Page 22 of Protected By Razor

His mouth is against my shoulder. His hand is in my hair. His weight is pinning me to the mattress and I don’t want him to move.

“Darcie.”

“Mm.”

“You didn’t know you could do that.”

“I didn’t.”

He turns his face into my neck and I feel him smile.

“Well,” he says. “You can.”

He goes out around eleven. Something about a meeting with King and picking up a bag from his place — he’s vague about it, and I don’t push, because I’m learning that vague is what work looks like in this world.

He kisses me at the door. Hard, quick, his hand cupping my jaw. “Back in an hour.”

He goes.

I make myself a cup of tea and curl up on the couch in his t-shirt with my legs tucked under me, and I sit there in the quietfeeling like a woman who has been turned inside out and then put back together wrong in the best possible way.

Then the knock comes.

I freeze. I look at the door.

“Darce?” Kate’s voice from behind it. “It’s me. Open up.”

I close my eyes.

I’d forgotten.

Kate is standing in my hallway, holding a paper bag of pastries, and I watch her face do three distinct things as she takes me in.

One: she registers that I’m wearing a man’s t-shirt.

Two: she registers that the t-shirt is her brothers.

Three: she registers that I am not wearing anything else.

“Darcie,” she says, very carefully. “Why are you wearing my brother’s clothes?”

“Kate?—”

“No. Don’t. Just — step back. Let me in.”

I step back. She walks in. Her eyes go round the apartment, and I watch her clock everything — his boots by the door, his jacket over the chair, the bike helmet on the counter, the fact that the couch hasn’t been slept on. She know’s he’s been staying here, but she is now registering it’s not quite going the way she thought.

She sets the pastries down on the table very gently. She turns around.

“Darcie.”

“Don’t.”

“Darcie.“

“Kate. Please.”

She stares at me. Her face is doing a thing I’ve never seen it do before — not angry, not exactly. Frightened. She’s frightened for me.