But every time she did, he would make a comment about the movie. A weird comment, that didn’t really sound like him. “You know, in the book version of this they kiss,” he said, just as the lead actors argued onscreen. “It suggests that they’re supposed to be together at the end.”
He almost sounded wistful about it, too.
And to the point where she found herself looking at him a little too long. At the steady way he was staring at the screen. How still he was, suddenly.If I leant over now and did something like what he’s describing, would he object?she thought.Is he saying that what we’re doing is a kissing kind of thing? That he would like it to be?
Though of course if he had, why wouldn’t he have acted on it?
They had fucked in some sort of way twice now, and he hadn’t done anything of the kind. In fact, he had never even gotten excited or comfortable enough to come. Never mind do anything as intimate as kissing. Impossible, she told herself, as she drifted off to the strains of the next movie.
Selena, she heard Jim saying, desperately, brokenly.
And then the next thing she knew, she was waking to darkness and silence. Heart pounding, like it usually did when she watched zombies before bed. Unsettled, trembling a little, self-soothing as always by reaching for the blanket. But just as she did, she felt it shift around her. All the way over her shoulders, right up to her ears. Gentle, and so much so she could have believed the whole thing was a dream.
She wasn’t used to someone being there.
Or even if there was someone, they usually weren’t the sort to do something like this. They were the sort to say that doing something like this was for soppy fools. Hell—Caleb Miller was that sort, too. He put it in his books, but he didn’t believe in it. Yet when she reached back to feel the hand on her, she knew it was his.
She could feel the heavy thickness of his fingers, the solid knuckles.
That scar, like a little crisscross, below them.
And then there was his reaction—startled, at first. Trying to demur. “Threw the covers off like a dipshit,” he whispered. But then something seemed to shift. He stopped trying to pull back, and after a moment’shesitation, turned his hand. A little clumsily, but he did it, and once he had he just squeezed hers.
“It’s okay,” he said. “It hasn’t happened in the night. Nothing is waiting for you in the darkness. And even if there was, well, come on now. You know I’d get that head shot before it was on you.”
Like he knew. He knew exactly why those movies scared her, and exactly what she loved about them, too. Waking up to horrors, everything gone, being unable to escape those two facts. And then maybe, just maybe, having someone there to watch your back. Someone who wouldn’t usually be there. Someone who learnt to value you, in a way nobody ever really did in real life.
In real life, people had choices other than her.
And they chose the others. They usually chose.
She had no idea why he wasn’t choosing right now. Like he said, nothing had actually happened. He was just there, in the darkness, holding her hand. Telling her he’d kill imaginary threats for her.
It was unsettling.
She had to talk about it in movie terms just to get out the million questions she wanted to ask him. “So is this who you secretly are, then? The one who looks out for the only other survivor of some harrowing nightmare? At the window, watching her run for her life, sniping out her enemies before they get to her?” she asked. Though even that seemed like she’d gone too far.
He was silent for a long, long while.
Then finally, “Pretty sure I’m actually the asshole.”
“I don’t know if the asshole would do something like this.”
“Well, usually the asshole wouldn’t even be in the position to. He’d fuck it up before he was. Hell, look how I got here. A mistake, a weird confluence of bizarre events. All of it made up, just a game. Nothing real here at all. Could never be real for me,” he said, voice almost light, almost breezy about it.
Until he got to those last six.
Yeah, those last six words seemed to crawl out of him, rough and rusted over.Remember when he almost said about wanting a family, her mind whispered. Then she simply had to keep pushing. “Is that why you can’t sleep? Thinking it couldn’t be? Thinking you could never be that way?”
“That was just a story. I made it sound like a bigger deal than it is. You know, for the crowd. So you could be the big heroine saving me from my own torment, or some bullshit like that. But really, there is no torment. I’m an insomniac. Exhaustion puts me out like a light, every time. Nothing deeper than that.”
“If it was that simple, you should be dead to the world now.”
“Why? Because I spent all day sitting on my ass in a car or a comfy chair?”
“You did other things besides that,” she said, unthinking. But oh, she thought alotthe second she felt him tense. Because clearly, he wasn’t imagining she meant the stairs he’d climbed up to the hotel room they now had to share.I need the exercise, he’d said, but she was thinking it was something else. Discomfort with the idea of being in an elevator with her again.
And now she’d gone and talked about it.
