Page 227 of What We Brave
I pull her closer. Bury my face in her hair. Hold on.
She loves me.
I'm not going to get used to that. Maybe not ever. Maybe every time she says it, it'll hit like this — sudden and enormous and terrifying in the best possible way.
She loves me. And she's not going back to that apartment. She's in this for real.
The bird starts up again outside the window. The light shifts from gray to gold. Down the hall, Reid's alarm goes off — muffled, distant, followed by a groan and the thud of a hand hitting the nightstand.
Normal sounds. Morning sounds. The sounds of a house with people in it.
She's already falling asleep. I can feel it — her breathing evening out, her grip loosening, her weight settling into me like I'm something solid. Something that'll hold.
I press my mouth to the top of her head.
42
REID
My hand is on something warm and soft and I'm about half a second from?—
Wait.
I squeeze. Nothing happens. No response. No sound. No?—
That's a pillow, Reid.
My brain comes online in stages, like an old computer booting up. Fact one: I'm in my bed. Fact two: my arm is wrapped around a pillow. Fact three: my hips are doing something to that pillow that I should probably apologize for.
Fact four: Laine is not here.
I open one eye. Confirm. Pillow. Just a pillow. A pillow that smells like her shampoo, which is honestly worse because now I'm spooning a pillowandsmelling it like a creep.
Great start to the morning. Really nailing it.
I flop onto my back. Stare at the ceiling. The other side of the bed is cold. She wasn't here when I fell asleep — she was in Blake's room last night. Movie ran late, she was already dozing on his shoulder, and I'd kissed her forehead and said goodnight because that's what we do. That's the system. Nobody calls it a system, but it is one, and?—
My door bangs open.
Laine. Bra and underwear. Hair like she lost a fight with a wind tunnel. She is not here for romance.
She goes straight for my dresser. Top drawer, second drawer, bottom drawer. Shoves things aside. Moves to the closet. Pulls shirts off hangers, checks behind things, drops to her knees to look under the bed, mumbling to herself the whole time.
Her head pops up beside me, scaring the shit out of me. "Have you seen my scrubs?"
I'm still holding the pillow against my chest like a stuffed animal. My brain is maybe sixty percent online. She's on her hands and knees in her underwear two feet from me and I can't even appreciate it because she's radiating a stress level that suggests this is not a good time to comment on the view.
"The — which ones?"
"Anyof them, Reid." She's up again. Back to the closet. "I have four sets of scrubs. Four. And I cannot find a single one in this entire house."
"Did you check the?—"
"I checked the dryer. I checked the laundry basket. I checked the bathroom, the couch, and the floor of Blake's room." She pulls a hoodie off a shelf, stares at it like it's personally offended her, shoves it back. "I have a dresser in a room I don't sleep in, clothes in two closets that belong to two different men, and I'm going to be late for my shift."
From across the hall: "What are we looking for?"
Blake. Already up, apparently. Already dressed, because Blake is the kind of person who wakes up at five and puts on actual pants.
