Chapter 253: Reid
Jake comes back fives minutes, hair a little wild, jacket still on, and she lights up at the sight of the sandwich like some small, impossible star just remembered how to burn; my shirt hangs to mid-thigh, my number bold on her chest, her bare legs folded under her on my bed while she eats with both hands and hums like she’s trying not to moan, and it does something feral to me—this picture of survival and softness, my stubborn little angel in my clothes, in my house, breathing because we dragged her back from hell and refused to set her down. She’s done in just a few minutes, teeth brushed, and I ease her to lie across my lap; three breaths later she’s gone boneless, lashes down, mouth soft, hair still damp against my wrist, and I card my fingers through copper until the rhythm of her breathing writes itself into my bones.
Water hushes in the hall as Jake takes a shower. When he pads in, clean and warm, he lifts her calves and I help raise them so he can sit; he settles beneath her feet like it’s a vow, towel slung over his shoulder, eyes on her the way mine are—hungry and wrecked and grateful and a little unhinged. “Diner was a circus,” he says softly, as if the room is a cathedral and her sleep a sacrament. “Half the place went silent. Then it was hands on my shoulders, questions in my face—Is she here, is she breathing, is he in jail, is she yours.” He huffs a laugh that doesn’t quite make it. “Couple of hugs I didn’t dodge.”
“Damn. We should do something about that. May we’ll go tomorrow,” I murmur, stroking slow through her hair, letting the strands slide like silk over my knuckles. “Answer what we can. They helped save her. They deserve something back.”
He nods once, then his mouth goes rough. “If they didn’t notice her before, they do now. Grayling boys practically sprinted to the window when I mentioned she was in town—like they were braced to see her on the sidewalk.” The jealousy that wakes in me is black-edged and old; I close my hand in her hair until I remember myself and loosen, make the touch tender.
“If it wasn’t for the Grayling, we might not have found her,” I say, forcing my voice to hold steady over the way my gut tightens. “They get their thanks. But they sure as hell don’t get her.”
“Agreed.” His jaw ticks; he drags the towel over his hair and watches her face like it’s the only gauge that matters. The house settles around us, wood ticking, ocean breathing beyond the glass, and I feel the next truth rise like a tide I can’t stop. “I’m thinking about tonight,” I say. “About how the hospital took the edge off with that mild sedative when it was time to go to sleep, and how here it’s just us and the dark. I wonder if she'll have nightmares without the sedative. I mean, she already had them before all of this.”
He goes still. We don’t have to say the word; it’s in both of us now, stitched into muscle and memory—PTSD, the psychologist said, for her, for us, for the crew, watch for the flinches, the cold sweats, the sudden silences, keep the room gentle and the exits known, hold her through the storms and don’t be afraid to ask for help. “Weekly sessions start Tuesday,” he says, and of course he knows the schedule because I know it too; we’ve carved those appointments into the back of our eyelids. “We’ll sit on either side of the screen if she wants.”
“Yeah,” I answer, and my thumb finds the hinge of her jaw, the bruise there fading from storm-dark to yellow. “But the first night back is ours. If something claws its way out of the dark, we choke it. If her hands shake, we steady them. If her breathing runs, we pace it.” I drag in air that doesn’t want to come. “I fucking swear, Jake. Every time I can’t see her—every time there’s one heartbeat where she isn’t under my hand—I’m back on that dock, staring at an empty berth that should have held the Vigil and a girl who should have been laughing, and I’m a step too slow, and he’s a step too close, and I—”
Jake reaches across her body and grips the back of my neck, a hard, grounding squeeze that says I was there, I saw you jump, I saw you haul her back, breathe. I do, barely. Then I look at her left hand where it spills against my thigh—small, delicate, bandage white over knuckles I’ve kissed a hundred times—and the thing I’ve been circling for days finally lands and digs in. “I meant it,” I say, voice low, like it’s a secret and a challenge and a prayer.
He knows which. His eyes are so fucking dark right now, and I bet mine are too. “I know.”
“I want her for life,” I tell him, stroking the pad of my thumb down her ring finger in slow, possessive passes that feel like drawing a line in the world. “I don’t give a damn whose name is on the paper; I give a damn that she sleeps where we sleep and wakes where we wake and that anybody who looks at her the wrong way learns how quickly we stop being civilized.” The darkness in me—old, coiled, patient—unfurls and stretches like a predator that has chosen its den. “Nick’s caged. Let him rot. But, fuck, I keep thinking about what if it happens again.” I glance up, meet my brother’s eyes, let him see the fear. “They'd be fucking dead. They don’t get a second chance.”
“Good,” Jake says, towel forgotten, mouth a hard line that’s somehow still soft when he looks down at her.
I continue. “There’s not a universe where she walks to the dock alone, or to the diner, or—Christ—down to the mailbox. Not now. Not for a while. Not until my bones stop hearing that moment we realized she was gone.”
I ease my palm from her hair to her waist and fit it there, warm and steady, the way you brace something precious when the road turns to ice; she sighs, turns into my touch, trusting as gravity. Jake shifts, covers her ankles with one broad hand like he’s staking a claim and a blessing in the same motion. We sit like that while the night seeps in from the windows and the house goes quiet and the ocean breathes in the dark, and there’s a vow in the silence that tastes like iron and a love that's way too fucking strong for one man to handle.
My girl. We almost lost her once.
Never again.