Chapter 45 Levi #2
Water runs in the other room a minute. Then the mattress dips again and there’s a warm, damp cloth moving over me, gentle, wiping me clean. My stomach, lower, careful and unhurried. Dante’s cleaning me up without a word.
I try to get one eye open to tell him thank you, and all that comes out is a contented sigh.
“Shh…” he whispers. “Go back to sleep.”
He tosses the cloth off somewhere and settles in behind me again, his arm coming heavy across my ribs, the both of us clean and dry now. I go back down.
A few short hours later, I come up out of sleep slowly, from somewhere deep. I never wake slow. I wake like the floor might be on fire. All at once, the body online before the eyes, arms already half up, the room counted off in the first half-second. Door, window, where’s out, who’s here.
This morning I just surface. Up through deep water. No jolt. No arms coming up. I’m awake before I’ve checked a single exit, and the not-checking is strange enough it finally gets my eyes open.
I slept good. Hours of it. Not the half-sleep I run on, one ear up, dozing on top of the covers in my clothes with my boots inside arm’s reach.
I went under last night with a warm body at my back, in a bed that isn’t mine.
Every threat my body has ever learned, all in one room, and it didn’t keep watch.
It stood down. It left the post and let me go under, and nothing bad came for me.
And I’m burning up. Damn, it’s hot in here. There’s a chest against my back and an arm slung over me, gone heavy, the hand open on my ribs. Slow even breath on the back of my neck.
Dante.
Asleep, pressed up the length of me, still here. His arm hasn’t moved all night. However long it’s been there, he hasn’t pulled it back. I lie inside the weight of it and can’t get my heartbeat to calm down.
I’ve done a few casual hookups with men before. In the dark, on the tour, fast, when everybody’s wasted. Not a lot, not all the way stuff, but enough to know what’s coming next.
I’ve never done the staying part. Where somebody slows it all down like there’s no hurry, like I was the main point. Where I fall asleep afterwards and my body lets me stay wrapped up tight in a man’s arms.
Dante was so careful with me. That’s the word I keep coming back around to.
Nobody ever told me it was allowed to be that way.
That it could mean more than sex. And that’s when the good feeling in my chest rolls over and goes bad, because it’s almost morning.
And if there’s one thing I know about Dante’s mornings, they don’t start late.
There’s no clock in my sightline and I don’t need one. I can feel the hour, after a life spent dreading specific ones, and it’s close to the one I’m scared of.
He gets up at five-thirty every day of his life, no alarm, no reason, just up, running full-speed. I learned it the first week. It’s near that now, and any minute the body at my back is going to wake.
And then it’s all over.
I go still. It’s the oldest thing I know how to do, playing dead, faking a sleep I’m not in. And it’s hard work to fake it. My heart’s racing fast enough I’d swear he can feel it through my back.
Every part of me wants up, wants my clothes, wants to be a problem that solves itself before he has to open his eyes and deal with it.
But if I get up, it means he wakes. I can’t be looking at him when his eyes open and he remembers what he did last night with the trouble he was supposed to stay away from.
Because I know how this will go with Dante.
He’s going to wake up and be polite. Not cruel.
He would never be that. That was never the fear.
He’ll wake up, be calm and handle me. Won’t meet my eyes.
Might even politely make me one of those little cups of coffee.
He’ll say he needs to be at a real estate event somewhere before he drives me back to the beach house with the radio up so neither of us has to talk, drops me at the gate, and that’ll be the end.
Under the bracing, down where I don’t let things up into the light, there’s the one thought I can’t let out. I want him to wake up and not take it back. I want him to keep me. Even if it’s only for a little bit longer.
But I don’t let myself finish that thought, because wanting it out loud is the surest road to losing it. I lie in the warmth of an arm that still hasn’t moved, and I refuse, with everything I’ve got left, to want the thing I want the most in this world.
His breath changes against my neck.
It’s small. A hitch, a deepening of the breath, the body at my back coming up out of its own sleep. His hand twitches where it’s gone open on my ribs. Five-thirty, near enough. On time. Just like I knew he’d be. The reckoning had a clock on it the whole night, and the clock’s run out.
Fuck.
What I wouldn’t give for this to last a little longer.
I keep my eyes shut. I keep the breathing false and even.
I lie dead still, my back to him, face to the window, the most undefended a body ever gets, braced to the soles of my feet for the first cool, polite word.
The first inch of his arm pulling back. His kind voice that’s going to fold last night up neat.
I wait for the morning to take it all back.