Chapter 55
Saint
Iwake before she does, which is always.
But this morning I don’t move immediately. I lie with her against my chest and her hair against my chin and her hand on my sternum where she placed it in her sleep, and I look at the ceiling of her room, and I let myself have the morning. My mind races with thoughts of what she means to me.
This is new. Letting myself have things.
The ward stripped the habit from it. When you live in a place where everything is conditional, everything administered on a schedule controlled by someone else, you learn to stop wanting the spaces between the conditions.
You learn to want only what is in front of you because wanting something in the future is the fastest route to a kind of pain.
But she has given me back the future.
Not all at once. In pieces. The way she does everything, carefully, honestly, one piece at a time so I can hold it without dropping it.
The first piece was a note I slid under her door.
The last piece was last night, which I’m going to be thinking about for a very long time. It wasn’t rough sex. It was a vow.
I look at her face in the morning light.
Her hair is fanned out across the pillow. Her lips slightly parted. Her pink nipples and the dip of her waist.
I think about what I want. The actual version, the one I have been allowing myself to build since the roof at golden hour and both hands flat on my chest.
I want to keep her.
Not the way Roman kept her. Not the way the Order expects me to keep her. Not as a resource or a territory or a body to organize control around.
I want her the way you want something that is already yours in the only sense that matters, not legally, not by force, but freely given that neither of us has ever had access to before.
I want her permanently. I want her safe. I want her in every morning I have left.
And I want—and this is the part that has been forming in the dark of my own mind for weeks now—the thing I haven’t said because I’m still working out how to say it honestly.
I want more than this. More than a dorm room and modified terms and the borrowed time of a campus that will eventually end.
I want the version that starts here and keeps going.
That has no expiry date. That is ours in the way that nothing in either of our lives has ever been ours before.
She opens her eyes and finds me immediately.
“Good morning,” she says. Her voice is rough with sleep.
“Good morning.”
“You were thinking,” she says.
“Always.”
She presses her palm flat against my chest, over the place where she always puts it, and looks up at me.
“Tell me,” she says.
But first, I want this. Just a minute more of this.
She seems to understand that, which is one of the things about her I could not have anticipated from a photograph in a white room—the way she reads silence correctly. She doesn’t push. She lies against me and waits, warm and patient, while I find the words to say.
When I find them, I say them plainly, because plainness is the only honest register I have, and she deserves honesty above everything else.
“I want all of it,” I say. “Not just this year. Not as Prey. All of it. I want you somewhere that is ours. I want the future that we build. I want it to be permanent in every way I can make it permanent.”
She goes very still.
“I know what I’m asking. I’m not asking you to decide today. I’m asking you to know that it is what I want so that when you are ready, the question is already answered.”
She looks at me for a long time.
“I trust you, Saint. I want that too.”
She says it the way she says the most important things, quietly, without drama, with the weight of something she has thought about carefully and is now done thinking about.
She holds my gaze without flinching. “I was just waiting for you to ask.”