He sat beside me—not touching, but close enough that I could feel the heat radiating off him. He handed me the water and I drank while he watched.
“Better?” he asked.
“I was fine to begin with.”
“Humor me.”
I set down the empty glass and looked at the book in his hand. Familiar cover. One I’d seen a hundred times. “Why do you have Jane Eyre?”
“I thought you might want me to read to you.”
I blinked at him. “You read to me?”
“I… yeah, I do,” He smiled while my heart was fluttering too wildly. Michael Ashford used to read to me? What else had I missed in the past year?
“Okay. Read.”
He opened to the first chapter and started.
His voice was perfect for it.
Deep and steady and rich. The kind of voice that wrapped around you and made you want to close your eyes and just listen. He did all the accents without being ridiculous about it. Made each character distinct and real. Young Jane sounded appropriately miserable. Mrs. Reed sounded cold. The servants sounded weary.
I found myself leaning against him without deciding to. My shoulder pressed against his arm. My head found his shoulder like it had done this a thousand times before. Like this was where I belonged.
There’d been a journal I had when I was a teen. The memory surfaced suddenly. A bucket list Pauline and I had made when we were sixteen and thought we’d live forever. Full of ridiculous teenage dreams about the lives we wanted.
Having Michael read to me had been on that list.
Number sixty-three. Written late at night during a sleepover after I’d watched him at a family dinner, wondering what his voice would sound like reading poetry or novels or anything that wasn’t polite conversation.
I’d imagined it would be nice.
I’d been underselling it.
His voice reading Jane Eyre was doing things to me that were probably illegal in classic literature. Making me aware of how close we were sitting. How warm he was. How his fingers were still tracing those maddening circles on my hip.
“How long have we been doing this?” I asked quietly, interrupting him mid-sentence.
He paused. Set his finger on the page to mark his place. “Um… a few months, probably.” I could feel the hesitation in his voice, that maybe he wasn’t sure. But I ignored it.
“Tell me.”
“You’d fall asleep on me while I read.” His voice had gone softer. Warmer. His hand moved from my hip to my hair, fingersthreading through the strands. “Every single time. You’d make it maybe three chapters before you were out. I’d keep reading anyway because I liked having you there, the way you’d curl up against me. Liked knowing you felt safe enough with me to sleep.”
My throat went tight.
“I wish I could remember.”
“I remember enough for both of us.” His fingers traced down my spine and I shivered. “And it won’t be long before you catch up.”
“What else?” I looked up at him. Found him already looking at me, his eyes dark and intense. “What else did we do?”
He was quiet for a moment. His hand stilled on my back.
“Late-night conversations,” he said finally. “You’d call me at two in the morning because you couldn’t sleep. We’d talk about nothing until you were tired again. Sometimes for hours. I’d fall asleep listening to your voice and wake up with my phone dead because we’d never hung up.”
The image made something warm bloom in my chest.
