“Alyssa…”
“Not done.” He closed his mouth. “You almost lost me today. And I almost lost me today, and I’m going to have a hard time with that, and so are you. I’m not carrying it by myself and I’m not letting you carry it by yourself. We carry ittogether. You hear me?”
He shut his eyes. “I hear you.”
“Good. Now ask me what you’ve been too scared to ask me since the kitchen.”
He looked at me a long moment. I watched him make himself do it.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m okay.” His whole body let something go. “My hand’s going to be fine, the cuts are clean, stitches out in two weeks. I’m notokay-okay. I might be jumpy, I may dream about it for a minute. But I’m alive. I’m here.” I squeezed his hand. “Are you okay?”
He shook his head, one small hard shake. “No. I’m not.”
“I know you’re not.”
“Haven’t been since I walked in and saw you on the floor… “I don’t know what to do with what I felt. Haven’t felt that since…”
He stopped, and I knew the end of that sentence the same way I’d known it when she came at me. I wasn’t going to make him say his mother’s name to finish it. I put my forehead against his and my hand at the back of his neck. “I know.”
He kissed my head and sat back. “Come on. The bath.”
He didn’t get in. He sat on the tile with his back to the wall and his knees up and held my hand over the lip of the tub, and he didn’t look away from me once. The water was warm and soothing. He’d put the eucalyptus salts in, and the whole room smelled green and clean. I sank to my collarbone and closed my eyes, while his thumb moved across my wrist, and about ten minutes in, the shaking started.
It came up out of nowhere. Maybe it was the warmth, the quiet, his hand, that told my body deciding it was finally safe enough to dump nine hours of adrenaline all at once. My teeth chattered and the water went choppy around me. It wasn’t crying. It was just my body doing what it had been holding off since seven that morning.
Julian didn’t move. Didn’t tell me it was okay, or try to lift me out. He sat on the floor with his hand around mine and let me shake. Maybe because he’d been near enough grief in his life to know a body that needs to shake should be allowed to.
It passed after a few minutes. Then he pulled the plug, held a towel open, and when I stood he wrapped me in it and picked me up like I weighed nothing. He put me in his bed, dressed me in his tshirt, pulled the covers up, and got in behind me. His arm came over me and settled flat across mine.
We didn’t say anything. I felt his breath in my hair and the weight of his arm and let myself start to drift… and right as I was going under, I felt it. A wet drop on the top of my head. Then another.
I didn’t move, or make a sound, because I knew if I turned to check his face he’d fix it, and I didn’t want him to fix it. He’d held it all day, and now, in his own bed, in the dark, with me breathing against him, he was finally setting it down. I wasn’t going to stop him.
So I let him cry into my hair. Slow and silent, no shaking, no sound, his arms never once going loose, for a long time. And then it eased, and his breath went even, and his hand at the back of my head got heavy, and he slept.
I stayed awake a few minutes more. I needed his chest rising under my cheek a little longer. I needed to know we were both alive in the same bed at the same time, and that we hadn’t lost each other today.
We hadn’t lost each other today.
The man I loved had cried into my hair and fallen asleep with both arms around me, and I was alive and he was alive, in his bed, in our town, and tomorrow we’d figure out the rest. For the first time in my life, every inch of me was covered.
I closed my eyes and let myself fall.
julian
Sabrina had survived emergency surgery,spent days in the hospital recovering under police watch, and been transferred to a psychiatric unit for evaluation while the charges moved forward.
Breaking and entering. Stalking. Aggravated assault. Attempted murder.
I stared at that list longer than I should have the first time my lawyer said it out loud. All of that life. All of that ambition. All of those years she’d spent building herself into somebody people watched, followed, listened to — and for what? To throw it away over a man who had never belonged to her. Over a life she had made up in her head and then punished Alyssa for living.
It was a waste.
A stupid, senseless waste.
And then I stopped myself, because even that was more energy than I owed her.
