me. You haven’t sat down once. You’re standing all the way over there like I’ve got something contagious."
"Sonny."
"And I know I’m not owed anything, I know that, I’m not—" My throat closes up and I have to work around it. "But before we were… I mean I was in here with you. And now you won’t come within six feet of me. I can’t work out what I did wrong."
He doesn’t answer right away. When I finally look up, he’s walked further away–his hand has closed around the doorframe.
"You didn’t do anything wrong," he says.
"Then why—"
"You didn’t do anything wrong."
Harder the second time. Final.
I don’t believe him, but his tone isn’t leaving room for discussion. My stomach sinks a little, so I’ll just say my peace and let him leave.
He obviously wants to.
"Thank you," I say. "For all of it. For the doctor, and for putting me in here instead of—" I stop. "Just. Thank you."
His eyes close hard enough for his forehead to crease.
"You were unconscious." It comes out clipped. "There was no decision to make."
"There was, though." I make myself look up at him. "You could've left me on that floor. Called somebody. Let it be Calder's problem." My hand finds my own throat without asking permission. "You cleaned this off. Didn't you?"
He doesn't answer me.
"Nobody's ever been this… thoughtful." It comes out smaller than I mean it to. "Not once. Not when I was a kid, not in the hospital, not her. I was always handed off to someone else. But you’ve never done that."
Vincent is looking at a point somewhere over my left shoulder. His hand has closed on the doorframe hard enough that I can see the tendons in it.
Sit down, I think at him. Please, just sit down.
His throat bobs on a swallow. "Eat while it's hot," he says.
And then he's gone.
I breathe out slowly, an ache forming in my chest. I eat both halves of the toast. Slowly. Like he said.
~
It takes me two days to get down the stairs on my own.
Vincent's in and out. He brings food and he asks about my heart but keeps his distance. I feel like a burden again, like he’s growing tired of taking care of me.
I keep waiting for the version of him that sat in the dark to make sure I kept breathing, that pulled me close to his chest when he saw I was cold.
I get the other Vincent instead. Polite. Efficient. Somewhere locked behind glass.
I don't see Killian once. A couple of times I heard doors slam somewhere below at odd hours. Once I heard him and Vincent shouting about something. I tried to listen but couldn’t make anything out.
But Killian doesn't come up here and I don't go searching for him.
Maybe that’s why I’m in Vincent’s room. For protection from Killian.
And when I’m back on my feet, moving around the house, Calder is nowhere to be found.
His truck's here, I checked. His boots are by the back door when I walk downstairs in the morning, but I don’t see him in the backyard. Twice I’ve had the distinct impression I just missed him–catching a hint of his scent like he vanished around a corner when he heard me coming.
I feel it in my sternum. Those hooks dragging me to him.
To my alpha.
I shake that thought away.
He's avoiding me. Fine. Good. I'm avoiding him too.
Except that I'm not. I wish it was that simple.
My mind is doing an excellent job of avoiding him but the rest of me is a compass. Every hour of every day I know where he is in this house—through walls, through floors—like something in my chest is pointed at him and won't be turned.
The doctor's drug took the heat. It didn't take whatever bond is building between us.
On the third afternoon I'm in the living room with the paperback I still haven't finished. The same one I came down for the night I heard more than I was supposed to. It's still not very good.
I can't hold a single sentence in my head anyway. I read the same paragraph four times. The house is quiet. It's cold and grey out and I’m bored.
And there's a wire in the wall pulling on my sternum.
And the pull under my ribs won't let up. It wants me to find him–Calder’s in the shed.
I exhale, closing the book and throwing my head back. This is ridiculous. I get up, telling myself I’ll just go into the kitchen for some water. I head to the stairs anyway.
I have to get as far away from him as I can.
That’s the plan. Put a floor between us. Put a wall and a floor and a closed door between us and maybe the thing in my chest will finally shut up about it.
Except it’s a lie, and I know it’s a lie by about the fourth step.
I don’t want to be truly away from him. I want him so badly my teeth ache with it. I want to be in a room where he is, close enough to smell him, close enough that the thing in my chest goes quiet the way it did when he was carrying me up these same stairs.
But I can’t. I can’t look at him. If he came around a corner right now I’d flinch, and then I’d hate myself for flinching, and then I’d want him to come closer anyway.
I get to the top of the stairs.
My room is to the left.
I turn right.
I don’t understand what I’ve done until I’m standing in front of Calder’s door.
I wait outside it for a long time. Long enough to have the whole argument in my head. He bit you. He walked out. He left you on the floor and you couldn't stand up and he left anyway. But none of it cools the spark in me, the need I have to be close to him.
Just a minute. That's what I tell myself. I'll stand in there a minute and it'll ease off and I'll go back to my own room.
I open the door.
The bed's stripped. That's the first thing I notice. The mattress is bare, and the sheets are gone—not in a hamper, gone, and I have a horrible flash of him hauling them out to the burn barrel in the dark. The window's cracked an inch even though it's forty degrees out.
He's been trying to air it out.