Sophia #2
We kept chatting, easily, and he admitted that the man who'd swum off into a black ocean for a living is frightened of exactly one thing on this earth, and the thing is the dentist — said it deadpan, like a confession he'd weighed the cost of — and it got me.
The real laugh. The one that almost never makes it past the gate, that comes up from somewhere below the ribs and takes my whole face with it.
I felt it crack open and didn't stop it.
When it passed I looked up, still grinning, and caught what it had done to him. He'd gone still to watch it. Not smiling back — not yet — just taking it in, his eyes moving over my face like he was getting the whole of it down before it went.
Then I told him about the cabin.
"I'll take you out there one day," I said.
His chin came off the top of my head. "Yeah?"
"Yeah." I smiled into his shirt. "Tiny. One room, a porch that catches the last of the sun, Daisy's paddock right out front."
"Your horse."
"My menace." I felt him huff. "I've always wanted a porch swing out there — one of the big ones, on chains, that you can lie right out flat on. Never got round to it."
"I'll build you one." Easy as that, and I could hear it already happening behind his voice — reclaimed oak, chains off the joist, the whole thing built in his head before I'd finished wanting it.
"Of course you will." I was laughing again, softer. "You can't help yourself. Somebody hands you something a bit broken and you've got it fixed before they've finished the sentence."
"Worse things to be." His hand moved slow on my shoulder. "You love that place."
I looked toward the dark window. "Yeah." It came out quiet.
"It's where I go when everything gets loud.
I sit on the porch with a coffee and the menace and pretend nobody on earth knows where I am.
It's the one thing that's properly mine — the only patch of all that shared dirt with just my name on it.
Liam saw to that. Made sure that whatever else came for us, I'd always have somewhere of my own to go. "
Then, before I could catch it: "You'll like it."
He let the words sit there. He didn't grab for them. And the not-grabbing, careful and quiet as it was, said more than either of us was going to out loud tonight.
It was the clock on the mantel that told me how late it was. Gone midnight, and then some.
He felt me see it. "It's late," he said, and shifted under me, getting ready to take himself back across the road. "I should let you sleep."
And every part of me that had spent a lifetime getting good at walking people to the door said nothing and let him start to rise — and the other part, the one that had woken with no cold left in it, got my mouth open first.
"Stay."
He went still.
"You don't have to — I'm not asking for —" The heat went straight up my neck. "I just. I slept. For the first time in I don't know how long, and I think it was because I was warm. You were wrapped around me and I wasn't cold, and I want that again. Tonight."
He'd stopped halfway up off the couch, and he came back down, slow, and put his hand to the side of my face, his thumb moving once along the cheekbone. "You don't have to build a case for it." He looked at me a long moment. "Yeah. I'll stay."
He stood and held his hand down to me, the broad scarred palm open, the same hand that had held the worst of me on the floor that morning and not shaken once. I put mine in it and went up the stairs of my own house, not one scrap of armor left on me, with the man from across the road.
We put the lamp on low. In the dim light I got the shape of him more than the sight — the breadth of a back as it turned, the pale ghost of a scar the dark wouldn't let me read. Enough to remind me that I was a thirty-year-old woman with a working pulse.
I got in on my side and he got in on his — and there was a his now, after a single day.
I put my hand flat on his chest. Under my palm his heart was going slow and steady and enormous, and the second my hand landed he took a breath, held it half a beat, and let it carefully out — a man taking a small voltage and choosing to stand quiet under it.
We talked in whispers — it felt like the dark made true things easier: "Thank you. For not leaving me on that floor — and for not leaving since."
His hand came over mine where it lay against his heart and pressed it there. "Told you," he said, low. "Right here, there isn't a place on this earth id be."
His hand came up and found the side of my face. I felt the question in it, and the space he left me to turn away in. I didn't. I closed what was left of the dark between us, and he met me in it.
He kissed me slow, and careful, and soft, like a man with all the time in the world who meant to spend every second of it gently, asking nothing back. I leaned in, pushed up closer and asked for more the only way I had left.
He let me have a little of it. Then he eased back, his forehead coming down to rest on mine. "Sleep," he said, soft, against my mouth. "You need sleep.”
The gentle no of it didn't sting — because right on cue a yawn cracked my jaw clean open, vast and undignified, and I giggled into the small dark between us. "See," he said, and I could hear the smile in it. "Point taken," I said.
He gathered me in then, turned me until my back was to his front and the long warm length of him was wrapped round all of me, his chin hooked over the top of my head, one big hand spread flat over my heart. "Sleep, beautiful," he said into my hair. "I've got you."
And I lay there wrapped up and warm and held, the heartbeat of the man who'd carried me up these stairs that morning going slow and steady against my spine, and I waited for the old reflex — the one that keeps one ear on the door.
It didn't come. For the first time I could remember, there was nothing left in the dark that needed me awake.
I was, against every odd I'd ever been dealt, safe.
And I went down into sleep like a stone let go into deep water, all the way to the bottom, and didn't dream.