Chapter 30 Eliana
ELIANA
nightcap /?nīt?kap/: noun
I’ve been lying here for what feels like three consecutive geological eras, rolling from side to side, trying to find some configuration of limbs, blankets, and pillows that doesn’t make me want to scream bloody murder into the void.
The pullout couch is actively hostile to my sleep patterns. I’m pretty sure it’s made of actual rocks bound together with Scotch tape and spite. The pillows are Styrofoam at best. The blankets—let’s not even go there.
Around 2 A.M., I give up entirely.
I peel myself off the couch with all the grace of the beached whale that I’m slowly becoming and shuffle toward the kitchen, one hand on my belly and the other outstretched to navigate the unfamiliar darkness.
I’m absolutely parched. I feel like the Dry Squidward meme. Waaateeer. I just need some water, and maybe then I’ll be able to catch a few hours of sleep before dawn.
But when I pass the front door, I freeze.
I smell cigarette smoke. The sharp, acrid scent of it drifts in through the crack under the door and into my nostrils. My heart does a stupid little leap, because I know immediately who it is.
I go to the front door and ease it open as quietly as I can. I stand there, a balmy night breeze on my face. “You’re back.”
Bastian doesn’t answer right away. When he does, he sounds beyond exhausted. “Yeah.” Another pause. “Couldn’t sleep?”
I step outside, letting the door close behind me with a soft click.
The concrete of the front stoop is cool under my bare feet.
It’s a classic Midwestern summer night, humid enough to feel like I’m being actively waterboarded, but still better than the swampy heat of a house crammed with too many fugitives.
“My bed is a cinderblock with fangs,” I say. “What’s your excuse?”
“Couldn’t stop thinking.”
I can hear him take a drag. The cigarette crackles as it burns. The tang of smoke mixes with the wintergreen scent that’s pure Bastian in a way that almost disorients me. Like two different versions of him colliding in my nostrils.
“Since when do you smoke?” I ask. I lower myself to sit beside him. My hip nearly grazes his thigh, but I leave a careful inch of space between us.
“Since the day I died,” Bastian says with a dry laugh. “I bought a pack on impulse after I staged the body. Haven’t touched them until tonight, though. I dunno why.” He takes another long drag. “Seemed like as good a time as any to start bad habits, I suppose.”
I hold out my hand. “Let me try.”
“Eliana—”
“I’m not asking for a lecture on prenatal health. I’m asking for a cigarette.”
Still, he hesitates. I don’t think it’s the nicotine he’s objecting to—though God knows I don’t need that—but rather the ritual.
The implication, so to speak. The pretense that we’re just two people sitting on a stoop in the middle of the night, sharing a smoke, shooting the shit, la di da, life is simple, life is normal, life is beautifully boring.
Then I feel the pack pressed into my palm. It’s crumpled, like he’s been crushing it in his fist for weeks. I fumble one out and stick it to my lips, then lean toward him. Bastian’s lighter flicks to life. I feel the heat as the cigarette ignites. Like a kiss on the tip of my nose.
I take a test puff—and immediately regret every decision that led me to this moment.
My lungs revolt and I start to cough so hard I’m pretty sure I dislodge something internally vital. My eyes water, my chest seizes, and my cool girl, femme fatale dignity falls in tatters on the concrete between us.
Bastian laughs. It’s rusty and surprised, like he forgot he could do that. “When’s the last time you smoked?” he asks.
“Sophomore year of college,” I wheeze as I thump my chest with my fist in a desperate attempt to quell the coughing fit. “Apparently, I’ve lost my touch. And my appetite. Here, I don’t want this anymore.”
He takes it from me, still chuckling, and grinds it out on the step.
When I finally stop hacking up my lungs, I slump back against the door. “How did it go?” I ask as a car moseys by on the street. “With Harold.”
Bastian is quiet for a bit. Cicadas are chirping out amongst the trees, loud and annoying as hell.
“He’s cooperating,” he says eventually. “He’ll get us what we need.”
“Good. But that’s not what I meant and you know it.”
“I didn’t cross your line,” he says. I feel him turn to face me. “But I wanted to. God, Eliana, I wanted to.”
“You didn’t, though.”
“No. I didn’t.”
“Well, that’s what matters.”
“Is it?” he questions, sounding more pained than I ever would have expected.
“Because I keep thinking about how easy it would have been. It would’ve felt so fucking good to give that son of a bitch what he deserved.
The only thing that stopped me was knowing I’d have to come back here and look at you. ”
I don’t know what to say to that. I settle for toying with the fraying hem of my sleep shorts.
“I’m trying,” he says into the darkness. “I’m trying so fucking hard to be someone who deserves—”
He stops. The sentence hangs there, incomplete, like a bridge to nowhere. Someone who deserves what, precisely? Forgiveness? A second chance? Me?
Maybe all of the above. Maybe none of it.
I reach out and touch his knee. The denim of his jeans is warm from his body heat and rough under my palm. He goes completely still at the contact, like I’ve pressed a pause button on his entire nervous system.
“I know,” I say.
It’s not exactly a Get Out of Jail Free card for the soul.
I’m not sure I have the authority to grant that, even if I wanted to.
But it’s acknowledgment. Recognition that the man sitting next to me on this shitty concrete stoop in suburban nowhere is fighting a war inside himself, and for once—perhaps for the first time in his life—he’s choosing to fight for the right side.
His hand covers mine. It rests there, hot and heavy, his fingers curling close like he’s afraid I’ll pull away.
I don’t.
“Trying counts,” I whisper. “It has to count for something.”
“I hope so,” Bastian murmurs, so low I almost miss it.
We sit there for a while longer, neither of us talking. But it’s not awkward or tense, the way it has been before. It’s just Bastian and Eliana on a stoop.
I don’t want to give that up just yet.
But nothing lasts forever. Especially not the good things.
“You should go back to bed,” Bastian finally says. “Get some rest.”
“Would if I could.” I palm my stomach with my free hand. “But the couch is terrible and my back is killing me and every time I close my eyes, I just…” I trail off.
“Just what?”
“Think about all the ways this could go wrong. All the ways we could lose.”
I feel him move beside me. The movement sends a whisper of warmth across the inch of space between our bodies.
“You’re scared.”
“Terrified,” I correct him. “Aren’t you?”
“Every goddamn second.”
The honesty in his voice undoes some essential tether in me. Some wall I’d been propping up with stubbornness and sleep deprivation. It crumbles, brick by brick, until I’m left with nothing but really sad, pathetic little truths.
I’m tired.
I’m scared.
And I don’t want to be alone tonight.
I take a breath. “Will you…?” I start, then stop. This is a terrible idea. A catastrophically terrible idea that I will almost certainly regret in the morning.
“Will I what?”
Too late to turn back now, I suppose. With a deep breath, I charge into the second half of a sentence I never should’ve started. “Will you come inside with me? Just until I fall asleep. I can’t—I don’t want to be alone with my thoughts right now.”
I can feel him weighing it. His thumb has stopped its wandering. His whole body has gone still.
“I’m not asking for anything more than that,” I hasten to add, before he can hurt my feelings. “Just stay with me until I fall asleep. Please.”
The soft, plaintive please might as well be my beating heart on a silver platter.
“Are you sure?” he asks cautiously.
“Nighttime Eliana is sure. As for tomorrow’s version… Well, in the morning, everything goes back to how it was.”
“Okay.”
“I’m still furious with you.”
“I’m counting on it.”
There’s a ghost of his old humor in that. A faint but undeniable flicker of the Bastian who used to drive me absolutely insane in conference rooms and test kitchens and elevators that had no business being so charged with electricity.
In spite of everything, I smile at it.
We stand together. It takes me longer than it should, what with the freeloading tenant in my stomach and all. But Bastian waits. Doesn’t rush me. Doesn’t try to help.
Even though this is one of those times where I wouldn’t mind if he did, goddammit. Why can’t men just have telepathy? It would really solve a lot of the world’s problems if they did.
When we step back in, the house is quiet. Everyone else is asleep, lost in their own dreams or nightmares.
As we reach the pullout couch, Bastian stops. “Your back,” he says. “You said it was hurting?”
“It’s fine—”
“Turn around.”
The command in his voice sends a shiver down my spine that has nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with muscle memory.
My body remembers what it’s like to obey that voice. To surrender to it.
I hesitate. One heartbeat. Two.
Then I comply.
I turn as he sits on the edge of the mattress, then pulls me into his lap.
His hands find the knots in my lower back immediately, thumbs pressing into the muscles on either side of my spine. Fingers knead across the curve. He hits a spot just above my hip that’s been screaming for attention, and I make a trampy whimper I definitely don’t mean to make.
Embarrassing as hell. Utterly involuntary.
“Better?” he asks, his breath warm against the back of my neck.
“God, yes.”
His hands work their way up my spine, finding knots I didn’t even know existed. I feel myself softening under his touch, the tension I’ve been carrying for weeks—months—years—slowly unspooling.
“You’re carrying everything too high,” he murmurs. “Stress, the baby. It’s throwing your whole alignment off.”
“Thank you, Dr. Hale, for that thoughtful chiropractic assessment.”
“I’m serious. You need to—” His thumbs press into a spot that makes me see actual stars. “There. That’s the one.”
I melt a little more.
When he’s finished—by which point my muscles have been reduced to something approximating human tissue rather than concrete—I don’t want to move. The mattress is still lumpy under my ass and as hostile toward my vertebrae as ever, but with Bastian’s warmth cocooning me, it feels almost bearable.
Without either of us ever really agreeing to it, I turn, sink to my knees on the carpeted floor, and start to undress him.
His skin is warm under my palms as I help him shrug the shirt off his shoulders.
I toss it aside, and then it’s just Bastian in his jeans, his chest bare, his heartbeat steady under my fingertips when I press my hand flat against his sternum.
“Pants, too,” I murmur. “You can’t sleep in denim. That’s psychopath behavior.”
He huffs out a breath that might be a laugh. I feel the mattress buckle as he stands, hear the metallic clink of his belt buckle, the sound of a zipper. More fabric hitting the floor.
“Boxer briefs,” he reports. “In case you were wondering about the state of my underwear.”
“I wasn’t.” I am, in fact, lying. But I’m not about to give him the satisfaction of knowing that.
He climbs back onto the pullout, and the whole thing groans in protest. The springs squeak. The frame creaks. The whole house is probably awake and listening by now, but I don’t care.
“Come here” he orders. It’s a bit softer than before. Still a command in most regards, since Bastian Hale has yet to learn the proper use of the question mark, but not quite as snarly as his daytime default.
Again, I find myself obeying.
I crawl up the mattress and find the divot that fits me. Bastian molds himself around my body from behind. The couch isn’t really big enough for two people, but we make it work, anyway, fitting together the way we always have.
Like puzzle pieces that someone intentionally designed to interlock.
Like we were built for exactly this configuration and nothing else.
His arm drapes over my waist and I feel his hand settle on my belly—tentative at first, his fingers barely grazing the fabric of my shirt. Then more confident when I don’t pull away, his palm flattening against the curve.
“Just for tonight,” I whisper in warning.
“Just for tonight,” he agrees.
His lips brush against my hair and I let my eyes close, let myself have this one stolen moment of peace. Tomorrow, we’ll go back to our separate corners. I’ll rebuild my walls and he’ll respect them and we’ll pretend this never happened.
But tomorrow feels very far away, and right now, Bastian feels very, very close. So for tonight—and tonight alone—I’m going to let myself feel safe in his arms.
Just for tonight.