36. Norah
Chapter thirty-six
Norah
The sound is wrong. Too sharp. Too close. It doesn’t belong in the moment.
A brutal impact slams into my left side, high and hard. There’s a burst of heat under my ribs, sudden and consuming, like it’s trying to burn its way through me. For a second, that’s all there is—pressure and heat, crowding out everything else.
The pain lags, almost as an afterthought. It arrives a beat later, slower but deeper, spreading through me. My body processes it in pieces, fragments that refuse to line up.
I don’t understand it yet. Not fully. I only understand that I’ve been hit and my mind is a step behind my body.
The bloom of heat moves outward from the pressure like water soaking through fabric, and my hand presses against my side.
It comes away warm and wet. I look down, confused by what I’m seeing.
I don’t see Silas move. He’s simply there, his hands closing around me as I’m falling, pulling me in with the absolute grip of someone for whom letting go is not a possibility.
“Norah.”
My name comes out of him differently than it ever has.
Stripped of everything controlled. Stripped of the composure that has been part of him since the first afternoon he stood in my doorway and read the room before deciding to enter it.
What’s underneath the composure is rawer than I expected, and sharper, and more afraid.
I want to tell him not to be afraid. I just need a second to get my bearings.
“I’m okay,” I try to say.
The words don’t come out right. They arrive thin and slightly wrong, like someone else attempted them on my behalf and got close but not quite there.
His hand presses against my side, steady and firm, and I understand in some dim and distant way what he’s doing, even if I can’t fully feel it. There’s too much warmth spreading too fast, and I still don’t completely understand.
“Stay with me,” he says.
His voice is closer now, rougher. I try to focus on it, to use it as the one thing that is reliable. Sound comes and goes in uneven patches. There’s a shout from someone else, farther away. Movement I can track and then can’t.
None of it is relevant anymore. His face, up close, the green of his eyes gone wolf-bright because his control is down, because there’s nothing to hold back. I’ve seen it once before, in the alley outside the laundromat in Larkin.
It didn’t frighten me then. It doesn’t frighten me now.
I hold onto it as long as I can, the last clear thing I have.
“I know,” I try to tell him, because I do, because I know he needs me to say so. And I want to tell him not to be afraid, but the words won’t come.
The edges go first. Not all at once. Only a softening at the periphery, the way the bar light had softened in the mist.
The cold lifts, and the air smells like water, wet grass, and open air. The smell of a place where there is sky above, and there’s nothing between me and the sky.
I’m lying back on a wooden surface—curved, slightly rough, the kind of surface that has been weathered by water and time. The movement is slow. The small, rhythmic rocking of something floating.
A rowboat.
Silas is across from me, with one hand resting along the edge of the boat and the other trailing through the water.
His fingers draw slow lines through the surface that disappear behind us.
The sunlight catches in his hair, the dark curl of it, softening the angles of his face.
I’ve never seen him look like this. He could be an angel.
“You’ll be okay,” I say.
The words are right this time.
For a long-suspended moment, nothing else exists. Not the parking lot, or the sound that split the air and rearranged the night. Just the lake and him across from me with his fingers trailing through the water and his eyes on mine.
Then his voice comes from somewhere that isn’t here.
“Help!”
One word, not a question, not to me. Urgent and cracked at the edges.
“Somebody help me!”
The warmth pulls away from the edges, and I try to hold on to it, to stay in the boat, to keep him where he is, looking at me.
“Norah. Stay with me…”
Silas dissolves. The dark comes in from the edges the way the warmth went out—steadily, and then faster, and then all at once. The last thing I hear is his voice, calling me back.
Then nothing.