His breathing quickened. He could smell it from where he stood. He could smell it as if Brody were lying on the floor next to the window, arms outstretched, chest exposed, and those gray eyes with red rims looking up at him.
I don’t need it. I need nothing from him.
His hands shook harder. He sat on the edge of the bed. The mattress gave way under his weight. His head ached. His chest ached. His bones ached with that low-grade fever that wouldn’t go away and that he knew wouldn’t go away as long as he kept the circuit open. How many days had it been since he’d slept over four hours? How many times had he woken up drenched in sweat with Brody’s name on the tip of his tongue?
Two hours. Brody sleeps for two hours.
He lay back and stared at the ceiling. The shadows cast shapes on the plaster that meant nothing. He thought of Reznov. Of his seven hundred thousand dollars. What he would do when he found him. He thought of his father and the debt and the chain of decisions that had brought him to this bed in this mansion inthis city. He thought about what would happen if Brody couldn’t fix his situation. He thought of what would happen if he did and Ren had to leave and the circuit remained open forever, a bare wire sizzling in the void.
And then what?
He sat up. The sweatshirt was still on the floor, by the window, exactly where he’d thrown it. The streetlight shone right on it. Gray. Soft. Huge.
Ren stood up. He crossed the room barefoot. He crouched down. He picked up the sweatshirt from the floor and stared at it for a moment. Then he pulled it over his head.
It looked ridiculous on him. The sleeves were a full hand’s width past his hands. The hem reached mid-thigh. The neck was so wide it left one shoulder exposed. But the smell. The smell enveloped him like hot water, like a bath in winter, like those mornings when his mother would hug him when he was little and everything was safe and all was well and nothing hurt.
He got into bed. He curled up into a ball. He pulled his knees up to his chest and buried his nose in the sweatshirt’s neck where the fabric was thickest and the smell densest. Raisins and walnuts. Oatmeal cookies. The wood-burning stove in a house that never existed but that his body remembered as if he’d lived there his whole life.
The calm was immediate. Not gradual, not slow: immediate. Like a switch. Like a faucet being turned off. The trembling in his hands stopped. His fever dropped by a degree. His jaw relaxed, and he realized he’d been clenching his teeth for hours. His shoulders slumped against the mattress. His breathing became deep, long, and each exhalation carried away a little more tension until there was nothing left, only the warmth of the fabric and the weight of his own body sinking into the mattress.
Just tonight.
He closed his eyes. The scent filled his lungs like sweet smoke and carried everything else away: Jax, the kitchen, the shame, Reznov, the seven hundred thousand dollars, the future. Everything. Nothing remained except the warm darkness inside Brody Kovac’s gray sweatshirt.
Ren fell asleep like that, wrapped up in him.
Chapter 9
Light streamed in through the window at gentle angles that didn’t disturb him. Ren opened his eyes slowly, without a start, without the rush of adrenaline that had woken him up the last three mornings. He blinked. The white ceiling. The velvet curtains. The room that wasn’t his but was feeling familiar.
And the scent.
Raisins and walnuts and something else beneath them, something that had no name but that his body recognized as one recognizes a melody from childhood: effortlessly, without thought, straight to the center of his chest. The sweatshirt covered him down to his thighs. The sleeves wrapped around his hands. The wide neckline had slipped down during the night, leaving his left shoulder exposed, but the scent was still there, permeating every fiber, and Ren buried his nose in the fabric with his eyes closed again.
Just one more minute.
The mattress was firm; the pillow soft. Everything around him smelled like home. Not the Valois house. Not the damp Paris apartment where Julian had settled the family after losing the estate. Not the Monte Carlo penthouse where Ren had spent the worst three months of his life listening to his father lose a hundred thousand euros in a single night of poker. Not what had come after that in America. It smelled like home as a concept, asan idea, as that abstract, idyllic place the body wants to return to when everything else falls apart.
Ren rolled onto his side and hugged his knees. The fabric stretched with him. The scent intensified with the movement, released by the friction of the cotton against the sheets.
I hate it.
But he didn’t move.
I hate it makes me feel this way.
But he didn’t take off his sweatshirt.
He took a deep breath. Again. And again. Each inhalation loosened something else inside him. One knot after another. Each exhalation loosened his shoulders, his jaws, his toes a little more. It had been years since he’d woken up like this. Years without feeling that stillness in his body that didn’t come from resignation or exhaustion but from something that looked dangerously like peace.
Maybe it’s not so bad.
The thought crossed his mind before he could hold it back with his will. And it stayed there, floating among his thoughts of resistance. Ren watched it with caution and curiosity.
Maybe it’s not so bad that someone smells like this.
He rolled onto his back, closed his eyes, and let the thought linger.
