Chapter 21 Eliana
ELIANA
hand feel /hand fēl/: noun
I should be sleeping. I know that.
But I can’t.
We’re bedded down in Zeke’s apartment for the night. When he and Bastian got home after surveilling the location where Sage is being held, Yasmin took Z into his bedroom and shut the door.
I don’t think they’re having sex; I’ve heard them have sex before, and it is not a quiet affair by any stretch of the imagination.
If I had to guess, I’d say they’re just touching each other softly, sharing breaths, confirming proof of life again and again and again, because one piece of evidence is never enough when it’s someone you love.
The terrifying pause between your lover’s every inhale and exhale is reason to worry all over again.
I know how that feels.
But Bastian and I aren’t lying side by side in a bed, stroking each other’s cheeks and breathing each other’s air. I’m hunkered on an inflatable mattress on the floor that’s slightly deflating and sagging in the middle, turning me into an Eliana burrito.
Bastian was supposed to be sleeping on the couch. Instead, though, he’s seated at the kitchen counter. I can hear him scribbling with a pen, then the rip of paper as he tears off a sheet of the legal pad Zeke gave him, balls it up, and tosses it aside. His breath comes in angry, frustrated snorts.
It’s funny how attuned to him I am. I would’ve guessed that, after all these weeks apart, he’d feel like a stranger to me. I mean, I never really knew him all that well in the first place, did I? He had so many secrets. So many shadows cloaking the deepest parts of him.
But he’s not a stranger. Not really, no matter how hard he tries to be. I still feel myself sighing and fidgeting and grunting along with him, like we’re two radios on the same wavelength, and whatever frustrates him frustrates me, too.
Finally, I give up on sleep. It just ain’t happening for me right now. I get ready, then haul myself off the air mattress in the most ungainly fashion imaginable.
It’s getting harder and harder to do stuff like that, Herculean tasks like “sit up” and “tie your shoes.” My center of gravity is all wrong these days.
It’s transitioned forward and down, like someone duct-taped a cantaloupe to my midsection and forgot to send the memo to my inner ear.
My body is a stranger’s, rife with all these new aches and pressures and inconveniences that nobody warned me about.
The motherhood books Yasmin has been reading aloud to me at night spend a lot of time waxing poetic about “the glow of pregnancy” and “the miracle of life,” but they all skip right over the part where the simple act of getting vertical becomes a multi-step ordeal.
When I’ve won the battle, I follow the sound of Bastian’s restless energy to where he’s sitting at the kitchen counter. The tile is cold under my bare feet. I stub my toe on a barstool leg and swallow down a curse.
He doesn’t startle at my approach. I’m sure he just heard me coming. Or maybe he’s as attuned to me as I am to him.
“You should be sleeping,” I scold.
“Mm.”
“You’re no good to us or to Sage if you’re dead on your feet, Bash.”
“Mm.”
I sigh. So much for that plan of attack. I settle onto the stool beside him. The leather is cool through my thin sleep shorts. “What are you doing?”
His wintergreen scent calms me the second it hits my senses. When did that become my safe space, I wonder? My whole nervous system just sighs in relief, like it’s saying, It’s okay; you’re home now.
“Planning.”
“How detailed. Care to share a little more with the class?”
His frustration flares again. “It’s late, Eliana. You should be sleeping.”
“If you think that tactic will work on me any better than it worked on you, you’re highly mistaken, sir.”
He doesn’t laugh—I’m not sure he’s even capable of it these days—but I do feel his irritation recede a bit. “Fair enough. One of us is a pot and one of us is a kettle, that’s for damn sure.”
“Dibs on ‘kettle.’” I scoot my chair closer. “So, what’re you working on?”
I hear the repetitive click of his pen. In-out, in-out, over and over. “Trying to cross all my t’s and dot all my i’s. The building is a fucking death trap. There’s a way, I think, especially since we have the element of surprise… but nothing is guaranteed.”
“Show me.”
He pauses. There’s a hitch in his breath, his mind whirring as he weighs whether to shut me out again and keep on shouldering solo burdens that everyone keeps begging him to share. The pen keeps clicking.
In-out.
In-out.
“Bastian,” I say, “I’m not going back to sleep, and I’m not going to sit here uselessly while you brood like a damn gargoyle. So either you tell me what you’re working on, or I start making wild, unhinged, uninformed suggestions. Your call. I assure you all my ideas will be terrible.”
This puff of air is even closer to a laugh than the one before. Progress. Tiny progress, but still progress.
“Give me your hand,” he says.
I blink in confusion. “What?”
“Your hand,” he repeats. “Give me your hand and I’ll show you.”
Slowly, I extract my hand from my lap and hold it out in his direction. Moving just as slowly, he cradles my wrist and folds all my fingers into a fist except for one. Then, taking my extended pointer finger in his grasp, he touches it lightly to the page.
“This is the building,” he murmurs as he traces my finger along a rectangular path.
“It’s three stories tall and Sage is on the second.
The main entrance is here, on the south side.
” He drags my fingertip down. “There’s a fire escape on the west—it’s rusted as all hell and there’s no telling if it’ll even hold my weight, but I don’t have much of a choice. ”
He moves my finger back up toward the top of the page.
“On the other side of the street, there’s a building I think we can easily get roof access to.
I’ll get up there, then shimmy across on some power lines.
Assuming I don’t fall to my death, get electrocuted to my death, or get spotted by the guards and shot to my death like a paper target at the fair, I’ll be able to get over to the roof of Sage’s building.
Zeke will make a distraction of some kind on the other side.
Then, while the security is dealing with that, I go in through the roof access, pull Sage out through the window, and haul ass down the fire escape before the guards come back and figure out what’s happening.
You guys will be waiting with the car. We jump in and run like hell.
” He settles back in his seat and sighs.
“You can see why I’m not exactly thrilled with the plan. ”
I pull my hand back, but the ghost of his touch lingers on my skin. “Not exactly thrilled” is a hell of an understatement; the plan is insane. Suicidal, even. Power lines? A rusted fire escape? Guards with guns? Has he lost his ever-loving mind?
“It’s really good… if you have a death wish.”
He chuckles. “Got any better ideas?”
I think for a while. But in the end, I sigh. “No. Not really.”
“There you have it. Operation Death Wish it is.”
He goes back to clicking his pen. It’s become kind of an ominous sound and I like it less and less with every successive in-out.
I reach out and cup his hand in mine. The clicking stills. “Talk to me about something else,” I request. I turn toward him on my stool, tucking one leg underneath me. “Something that isn’t quite so grim.”
“There’s nothing else to talk about.”
“There’s always something else to talk about.
” It’s nice to touch him. The constant heat of his skin grounds me, calms me.
The man is a furnace at all hours of the day and night, and touching him now just reminds me of how cold I’ve been for seven long weeks now.
“Tell me about the before times. Something happy. A story with a nice ending.”
I’m sure he’s going to deflect again and throw up another wall between us. He’ll tell me to go back to sleep so he can return to his endless machinations.
But then he exhales, long and slow, and some of the tension bleeds out of his shoulders. “Happy,” he repeats. “You want happy.”
“Yes, I want happy. Give me something good, Bastian.”
The pen clicks once more—in-out—and then stops.
“I was seven, maybe eight. It was the beginning of summer.”
I wait. I don’t push. I barely breathe.
“My mother was sober that day. One of the rare times.” He pauses and scratches at his beard.
“She’d scraped together enough money for ice cream, so we went down to the lakefront to walk along the shoreline.
The three of us—me, her, and Aleksei. The water was still cold, but we didn’t care; we still took our shoes out and stepped in it.
We were talking, and I don’t remember what I said, but it must’ve been funny, because she laughed in a way I never really heard much.
I’ve tried for years to remember what I said that made her laugh like that, but I can’t. It’s gone. Just gone.”
He swallows. It’s the only sound in the still apartment.
“But I remember her laugh. And the ice cream melting down my wrist, all sticky and pink. I remember being happy.”
With a viciously on-point sense of timing, my nausea flares up again, hot and sudden.
I cry out and my hands fly to my middle instinctively. My stomach is rocking as it’s pummeled from within. It’s a strange thing, this sensation—like bubbles popping against the inside of my skin. A new kind of nausea for a new kind of chapter in my life.
Bastian stops his story at once. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong.” I keep my hand pressed against the curve of my belly as I wince. “The baby can’t kick yet, but they’re still intent on making me miserable. It’s like he or she is—is— Oh, to hell with it.”
Before I can think better of it, I reach out, snatch up Bastian’s hand in the dark, and lay it flat against my belly.
Every muscle in his arm locks up like he’s being electrocuted. I can’t see his face and I’m glad for that, because I’m starting to wonder if he hates me more than I’ve realized yet.
But then his palm softens. His fingers spread wide, spanning the curve of my stomach gently, so gently, so, so gently. There’s nothing really for him to feel, but it seems as if that doesn’t matter, because Bastian makes a sound I’ve never heard from him before.
“That’s—” He clears his throat and tries again. “That’s really… something.”
“Yeah.” I don’t know why I’m whispering. “It really is.”
The baby-induced nausea settles—apparently, the little gummy bear is satisfied that it isn’t being ignored—but Bastian’s hand stays exactly where it is.
And for as long as that lasts, God, there’s hope in the universe again.
There’s light and color and joy and something, like Bastian said, a thing that doesn’t have a name but doesn’t need one.
There’s a man’s hand on my womb and even though that hand has done so many things wrong, it’s done so many things right, too.
It has loved me and cradled me and cared for me.
It’s protected me and pleasured me. It’s pinned me against skyscraper windows and walk-in freezer doors. I’ve loved that hand and it’s loved me.
Maybe it’ll love me again, one day. If I let it. If he does. Or maybe not—maybe it’ll plunge right back into the ocean of blood that made it, and the scars it currently bears will be nothing compared to all the scars still to come.
Maybe, maybe not.
In-out, in-out.
It’s a world that hangs in the balance, half in the light, half in the dark, and from where we stand right now, there’s no telling which way it will fall.
But it’s not over. Not yet. Not fucking yet.
Then, as quickly as it began, the moment ends. Bastian’s hand falls away and I let it go, even though it leaves me cold in all the places he was warming me up just a second ago.
My heartbeat is wild and out of control as I scoot my stool back, putting precious inches of distance between us.
The screech of metal legs against tile is obscenely loud in the quiet apartment.
“That was a one-time thing,” I blurt. I sound hard and cruel, but that’s good.
Hard is what I need to be right now. Cruel is the only thing keeping me from dissolving into a puddle of hormones and hope and other stupid things that will only get me hurt. “You don’t get to do that again.”
Bastian’s hand hovers in the air where my belly used to be. I can hear the absence of movement, the way he’s frozen mid-reach like a man who just had something precious ripped away from him.
The silence ticks for one beat. Two.
Then his hand drops to his side.
“Okay,” he says.
Just that. Just “okay.”
I retreat to the air mattress without another word, curling on my side with my back to him and the blankets pulled up over my head.
But even though it’s muffled, I can still hear sounds. The pen starts clicking again. In-out, in-out. The scratch of graphite against legal pad. The soft sound of another rejected page being crumpled and tossed aside.
I trace slow circles over the curve of my belly as my heart beats.
Ba-boom. Ba-boom.
In-out. In-out.
Maybe. Maybe not.
My eyes grow heavy. Sleep pulls me down. I surrender to it gratefully.