Chapter 259: Reid
I’ve never been a man haunted by dreams. Even when the ocean took men in front of me, even when fists flew in lousy bars at closing time, my sleep stayed black and empty. But the night she vanished, the night her heart failed, the week she wouldn’t wake—that was a waking nightmare I couldn’t claw my way out of, and this is its echo: her body shaking in our bed while I can’t do a damn thing but hold on and wait for it to pass.
When her eyes finally clear and the sob catches, I kiss her hair and tell Jake, “I’ve got her,” and he nods, already moving to strip the bed, to fetch fresh cloths, to put the house back in order the way he always does when the world tips. I slide my arms under her and lift. She weighs less than the memory of her does; hospital weeks pulled at her the way undertow drags at ankles, and she feels breakable and stubborn at once in my hands. In the bathroom I set her carefully on the counter, step between her knees so she can lean into me if the room sways, and tip her chin with two fingers.
There’s a smear of red at the reopened stitch along her forearm, nothing dramatic, just a thin, angry line that makes my vision go narrow anyway. She inhales too sharply when she sees it—guilt, not pain—and I catch the flinch before it becomes words.
“Hey,” I say, soft but not soft enough to invite argument. “Look at me.”
Her cheeks are blotched from crying, lashes wet, the rest of her face pale and a little shocked, and I take my damn time with everything because she deserves a world that moves slow when she’s hurting. I clean the blood in small patient circles, blot and check, then lay a new strip of gauze, smooth the edges down with my thumbs like blessing the wound will make the skin remember how to be whole. It doesn’t need stitches; the cut is more offended than open. I kiss the wrap when I’m done, because I can’t kiss the part of me that wants to put my fist through every wall in this house.
She’s cold—the shivery kind that lives under the skin after fear—so I run a warm washcloth over her face, down the curve of her throat, along the hairline where sweat has pasted copper strands to temples. I tuck stray wisps behind her ear, thumb the salt from the corner of her mouth, and feel that useless, savage ache open in my chest again, the one that says I should be able to take this from her with my hands.
“This changes nothing,” I tell her, and my voice comes out rough because the truth rubs it raw. “Do you hear me? Nothing. You don’t get smaller to us because of a nightmare. You don’t get harder to love. You get us, every time, for as long as it takes—for every bad dream, every three a.m., every morning after.”
Her lower lip wobbles, and Christ, I shouldn’t think it now, but she’s so goddamn beautiful like this—eyes blown wide and shining, cheeks flushed from crying, mouth soft with trust. I cup her face, careful of the bruises that are yellowing at the edges now, and rest my forehead against hers until our breathing remembers how to match.
“We sit it out,” I say. “We do it again tomorrow if we have to, and the day after, and the day after that. You shake, we hold. You fall, we catch. That’s the deal, Trouble.”
A tiny, broken laugh ghosts across my mouth; she nods once, shaky, and lets her hands creep into my shirt like she needs to anchor herself to something that won’t move. I wrap an arm around her waist, the other across her shoulders, and just hold, feeling the last of the tremors drain through her and into me where they can’t do any harm.
Jake knocks once and leaves a glass on the sink; I get her to sip, slow, then wipe one more tear I missed and tuck an errant curl behind her ear again because I could do that forever. “Back to bed,” I murmur. “Between us. Heat on your feet, my hand in your hair, his hand on your back. Nothing gets through.”
She breathes, steadier now. “Okay.”
I lift her again—lighter than I like, stubborn as ever—and carry her down the dim hall. The house is quiet, the kind of quiet that feels like we bullied the night into behaving for a while. When I set her between our pillows she catches my wrist with small fingers and squeezes, a small, fierce gratitude that lands like a vow.
I kiss her knuckles. “Sleep,” I tell her. “We’ll keep watch.”
She looks up at us, eyes still wet, voice soft but sure. “I don’t want to sleep. I want you.”
Everything in me goes tight. “Not yet,” I manage, rough around the edges. “You’re healing.”
“I know,” she whispers, a tremor of need threading the words. “You can be gentle with me. I really want you—I want to be as close as physically possible.”
A sound tears out of me—half protest, half surrender—and I’m ready to say no, to be the wall she can lean against but not climb, when Jake meets my gaze and it’s written all over him too, the same war, the same loss. We turn back to her together, steadying, choosing her on her terms. “If it’s too much,” we say as one, “we stop.”