For us, it’s more than simple nighttime companionship. It’s about feeling safe and knowing the other is safe. We sleep curled up and entwined, his arms around me, my head against his chest. This means that if one of us slips from bed, the other almost certainly notices. So that night, when his warmth and his heartbeat disappear, I wake to hear the soft swish of him pulling on his jeans.
“Going for a run?” I ask.
The sound stops, and I crack open one eye to see him poised in a sliver of moonlight, his chest bare, jeans half on.
Derek’s “runs” aren’t jogs through the streets of Toronto. We have a car, which spends most of its life in a very expensive parking garage, the advantage of having a rich father who tries tocushion my life with stacks of cash. That car usually comes out only when Derek and I go to the ravines—or outside the city—for his runs. If I’m swamped with work, he’ll insist on going alone. I’m not currently swamped with work.
Still, he could say yes. Whenhe’sswamped with work, he sometimes needs the stress release of a run, and he wouldn’t wake me at two a.m. to accompany him. It’d be such an easy lie to tell. Yet once we start lying to each other—even for the best reasons—we erode the thing we treasure above all else. Trust.
We have a small circle of people in our lives that we trust, but none so implicitly as each other. In this life, we need that. The one person who would never betray us, never hurt us, never lie to us.
“I’m restless,” he says. “Not sleeping. No reason you shouldn’t.”
I lift onto my elbow. “So you’re going for a walk?”
“Yeah.”
“Over to Justin’s apartment to see whether you can pick up his sister’s trail?”
When he’s quiet, I sit up. “Answer carefully, Derek. Because if you say you just need air, and then I find out you ended up three miles away at their apartment, I’ll sleep on the sofa for a month.”
One brow rises. “Shouldn’t I be the one sleeping on the sofa?”
“You’ll feel worse if I do.”
A low rumble of a laugh. “True.” He sits on the edge of the bed and tucks back a lock of my hair. “I wasn’t planning to follow her trail, necessarily. To do that, I’d need her scent. I was going to see whether Justin was right about the key being in the garden.”
“And if it was?”
“I’d go in and find a scent source.”
“Then come straight home without trying to find her trail? Leave that until tomorrow because it’s so much easier sniffing city sidewalks in broad daylight?”
He sighs and leans against the headboard. “Yeah, I guess I’d have checked it out. I just wasn’t thinking that far ahead.”
“You always think that far ahead, Derek. You just weren’t committing to trying to find her. Baby steps. With any luck, there’d be no key, so we could stop there. Or you wouldn’t be able to find a good source of her scent in the apartment, so we could stop there. Or the trail would be cold, so we could stop there.” I shift up beside him. “Not that you’d actually be happy if we had an excuse to stop. The excuse is telling yourself you were looking for an excuse.”
He sighs again, deeper. “We don’t need this shit.”
“We don’t.”
“It doesn’t involve us.”
“It doesn’t.”
“We could get hurt.”
When I don’t answer that, he manages a still deeper sigh, one that shudders through him. “Fine. Yes. I wasn’t thinking that I could get hurt. I was thinkingyoucould. I was leaving you behind, which is stupid. I should have backup. Second pair of eyes and all that. And if Ihadmanaged to sneak out, you’d have been very cross with me.”
I sputter a laugh. “Which isterrible.”
“It is.” He glances over. “I’d rather you fought, like Maya. Lose your temper. Yell at me. Maybe throw a few things. Kick my ass. Your ‘very cross’ is so much worse. Almost as bad as ‘quietly disappointed.’ ”
I hug him. “Well, you got away with ‘mildly exasperated’ this time. Now let’s go see if we can find a scent source. We’ll be fine. Remember, the couple that breaks and enters together goes to prison together.”
He shakes his head and pushes out of bed, and we get ready to go.
The key is where Justin said to expect it. He and his sister live in an old house that’s been converted to apartments, and they keep a key under a garden rock. From there, it’s just a matter of climbing rickety external stairs and opening the apartment. Inside we find a photograph with a woman—their mother, I presume—looping her arms around a teenage Justin and a preteen girl who must be Gina.
