Chapter 20
Saint
She put her hand on my chest.
I have been in rooms where people have tried to kill me. I have taken three bullets across two separate incidents and walked away from both. I spent years in a pressurized white room being administered medications designed to quiet the part of my brain that makes me difficult to contain.
I’ve been called upon to help with the dirty work for all the sons of Kenyan for the women they love. Killed people. Made them disappear. Hurt them.
I found satisfaction.
Revenge.
None of those things did what her palm against my sternum did.
I stand in the outside her door for four minutes and thirty-seven seconds after she closes the door. I count them. Not because I am waiting for her to open it again, because I’m not.
Because I need the time to reassemble the parts of myself that her hand on my chest redistributed.
Thank you.
Two words. In her voice, looking directly at me, with quality of someone who has decided to admit something and is watching to see what happens when they do.
I walk back up to my room and stare at the ceiling, not wanting to forget how her hand felt.
What I know about Amy Torres could fill a ledger.
What I know about myself, in relation to Amy Torres, is less charted territory.
I was not built for this. I want to be clear about that, in the privacy of my own head, in the way I am only ever honest in the dark with no audience.
I was built for endurance. For rage that has a target. The patience of a man who has spent years with nothing to do but wait and plan and understand exactly what he wants and exactly how long he is willing to wait for it.
She was always the answer to what.
I understood this before I saw her face.
Before she arrived on this campus. In Unit 9, in the dark, turning what I knew of her over in my mind, the fragments Azriel let slip, the photographs, the outline of a person assembled from the negative space of everything that must have been done to her.
I understood that what I was building was not infatuation.
Infatuation is about the surface. This was something older.
Something that had been resolving itself in the dark for years without my permission.
What’s unresolved becomes immortal.
Dr. Wick thought it was pathology. She was right. It is pathology. It is also the most accurate thing I have ever said about myself.
Amy is not what I built in the dark. She is smaller and more tired and softer in the places that weren’t supposed to survive, and that is the part I couldn’t have anticipated. That she would be more rather than less, and that meeting her would not diminish what I’ve been carrying but compound it.
I lie on my bed and look at the ceiling, and I feel her heartbeat against my palm in reverse. Not mine against hers. Hers. The way it was running fast under my hand when she opened the door. That quick staccato of a person who has made a decision and is frightened by it, yet is doing it anyway.
She is the bravest person I know.
And that is not a feeling I was prepared for.
At two forty-seven in the morning, something changes in the building.
I feel it before I can name it. Something that I’ve learned to read like the way others read weather, a barometric change in the quality of the silence. I’m off my bed before I’ve consciously decided to move.
I am in the stairwell when I hear her.
Not words. A sound.
The kind that comes out of people when the nightmare has them before they’re fully awake. A sharp, broken sound that has nothing to do with the present and everything to do with something the present can’t reach.
I take the stairs.
I find the skeleton key and unlock her door and push it open.
The lamp is off.
The room is dark except for the streetlight coming through the gap in the curtain. She is in bed, tangled in the duvet, her body rigid with tension of someone fighting the inside of their own skull. She makes the sound again, that awful, small, trapped sound, and her hands fist in the sheet.
I cross the room.
I don’t turn on the light. I sit on the edge of the bed, and I say her name once, very quietly, in the register I use when I need to be heard through distance.
“Amy.”
She startles. Eyes open, unseeing for a moment, the lag of a person surfacing from somewhere deep.
She blinks, and her focus is on me.
Her breathing is ragged. Her face is damp. She is looking at me with the disorientation of someone trying to reconcile the inside of the nightmare with the outside of the room, so I wait. I’m very good at waiting while she does the work of separating them.
“Saint,” she says, like I’m the string that pulls her out.
“I’m here,” I say.
She closes her eyes. Opens them again. “Here,” she repeats, quieter, like she’s confirming it.
She’s shaking. Fine tremors through her shoulders, the kind the body produces when the adrenaline has nowhere to go. I have felt this from the inside. I know what it needs.
I reach out, and I put my hand over hers where they’re fisted in the sheet. Not pulling. Not restraining. Just weight. Just warmth.
She exhales.
The shaking doesn’t stop immediately, but it changes character, losing the frantic edge and settling into something the body can manage.
She breathes more deliberately now, in the long, controlled intervals I’ve watched her practice a hundred times without knowing I was watching.
I count her breaths with her.
After a while, she says, “Don’t go.”
Two words. Quietly. Without looking at me.
“I won’t if you don’t want me to,” I say.
She turns her hand over under mine. Not holding. Open. Palm up.
An offering, a permission, or something in between.
The nightmare doesn’t come back.
Eventually, her breathing evens out entirely, and the tremors stop. She is still, and the room is quiet around us.
I sit at the edge of her bed in the dark with her hand open under mine, and I look at the ceiling, and I think about what Azriel said.
Whatever you are to her is going to matter.
I think about her hand on my chest in the doorway. The weight of it. The warmth.
I look at her in the dark.
Her face is slack now, unguarded in the way sleep makes everyone unguarded, the performance stripped away. She looks like someone who has been holding something very heavy for a very long time and, in this moment, has been allowed to put it down.
I am going to burn down every single thing that ever made her feel like she had to carry it alone.
The thought arrives with the quiet certainty of a fact rather than a decision.
I sit with it in the dark.
I caress her face with the back of my fingers. Her eyes flutter open under the sliver of moonlight filtering through the window.
“Saint,” she whispers softly.
I lean close. My lips hover over her soft lips. Lips I’ve been dying to know what they feel like.
She lifts her chin, giving me permission.
“If I kiss you, Amy. I taste all of you.”
She furrows her brow. “What do you mean?”
I lean closer so she can decide to push me away. “It means I taste those lips and the ones between your legs. It means I’m going to fuck you with my tongue.”
I lean back so I can look into her wide eyes and give her time to decide.
She swallows thickly. “Is that what you want?”
“For now, it’s what you can handle.”
She stays silent for a few seconds.
“A simple yes or no would suffice.”
She nods. “Yes.”
For a second, neither of us moves. The room feels too small around her. Around me. Around the yes she just gave me, sitting between us like something alive.
I look at her and hear more than the word. I hear every no she was forced to swallow. Every time her body stopped belonging to her. Every moment some man decided her silence was the same thing as permission.
“You understand what you just gave me?” I ask.
Her throat moves when she swallows. “Permission.”
My hands curl once at my sides. “No.” My voice comes out rougher than I intend. “Permission can be taken back. I need you to know that before I touch you.”
Something shifts in her face. Not fear. The fragile disbelief of someone who has never been allowed to trust an open door.
“You would stop?” she asks.
My jaw tightens. The question offends something violent in me. Not because she asks it, but because someone made her need to.
“I would tear my own hands off first.”
Her breath catches. I stay where I am. I don’t touch her. Not yet.
I run my gaze over her oversized shirt until she pulls it over her head. My eyes lock onto all her scars, and I’ve never seen a woman so beautiful before.
She wears them with pride. They are part of who she is.
She moves her hands over them, and I stop her, shaking my head. “Let me.”
She does.
Her fingers find my hair, the tips of her fingers over the strands I keep tied in a bun, as my lips graze the elevated scars on her soft skin, memorizing them. The pain, from whoever inflicted them, the ones I know she didn’t deserve.
Her breaths come in and out faster than before.
Her nipples harden, her back arches, and my lips softly skim over her right nipple and then the left.
I reach her lips and slide my tongue inside and finally taste her.
The whimper that leaves her throat is like a song that calms the rage inside me. I drown in her and don’t stop kissing her until she needs air.
I raise my head and pull my hoodie off over my head. Her hands find the same spot over my chest. My heart beats faster with the feel of her touch on my skin and the way her fingers move over the ripple of muscle.
She is so small compared to me. Petite but strong at the same time.
My fingers find the black string of her panties, and I pull them down her hips.
I settle between her legs and look up, watching her watch me with wonder in her eyes.
My mouth is so close to the lips of her wet pussy that the light from the moon cannot hide them from me.
I taste her slowly like a wine connoisseur’s favorite vintage—expensive, intoxicating, and impossible to forget. Her little moans of pleasure are like music to my tongue. Every flick and suck on her clit gets her closer to coming.
I fuck her with my tongue, tasting every sinful second I have my face between her thighs.
Her fingers grip my hair.
She gasps. “I’m coming, Saint. Fuck. I’m coming. Yes.”
I don’t stop fucking her with my tongue, sucking her clit with each measured stroke. I hold her as her thighs shake, her orgasm hitting her like a bullet train. Deep measure strokes, memorizing her scent.
When her thighs stop shaking, I breathe her in one more time like fresh air, lick her one last time until I reach her parted lips right before she falls asleep. “You’re mine now.”
When the first gray light comes through the curtain gap, I stand carefully, slowly, and I put the duvet back around her where she’s thrown it off.
I look at her for a long moment after putting on my hoodie.
Then I leave.
I pull the door and make sure it’s locked.
In the stairwell, I stop, and I press the heel of my hand against my sternum, against the place where she put her palm, and I breathe.
Three hours until first period.
I have never been less interested in behavioral psychology.