Three.
Then she simply disintegrated.
Not loud. No theatrics. Something deeper than that. Her body folded forward and then reversed, turning into me, pressing her face into my chest. Her hands found my shirt—fists balling the fabric.
The first sob came almost silently. Just the convulsion of her against me, the sudden wet heat of tears soaking through my shirt to the skin beneath.
Then the sound broke through.
Low. Wrecked. A grief so unguarded it had no shape to it, just sound pressing against my chest and finding a dent in a place I’d kept intact for a very long time.
“I thought—” she choked, her voice muffled against me, broken into fragments. “I thought it—it almost—”
“You’re here. You’re safe.” I pressed my mouth against her hair. Not a kiss—I told myself that. Just contact. Just presence. But my lips stayed. My hand tightened at the back of her head, and something shifted in my chest that I didn’t have a name for and wasn’t going to look for right now. “It’s dead. It can’t touch you.” A breath. “Nothing touches you. Not while I’m here.”
“I couldn’t get it off me—” Her breath hitched violently. Her whole body shook against mine. “Its hands—I could—I can still,”
“You’re here now.” My mouth was against her hair, and this time I didn’t bother with the distinction. It wasn’t a kiss, but it wasn’t just contact, either. I registered how far past every line I’d drawn this had gone, and I didn’t pull back. “It’s dead. Nothing in this house touches you. I promise.”
Her fingers dug harder into my shirt. I could feel her fingers against my chest, sharp and desperate, pressing into the muscle there as if she needed to verify the heartbeat underneath. I let her.
“I’ve never been that scared,” she whispered.
The admission cost her something. I heard it in her voice, the way she pressed her face harder against me afterward, hiding from her own vulnerability.
“I know,” I said. Softer. My hand moved from the nape of her neck, tracing her spine, slow and deliberate, until it came to rest on the small of her back and stayed there. Warm. Steady.
Her breath was warm on my neck.
I held her through the rest of it. Didn’t rush her. Didn’t say anything at all. Just let the grief do what it needed to do.
The sobs came farther apart. The tremors lost their violence, broke down into something smaller—a shiver, a catch, a shiver again. Her breathing changed. Still uneven. But slower. Deeper. The spaces between expanding.
She didn’t pull away.
Nor did I.
I turned us both, settling more fully onto the blankets, adjusting so her head rested on my chest. It fit there, in a space that seemed designed for exactly this, for exactly her, as if it had been waiting. Her body pressed along the full length of mine. Her legs tangled with mine unconsciously seeking contact, and I let them.
“You good?” I asked after a long while. My voice had dropped to something barely above a murmur, roughened by the tightness in my own throat that I refused to examine.
A small nod against my chest. The movement pressed her face closer, her lips grazing the skin exposed by my collar. A shiver ran through me.
“Yeah,” she whispered.
Quiet settled over us. The house creaked. Somewhere downstairs, Fiona moved from one window to another—I tracked the soft footsteps without fully surfacing from the half-sleep that had started dragging me under.
Libby’s breathing deepened.
Slowed.
Her body went heavy against mine—her muscles giving up their tension in stages, like a fist unclenching finger by finger. Her arm across my stomach tightened once, a reflexive clutch, then relaxed. Her breath came warm and steady against my throat, each breath ghosting across my skin.
I tightened my arm around her. Just slightly. Not enough to wake her.
Enough to close the last quarter-inch of space between us. Enough that I could feel her heartbeat through the thin layers of fabric separating her skin from mine—steady now.
I turned my head. Breathed her in—past the rain, past the tunnel, past everything the day had left on her—and underneath all of it, there it was. Something warm and all her. She slept. The weight of her. The sound of her breathing.
