Chapter 119 Morning kisses
The knock came twice, sharp and impatient.
Azrael was already half awake. He eased himself out of the bed carefully, glancing at Lilith. She hadn’t moved, still deeply under, her hair across the pillow.
He pulled on his trousers and shrugged his shirt over his shoulders without buttoning it and crossed to the door and slipped out into the corridor.
Cain was standing there.
She opened her mouth and then her eyes moved past him through the gap in the door and stopped. He didn’t say anything. He just stood there and let her see it, the darkened room, Lilith asleep in the bed, the clothes on the floor.
Cain’s expression shifted, surprise first, and then something that went very quiet in a way that was worse than anything loud.
She looked at him once more and then turned and walked away.
He watched her go until she disappeared around the corner and then he went back inside.
He used the bathroom quietly, and when he came back out Lilith was awake.
She was sitting up in the bed with the covers pooled around her, her hand pressed flat against the empty space beside her, and she was looking at the room with the expression of someone who had woken up and done the math and arrived at a conclusion she didn’t like.
She looked up when she heard him and something in her face shifted.
“I thought you left,” she said.
“I wouldn’t do that,” he said.
She looked at him for a moment and then nodded once, something releasing in her shoulders that she probably didn’t realize had been there.
He crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed beside her and kissed her softly, just once, and she kissed him back and her hand came up and rested against his chest where his shirt was still hanging open.
When he pulled back he looked at her properly. She looked like someone who had slept well for the first time in a long time, and he found that he didn’t want to move from this spot, the morning still grey outside the window and the room still warm and quiet.
“I should go,” he said. “I have two sessions before midday.”
“I know,” she said.
“Do you want me to stay.”
She looked at him, and he could see her working through it, the honest answer and the practical answer sitting on opposite sides of a scale she was trying to balance.
She reached out and started doing up the buttons on his shirt from the bottom, slowly, one at a time, and he let her, watching her face while she did it.
She smoothed the front of his shirt when she finished and looked up at him.
“Go,” she said. “You have things to do.”
He could hear in her voice that it wasn’t what she wanted to say, and he suspected she could hear that he heard it, and neither of them made it a bigger moment than it needed to be.
He stood up and found the rest of his things and when he was done he was at the door, his hand on the frame, and he turned back to look at her one more time.
She had pulled her knees up to her chest and was watching him with her hair loose around her shoulders and the necklace still at her throat, her name catching the pale morning light coming through the window.
“Cain stopped by,” he said. “Earlier, while you were asleep”
Lilith went very still.
“She saw…” he said simply”.
He didn’t need to say anything else and he didn’t. He held her gaze for a moment and then he opened the door and left, his footsteps quiet in the corridor outside, and Lilith sat in the bed in the grey morning light and stared at the door he had closed behind him and felt the warmth of the night before and the cold of what was coming settle over her at exactly the same time.