Chapter 54
Amy
He doesn’t tell me what happened.
He doesn’t have to. I know most things about Saint by now, not from what he says but from what he doesn’t say, and from the way he holds himself when he comes through my door, sits on the edge of my bed, and looks at the wall with the expression that means whatever he is battling is unsettling.
His knuckles are split. His jaw shows a bruise forming along the left side.
Victor hit him. And then he made sure he couldn’t breathe.
I sit on the bed beside him. I don’t get the first-aid kit this time. I just sit, close enough that our arms are touching, and I look at the same wall he’s looking at, and we stay like that for a while in the lamplight of the room.
. His jaw is set, and his hands are loose in his lap, and he is watching the wall with the patience of a man who knows he is going to sit with whatever I give him for as long as it takes.
“I’m grateful,” I say. “I knew something was wrong this morning.”
I look at him for a long moment when he doesn’t respond.
He reaches over and picks up my hand from where it is resting on the bed and holds it in both his hands, his thumb moving once across my knuckles in the same gesture he makes when the words aren’t enough, and he needs to say something with his hands instead.
“He won’t come back,” he says. “Ever.”
I nod. He says it with the assurance that comes from knowing who Saint is and what he is capable of, and from understanding that he will keep me safe.
“Are you all right?” I ask, concern laced in my voice. “Your jaw.”
“I’m fine,” he says.
I reach up with my free hand, and I gently touch the bruise along his jaw, my fingertips tracing the edge of it. He is very still while I do it.
“He hit you,” I say.
“He tried,” Saint says. There is something in his voice that is almost dry.
I look at the bruise and the rest of his face.
“Thank you,” I say.
The expression on his face is the full one, the one with everything in it that he doesn’t usually let people see.
“You don’t have to thank me for that,” he says. “Ever. You’re mine.”
We sit in the lamplight with his hands around mine.
I think about the fifteen-year-old girl who ran toward Roman because running toward him felt like the only available direction, and I think about what it means that the damage he left in her has been met, finally, by something that took it seriously.
I’m not naive about healing. Healing is not a single event. But refused to be dismissed.
“Saint.”
He looks at me.
“Stay with me.”
“Always,” he says.
That night, I don’t wait for the nightmare. That night, I turn to him first.
There is a difference between the nights the nightmare brings him to me and the nights I bring him to me myself, and I have been learning, slowly, that the second kind matters more.
That choosing to reach for someone before you are already broken is a different thing entirely from reaching for them after.
It is the version of trust that does not require a crisis.
It is the version that says, I want you here.
Not because I need rescuing. Because this is where you belong.
He is sitting against the headboard when I turn to him, his book closed in his lap, watching me with the dark, unhurried attention that I stopped trying to look away from weeks ago.
I move toward him. He makes room.
He learns me the way he learns everything, completely, without missing anything, without rushing toward the end of the lesson. Every thrust. Every whisper of his name on my lips every time I come. Every stroke of his tongue on my skin. Every moan he makes when he empties inside me like a gift.
And I let him.
I give him everything he asks for and several things he doesn’t ask for, but that I want him to have, and when it is over, I lie against his chest in the dark, and his heartbeat is under my palm, and the room is ours and the night is ours.
He presses his mouth to the top of my head once, quietly, the way he does when the words would be redundant.
I close my eyes and fall asleep without dreaming.