Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Eliot woke at four.
Old habit. His body had never fully surrendered the early-morning alertness he'd developed as a child; that pre-dawn wakefulness of someone who had learned that the quality of a day could be established in its first hour, before anyone else was up, before the atmosphere of a house became whatever it was going to be.
He lay still. Took inventory. He was not at home. Not in his condo in Philly. Not in his temporary apartment in Valor.
He was on Dalene's couch. She was asleep against his chest. His arm was around her shoulders. The television had moved on to an infomercial about a device that appeared to simultaneously juice fruit and play ambient music.
Eliot let his focus hang on the juicer for a long moment. In truth, he was paying less than half attention to the television. The majority of his senses was taken over by the woman in his arms.
He should leave. That was the right thing to do.
His own bed was forty feet away through the wall.
It was early in the morning. Nothing about his continued presence on this couch was necessary or appropriate or consistent with the terms of an arrangement that was supposed to be managed and strategic and temporary.
He should leave.
He didn't move.
Dalene was warm against him. That was the first problem.
She had arranged herself at some point in the night into a configuration that was so thoroughly, unconsciously comfortable that moving would require a kind of deliberate disruption he couldn't justify.
Her head on his chest. Her hand loosely curled near his ribs.
The weight of someone in real sleep — not the shallow, provisional kind, but the deep kind.
The kind his mind had just released him from because he was rested. Fully rested. Entirely at peace.
He was aware, with the helpless precision of a man who noticed everything, of her hair. Of the lavender. Not color; the smell.
He'd identified it first in the meadow, when she'd been close enough and he'd been paying more attention than he'd admitted to himself.
The same shampoo, apparently. It was everywhere now — warm and clean and present in a way that was not, he had revised his position thoroughly on this, anything like soap.
It was in his nose. On his tongue. In his throat. He swallowed and only just managed to keep himself from groaning in pleasure.
Dalene shifted in her sleep. A small sound, a sigh, escaped her pursed lips. She settled deeper into him, like a kitten burrowing into his chest. Eliot's protective instincts flared.
He thought about pride. That was the word his brain produced, unprompted, and he sat with it carefully. Pride. Not ownership — nothing like that. The quiet, private satisfaction of a man who had accomplished a difficult task.
Like him, Dalene had trouble sleeping. But inside his arms, she felt safe enough to rest. To set down her burdens and relax enough to fall into a deep, unguarded sleep. He had done that for her. She had done that for him.
Eliot thought about his mother. She had slept lightly.
Always. He hadn't understood it as a child — had thought it was simply how adults slept, that shallow, provisional way, always half-listening.
It was only later, much later, that he understood it for what it was.
A body that had learned it wasn't safe to fully let go.
A nervous system that had been trained, over years, to stay ready.
He'd been the same. Still was, mostly.
He'd joined the military at eighteen because it was the most structured, rule-governed environment he could find, and his father had taught him that structure was the closest thing to safety available.
He'd been nervous about it — had expected to find men like his father in the ranks.
Hard, unpredictable, the kind of authority that moved the goalposts without announcement.
Instead, Eliot had found people who were difficult in completely different ways — tired, scared, occasionally incompetent, often extraordinary.
But the rules had been the rules. The orders had been the orders.
Nobody had changed the requirements after the fact and then punished you for following the previous version.
He'd learned there what his father's house had not been. What it should have been.
Dalene sighed again. Settled again. Her hand shifted slightly against his ribs.
Eliot buried his face briefly in her hair. In the field of lavender; the scent he'd rejected days ago. He held her a fraction tighter. He stared at the ceiling and thought: what happens when I go back.
Not if. When.
Who would make her dinner then? Who would hold show up with an umbrella and rescue her from overgrown man-children in a letterman's jacket? Who would sit on the couch and keep the television low and give her body a reason to believe the evening was safe.
That was a problem for a later version of himself, one with more information and presumably better judgment.
There was a change in her breathing. The shift from deep and even to something lighter, the small return of tension that meant consciousness was coming back.
She yawned, her eyes still closed. Her lips parting wide, her head tipping back slightly against his chest, entirely unconcerned with being witnessed.
He watched her mouth and thought about cinnamon rolls and lavender and a bundle of dried herbs hanging above them in the market and the fraction of a second his gaze had dropped and what it had cost him to bring it back up.
Her shoulders scrunched up toward her ears. She stretched. Her arms extended, her back arching slightly away from him and then settling back. She unfurled her limbs like a cat that had claimed a patch of sunlight and was taking full inventory of its satisfaction.
She brought her hands up and rubbed her eyes with her knuckles. Small, circular, the unselfconscious gesture of someone not yet remembering they had an audience. Her hair had escaped entirely from whatever had been holding it and was spread across his chest.
She opened her eyes. She saw him. She smiled. She smiled at him like he was a good thing to wake up to.
Eliot's heart stopped. Between one beat and the next, a full pause. Then it started again. A new rhythm, slightly altered, recalibrated around a new tune. Because her chest was still against his, Eliot realized his heart was beating the same moderate rhythm as Dalene's.
He was in significant trouble.
"Morning, weather boy," she said.
Her voice was rough with sleep. There was a faint crease on her cheek from his shirt. Up close the constellation of freckles on her face felt more like a black hole and Eliot was falling into them.
The couch was very small and the morning light was coming in soft through the curtains and she was right there and he wanted — he wanted—
He wanted to kiss her.
"I should get home," he said.
Something moved across her face. Small and quick. "Right." She sat up, making space, pulling the throw blanket around herself in the way of someone missing warmth. "Of course."
Eliot stood. Found his jacket on the hook by the door where he'd put it last night.
She was still on the couch, blanket around her shoulders, watching him with the soft, unassembled expression of someone not yet fully defended against the morning.
"The sleep," he said, from the door. "How was it?"
"The best I've had in months," she said.
"Me, too." He nodded once.
He opened the door.
The rain had stopped long ago, but the clouds remained in the sky. He stepped out into the early morning and pulled the door shut behind him. He left his umbrella at her door. Then he crossed the garden, got inside, and stood in his.