Chapter Twenty-Six
I SLEPT. THAT’S the thing I couldn’t get over when the sun finally dragged me up out of it. I’d slept all the way through, hard enough that for a few seconds I didn’t know what had woken me or why my body felt different, and then Amy shifted against me and the night came back at once.
I’m the one who stays awake. That’s the arrangement, been the arrangement for weeks: she sleeps and I keep watch, lie there in the dark being the thing between her and the hallway while I count ceiling boards and listen to every sound the compound makes.
Only last night I went under with her wrapped all the way around me and the lamp still burning, and I didn’t surface once.
Didn’t hear the compound. Didn’t check the window.
Didn’t dream. Just slept, the hardest I’ve slept in longer than I could remember, and stayed down until the sun came through the window and found us tangled up exactly where we’d fallen.
That did something to me I wasn’t ready to look at too close.
She was still asleep, face slack against my chest, mouth a little open, one hand fisted loose in my shirt like even unconscious she wanted something solid under it.
Her hair was everywhere, half across my arm and half across the pillow, and without all that watchfulness she carries around during the day she looked softer somehow, unguarded in a way Amy almost never lets herself be.
There was no stubborn set to her mouth, no little line between her eyebrows from thinking too hard, no part of her ready for the hit that might come next.
Just Amy. In my bed. Wrapped around me. And there was a mark low on her throat where my mouth had been. I stared at that longer than a decent man probably would’ve.
Hell, maybe longer than an indecent one.
The memory of putting it there came back hot, along with enough of the rest of the night that I had to shut my eyes for a second and remind myself she was asleep, I was thirty-five years old, and there were limits to how much humiliation a grown man ought to suffer before breakfast.
Didn’t help much. When I looked again, the mark was still there.
Mine.
The word came up hard and primitive before I could do a damn thing about it, and for once I didn’t beat it back down or dress it up into something prettier.
Mine. Not because she belonged to me. I’d learned that lesson about as painfully as a man could learn one, and I’d spend the rest of my life making sure I never forgot it.
But I belonged to her.
That was the piece I’d been too stupid to understand.
Mine to protect if she wanted protecting.
Mine to hold when she reached. Mine to answer when she called, to sit outside a door if that was all she’d give me or wake up with her wrapped around me if she gave me this.
Mine to spend whatever years I had left proving that when Amy Dawson put something fragile in my hands, I knew how to keep my fists open around it.
And hers.
That one hit harder.
I’d spent months telling myself all the reasons she couldn’t be mine and never once stopped to ask what it meant that I’d already become hers.
The garden, the cabin, the bike, every hour sitting across from that campus, every night awake beside her, every goddamn thought I’d had for longer than I cared to count, they’d all bent toward this girl until there wasn’t much of me left that hadn’t.
I should’ve been scared by that. Instead I looked down at her sleeping against me and felt about as content as I’d ever felt in my life.
So I let myself have the morning.
Didn’t move. Didn’t start counting all the reasons this was complicated or all the ways I could still screw it up, didn’t reach for the age between us or the blood on my hands or any of the other weapons I’d spent months using against myself.
I just lay there with one arm around her and felt her breathe, let the sun crawl farther across the bed, and when she shifted closer in her sleep and tucked her face into my chest like there wasn’t anywhere else she’d rather be, I put my mouth against the top of her head and closed my eyes.
Because I finally understood something, and it had taken me the long road of my own stupidity to get there.
* * *
She woke somewhere around eight, but I knew she was coming up before she opened her eyes because her breathing changed first, then the hand loose against my chest tightened once and she made a little sound low in her throat before tucking her face deeper into me, like she was arguing with morning on principle.
I stayed still and let her have the argument, one arm around her and the other under my head, and after another minute her eyes finally cracked open.
She stared at my chest for a few seconds, then at the hand she’d got curled into my shirt, and finally, very slowly, up at me.
“You’re awake.”
“Been awake.”
Her eyes narrowed. “How long?”
“Long enough.”
“That’s creepy.”
“Probably.”
She didn’t move, though, and that was the part that got me.
Amy could call me creepy all she wanted, but she was still wrapped around me under the sheet with one leg tangled through mine and her hair all over my pillow, and there wasn’t an inch of hurry in her to put any distance back between us.
If anything, she moved closer while she was accusing me of bad behavior, her cheek coming back down against my chest like she’d decided the conversation could happen just fine from there.
I put my hand over the back of her head, and she went still for half a second.
Not scared.
Aware.
There was a difference now, and after last night I knew it.
“So,” she said into my chest.
“So.”
“This is weird.”
“Little bit.”
“A lot, actually.”
“Alright.”
She lifted her head enough to look at me. “Could you stop agreeing with everything I say?”
“Could.”
Her mouth twitched, just barely, and because apparently I’d lost every scrap of good sense I’d ever owned, I ran my thumb over the corner of it.
That wiped the almost-smile right off.
Her eyes came to mine, and the room changed so fast it damn near made me dizzy.
Didn’t take much with us anymore, apparently.
One touch and all that soft morning silence had something warmer running underneath it, and I watched her become aware of exactly how we were lying, how little there was between us, what we’d done in this bed with the lamp burning beside it and what it meant that neither one of us was pretending it hadn’t happened now that the sun was up.
My thumb was still resting against her mouth, and I should’ve moved it, but I didn’t.
Then her eyes dropped to mine.
Well, hell.
“Don’t do that,” I said.
Her gaze came back up, innocent as anything. “Do what?”
“You know what.”
“I really don’t.”
Liar. I saw it in the little lift at one corner of her mouth, and something about Amy lying in my bed teasing me after all those months of barely looking at me felt so damn good I couldn’t even be irritated about it.
“You keep looking at my mouth,” I said, “and we’re gonna have a different kind of morning.”
The pink came fast, starting at her throat and climbing into her cheeks, but she didn’t look away.
“Maybe I was just looking.”
“Maybe I’m thirty-five and know better.”
“Do you?”
That one landed, and she knew it did.
I stared at her, she stared right back, and then, slowly enough that there wasn’t a thing accidental about it, she pushed herself up and kissed me.
Morning Amy kissed different. Last night there’d been nerves tangled through everything, even when she wanted me, some part of her checking every step before she put her foot down, but there was none of that now.
This was warm and sleepy and a little bold, her hair falling around my face while she kissed me like she had nowhere else she needed to be, and I let her lead it because that mattered to me more than she’d probably ever understand.
Didn’t mean I couldn’t enjoy the hell out of where she led.
When she pulled back, I followed before I caught myself, barely an inch, but it was enough.
Her smile came slow.
“Rune.”
“Don’t.”
“You followed me.”
“I moved my head.”
“You followed me.”
“You’re getting real mouthy for somebody in my bed.”
Her eyebrows went up.
I heard it the same second she did.
“My bed,” she repeated.
“Poor choice of words.”
“No, I think those were exactly the words you meant.”
I groaned and dropped my head back against the pillow. “Jesus Christ.”
She laughed, and that sound did something to me I wasn’t prepared for.
Not the little almost-laugh I’d been getting out of her lately and not the wet, broken one from the floor last night. Amy laughed in my bed with her hair a mess and sleep still rough in her voice, and I felt the sound of it against my ribs because she was lying half on top of me.
I’d have made a fool of myself for that sound.
Probably already had.
“You’re very grumpy in the morning,” she informed me.
“I’ve been awake ten minutes and you’ve already started shit.”
“You said you’d been awake a while.”
“Feels like ten minutes.”
“That’s not how time works.”
“Thank you, college.”
She smacked my chest, and I caught her hand without thinking.
Neither of us laughed after that.
It was pure reflex, her palm coming down and mine closing around her wrist, but the second I had her there, the air changed again. Her eyes dropped to my hand and mine followed, and I opened my fingers immediately, letting her go before either of us had to think about it.
Amy didn’t pull away.
She turned her hand inside mine instead, slowly, until our palms met, then threaded her fingers through mine.
Such a little thing.
After last night it shouldn’t have been anything at all, but I swear it damn near stopped my heart.
She looked at our hands for a long moment, her thumb moving once over my knuckle, and when she spoke again the teasing had gone out of her voice.
“Are you going to be weird now?”
“Almost certainly.”
That got the smallest smile out of her.
“I mean about us.”
I knew what she meant, but I also knew better than to answer a question she hadn’t quite asked.
“What about us?”
Her nose wrinkled. “I hate when you do that.”
“Do what?”
“Make me actually say things.”
“Thought that was the point.”
The look she gave me said I deserved that one, and I probably did, but then she dropped her eyes back to our joined hands and went quiet long enough that I could feel how hard the next words were costing her.
“I don’t know what this is yet.”
“Okay.”
“And I’m still mad at you.”
“Know that.”
“Like, really mad.”
“I’d be concerned if you weren’t.”
That finally brought her eyes back to mine. “And last night doesn’t erase anything.”
“No.”
I lifted our joined hands and settled them against the middle of my chest, right over the place she’d been using to find her way back to herself for months.
“It doesn’t have to erase a damn thing, Amy.”
Something shifted in her face, and I watched her try to hide it before I went on.
“I don’t need you to forgive me this morning. Don’t need you to decide what we are, don’t need some promise about tonight or tomorrow or next week. You wanted me last night and I wanted you, and morning doesn’t make either one of us owe the other something for it.”
Her eyes got suspiciously bright, and I wasn’t having that. Not this morning.
I rubbed my thumb across her fingers. “Though I’d appreciate it if you quit calling me creepy while you’re half naked in my bed. Sends mixed signals.”
Her mouth dropped open.
Then she hit me with the pillow.I took the first one because I had it coming, caught the second swing, and somewhere in the wrestling over the damn thing she ended up half across me with her hair in both our faces, laughing again while I got an arm around her waist. My hand slid up against the warm skin of her lower back, and I felt the laugh catch in her throat when my fingers pressed in.
Too late for dignity. The laughter faded slowly when she realized where she’d ended up, but the smile stayed, softer now, and for a second neither of us moved.
She was close enough that I could feel her breath against my mouth, close enough that I could see the sleep still sitting heavy in her eyes, and there wasn’t any fear in them this time.
Just her, and the way her hips settled against mine like they’d been made to fit there.
I reached up, slow enough that she saw my hand coming, and pushed her hair back behind her ear. My thumb traced the line of her jaw after, down to the pulse beating steady at the base of her throat. “Morning,” I said.
Stupid thing to say. We’d been awake ten minutes.
Amy looked at me like it wasn’t stupid at all. “Morning.”
Then she kissed me again, and I let the pillow drop. Her mouth was soft and sure, and when she leaned into me I could feel every place we were touching, her knee against my thigh, her stomach against mine, the way her breasts pressed into my chest as she deepened the kiss.
For once, I didn’t think about tomorrow.
Didn’t think about Devil, or the man with the ink on his throat, or the club waking up beyond my windows.
I just pulled her closer when she came to me, my hand sliding up her spine until she shivered against me.
Felt her smile against my mouth when I did, and let myself have one morning where loving her wasn’t a problem I had to solve.
It was just Amy in my bed, kissing me because she wanted to, her body warm and willing under my hands.
And for that little piece of morning, that was enough.