Then he sweeps me up in his arms, making me squawk. “What are you doing?” I ask.
“Putting you to bed.”
Then leaving, is the unspoken remainder of that sentence.
I can tell by the way his expression turns serious and focused, its playful, passionate fire dimmed; the way that he walks me to my bed and lays me on it, then drags the blankets up.
“Stay,” I whisper, brave in the darkness, in the raw need that I feel. No one’s ever touched me like this, made me feel free and weightless and known, a fire billowing in the air that feeds it, hot, wild, alive. I don’t want to be left alone in that. “Please.”
He’s quiet for a long moment, his hand on my hip, his thumb sweeping tenderly against the skin beneath my shirt.
Then slowly, he stands.
My heart plummets. He’s leaving.
Except, he isn’t. He stops at my bedroom door and pushes it shut, bathing the room in darkness.
I hear drawers open and close. Fabric slide off his body. I hate the darkness for what it hides, knowing he’s changing out of the clothes he came all over.
A shirt hits my face. “Put that on,” he says quietly.
“You’re so bossy,” I grumble. But I still drag off my shirt that’s wet at the hip and throw it somewhere in a corner of the room before I pull on the new shirt. It’s as soft as I love my shirts to be, but surprisingly loose. I get a whiff of his scent and smile to myself. He gave me one of his shirts.
Christopher crawls onto the bed, pointedly on top of all the sheets, like he’s going to “try to be a gentleman” again, as if he didn’t just dry hump and finger me into orgasmic oblivion against a bathroom door. Then again, even with my wardrobe change, I’m still a mess of grass stains and paint and sweat, so maybe he’s just protecting himself from that.
Then again, he’s covered in all that stuff, too.
So why the distance?
Gently, he tugs the sheet up to my chin, then drifts his fingers across my forehead, down my temple, across the bridge of my nose. “Time to settle that busy brain of yours, Katydid. Go to sleep.”
“Don’t tell me what to do,” I mutter, feeling my eyelids give in to the temptation to slip shut. “Besides. I’m not”—a yawn rudely interrupts me—“tired.”
“Of course you’re not. You’re not exhausted,” he says, his fingers slipping through my hair along my scalp until they bump into my messy bun. “Your eyes aren’t sleepy. Your limbs aren’t heavy.”
Another yawn. “Nuh-uh.”
I hear the smile in his voice as his knuckles tenderly graze my cheek. “And you definitely won’t have sweet dreams.”
I wish I could say his reverse psychology doesn’t work. But my eyes drift shut. My limbs are heavy.
And I dream the sweetest, filthiest dreams.
? TWENTY-SIX ?
Christopher
I wake up groggy, my body heavy and loose with the unfamiliar pleasure of feeling rested. Blinking, I stare up at the ceiling and smile as I remember Kate cuddling with me in her sleep, her head on my shoulder, her arm across my stomach, her leg over mine.
Watching her sleep, listening to each steady breath, holding her, feeling her hold me, I could have stayed there forever.
My smile falls.
Because now I remember where I am.
I’m not with Kate in her bed. I’m in my bed, which I stumbled into after I slipped out from her arms and dry swallowed my abortive med as a migraine scraped across my brain and sunk in its teeth.
It comes back to me in patchy flashes of memory. Battling waves of nausea on the train ride back as my pain level skyrocketed. Collapsing onto my bed. Covering my head with my ice cap and a pillow as agony pulsed through my brain, until mercifully the med kicked in, and I slept.
But Kate doesn’t know any of that. All she knows is I touched her and kissed her and put her to bed, then left. I tried to write her a note before I left, but my hand was shaking so badly from the pain, I couldn’t write. By the time I got on the train, I couldn’t stand to look at my phone’s bright screen and text her. I told myself I’d message her as soon as I woke up. I’d only sleep a few hours, like I always do, before nature’s call or more pain woke me up.
And of fucking course, the one time I counted on only a few hours of sleep, I slept straight through the day.
Goddammit. The thought of her waking up to an empty bed makes my chest ache.
Reaching for my nightstand, I feel around clumsily for my phone, then spin it toward me. I turn up the screen brightness so I can see it, now that the light won’t hurt my eyes.