“His room's this way,” she said quietly, leading me down the hall without asking questions.
I followed her into a small bedroom that was somehow both cluttered and organized, clothes piled on a chair but books stacked neatly on shelves. She pulled back the covers on his bed, and I laid him down as gently as I could. He mumbled in protest but didn't wake, just curled onto his side and went still.
Talia pulled the blanket over him and then jerked her head toward the door, clearly wanting to talk outside. I followed herinto the hallway and watched her close Soren's door with the kind of care that suggested she'd done this before.
“How drunk was he?” she asked, keeping her voice low.
“Pretty drunk. Called me from a club, said he wanted me to meet him there.” I leaned against the wall because standing still felt impossible.
“The drinking's been a problem for a while.” She said it flatly, without emotion, just stating a fact. “It gets worse when he's overwhelmed or stressed or dealing with our parents.”
“How often does this happen?”
“Often enough that I know what it looks like.” She crossed her arms and met my eyes with an expression that was equal parts exhaustion and warning.
I felt my chest tighten with anger and worry and too many other things to name. “What can I do?”
“Be there. Don't let him disappear into his head. Call him on his bullshit when he tries to pretend he's fine.” She paused, and I could see her weighing how much to say. “And don't make promises you can't keep. He's already been abandoned by too many people who said they cared.”
“I'm not going anywhere.”
“Good.” She studied me for a long moment, and I got the distinct impression I was being evaluated. “He talks about you sometimes. Not a lot, but enough that I know you matter. Don't fuck that up.”
“I won't.”
She nodded once, apparently satisfied, and disappeared back into her room. I stood there in the hallway for a few minutes longer, staring at Soren's closed door and trying to process everything that had just happened.
CHAPTER TWELVE
midnight blues
ROOK
Sleep was not happening.
I'd been lying in the dark for the better part of an hour with the ceiling doing nothing useful above me and my body doing the opposite of what I needed it to do, which was shut down. My brain had other plans. My brain had apparently decided that the hours between two and four in the morning were the ideal time to replay everything that had happened in that club in precise and excruciating detail, starting from the moment I'd walked through the door and found him leaning against the bar looking like a disaster I'd been heading toward my whole life.
I rolled onto my back. Stared at the ceiling. Rolled onto my side.
The sheets felt too warm and too close and the house was too quiet in the way it only got at this hour when there was nothing to distract me from the inside of my own head. I lay there foranother ten minutes trying to will myself unconscious through sheer stubbornness, which had worked for me on the ice plenty of times and was doing absolutely nothing for me now.
I gave up.
I got up without turning on any lights, moving through the bedroom in the dark in just my boxer briefs because the house was mine and I ran warm and I hadn't been sleeping with anything else on anyway. The hardwood was cold under my bare feet on the way to the kitchen, and I stood in front of the open fridge for a moment, the light from it falling across my chest, looking for something that wasn't there.
I didn't want water. I didn't want the protein shake sitting on the second shelf that I was supposed to have after practice. I reached past both of them and pulled out the bottle of red I'd opened three days ago and not finished, because sometimes a man in his mid-thirties in his underwear at two in the morning needed a glass of wine and there was no version of tonight where I was going to pretend otherwise.
I didn't bother with a glass. Took the bottle.
The living room was dark except for what came through the floor-to-ceiling windows, which was the coast — the ocean moving in the dark below the cliffs, the moon doing its job, the water reflecting it back up in broken silver lines that shifted and reformed and shifted again. I'd bought this house partly for those windows and I almost never sat in front of them at night. The view was different in the dark. Bigger. Less like something you looked at and more like something that looked back.
I dropped down onto the floor just in front of the glass, my back against the base of the couch, legs stretched out in front of me, and took a long drink of the wine and let the quiet do whatever it was going to do.
It replayed the club scene.
Of course it did.
The weight of him against my chest on that dance floor. The heat of his body coming through his shirt and mine like neither layer of fabric was actually doing anything. The way he'd moved, all loose-limbed and completely unself-conscious in the way drunk people sometimes got, like his body had stopped asking permission for anything and was just doing what it wanted. Hips rolling back into mine with a rhythm that had nothing to do with dancing and everything to do with the fact that Soren had apparently been put on this earth specifically to take me apart.
