13. Alex #2
Leo appeared in the doorway, his candle held up to light the way. He’d changed into dry clothes, a soft gray t-shirt and dark sweatpants, and his hair was still damp but no longer dripping. The candlelight caught the side of his face and turned his amber eyes very dark.
“All latched on your side?” I asked.
“Yeah.” He glanced at my wet shirt. “You went out the window.”
“Shutter was loose.”
He looked like he wanted to say something about that and thought better of it. “There’s a leak in my ceiling,” he said instead.
I stared at him.
“Not a pipe this time,” he added quickly, reading my expression. “The rain. It’s coming in around the frame of the skylight. My bed is soaked.”
“Okay,” I nodded, not sure what to do with that information.
We stood there for a moment in the doorway, the storm doing its level best to tear the roof off above us.
Another crack of lightning, this one close enough that I felt it somewhere behind my sternum.
The thunder followed it instantly, a sound like the sky splitting in half.
Leo jumped, his candle going out as he ran into the door frame with a dull thud.
“Careful,” I said, reaching out to steady him without thinking about it.
“I’m fine.” But his voice had gone tight. He steadied the candle and straightened up. He tried to rearrange his expression, his gaze darting away from my hand on his bicep.
“Are you afraid of storms?” I asked.
“No.” A beat. “Not usually.”
“This one is pretty bad,” I added, trying to give him some grace. “I’m kinda freaked out too.”
He looked at me for a moment, the light of my candle moving across his face.
“I’ve never been in a house this old during something like this,” he admitted.
“Back home everything is built to code. Double-paned glass and steel frames and all of that. This place is just…” He gestured vaguely at the walls around us. “Stone.”
Despite everything, I almost smiled. “It’s held this long.”
“That’s either very reassuring or extremely not,” he said.
Another flash. Another crack that arrived so fast it was practically simultaneous. This time Leo didn’t step back, but I saw his jaw tighten and his free hand close around the door frame. My candle flame threw wild shadows up the wall.
“Come on,” I said. “Just stay here until this blows over.”
He didn’t argue, he just followed me into the room. I placed my candle on the side table and flopped down on the bed. To my surprise, Leo took a seat at the far end, trying to take up as little real estate as possible.
“Might as well get comfortable,” I offered, lacing my hands behind my head. “We could be here a while.”
He was quiet for a long moment, then slid back slightly on the bed so he wasn’t perched at the edge. For a while we just listened to the thunder and watched the flashes of light between the cracks in the shutters. The silence between us was almost louder than the storm. Almost.
I was aware of every inch of distance between us on the bed. The way he was lying with careful deliberateness at his end, like he’d measured out exactly how much space to leave.
I stared at the ceiling and tried not to think about the past three days.
About all the rooms I’d walked out of. About the blank notebook page and the hours in the garden before dawn and the conversation I’d been having with myself on a loop since the moment my hand had shot back from his shoulder like I’d been burned.
Ignore it. That had been the plan. The plan had been to ignore it until it went away or until the three weeks were up and we went home and back to our separate lives and I could pretend none of this had ever happened.
That plan was not going particularly well.
“Alex,” Leo said.
“Don’t.”
“You don’t know what I was going to say.”
“I know,” I said. “But whatever it is, don’t.”
He was quiet for a moment. Outside, the rain was pounding against the shutters, making a sound like static, like the whole world was an old television left on a dead channel.
Lightning pulsed through the gaps and threw brief, sharp shadows across the ceiling.
The candle on the side table was burning low, the flame bending in the drafts, and the light it threw was warm and unsteady and made everything feel slightly underwater.
“You’ve been avoiding me,” he said.
“I’ve been giving you space.”
“That’s not what it looked like from where I was standing.”
I said nothing. The thunder rolled through the floor beneath us, long and low, and I felt it in my spine.
“Three days, Alex,” he said quietly. “You walked out of every room I walked into. You wrote nothing in that notebook for three days. You ate food I left for you on the counter and disappeared before I could sit down.” A pause. “That’s not giving me space. That’s hiding.”
“Leo—”
“I’m not angry,” he said. And I could tell from his voice that he wasn’t. That was somehow worse. “I’m just tired of pretending I don’t notice.”
I closed my eyes. The candle guttered, steadied, guttered again.
“What do you want me to say?” I asked.
“I don’t want you to say anything you’re not ready to say.” His voice was very even. Careful in the way that meant he’d been thinking about this for a while. “I just want you to stop punishing both of us for something neither of us asked for.”
The words landed somewhere I hadn’t been expecting. I opened my eyes and looked at the ceiling and tried to figure out what the hell to say.
So he knew. Or he thought he knew. Or he’d been turning the same terrible math over in his own head for the past three days and had arrived at the same conclusion I had.
And now we were lying on a bed in the dark in the middle of a storm in a country neither of us really knew, and the air between us felt thick and oppressive.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. My voice came out higher than I intended.
“Maybe not,” he allowed. “But I know what I saw in that kitchen. And I know what I felt when you put your hand on my shoulder.” He paused. “And I know that whatever I felt, I wasn’t imagining it.”
My heart did another little flip.
“Leo.”
“I’m not asking you to do anything,” he said quickly.
“I’m not asking you to be anything. I just—” He stopped.
Started again. “I’ve spent my entire life making myself easier for other people.
Not saying the difficult thing because the difficult thing made everyone uncomfortable, and it was just easier to be silent.
” His voice was still even, but I could hear the effort underneath it now. “I don’t want to do that to you.”
The candle went out.
It didn’t flicker or fade. It just went, snuffed by a draft that came through nowhere in particular, and the darkness that replaced it was total and immediate.
I heard Leo make a small, startled sound beside me, and then the rustling of him reaching for the matches on the side table, and then the scratch of a match head that didn’t catch. Another scratch. Still nothing.
“The matches are damp,” he said in a frustrated tone.
“Hold on.” I sat up and reached into my pocket for the matchbox I’d been carrying since the shutters. My fingers found it. I drew one out and struck it against the side, and the small flame caught.
In the sudden warmth of that light, I became aware of how close Leo was.
He’d shifted when he’d reached for the matches, and now he was not at the far end of the bed anymore.
He was close enough that I could see the match flame reflected in his amber eyes.
Close enough that I could see the slight dampness still in his hair, the hard line of his jaw, and the expression on his face that he hadn’t had time to put away before the light found it.
He was looking at me the way he’d looked at me in the kitchen. Open. Undefended. Like he’d run out of things to hide behind and had decided he was done trying, anyway.
The match burned down toward my fingers.
I should’ve lit the candle. That was the logical next move. Pick up the candle, touch the flame to the wick, restore the light. Simple sequence. I knew how to do it.
I didn’t move.
“Alex,” he said. Barely above a whisper.
The match went out.
In the darkness, his hand found mine. Not reaching, not grasping, just touching.
Out of instinct, I leaned into it. But I didn’t stop there.
The dark made me bold, like none of this was real and that I was just living in a dream.
I ran my fingers up his arm, feeling him shiver under my touch.
I traced his bicep, his collar bone, and then found his neck. He let out a small gasp.
“A-Alex…”
And then, before I second guess the dream I’d found myself in, I leaned forward and kissed him.