Page 58 of Take the Fall
It was still there. It hadn’t gone anywhere.
But it could wait until morning. Everything could wait until morning. For tonight I had him, warm and breathing and here, and I had finally, finally said the loud part out loud, and he had pulled me into the water rather than let me drown on the step.
I turned the lamp off with my free hand and held on.
Chapter 17: Something to Keep
Luke
I woke into the pain first.
That’s the order with a body that’s been worked over. The hurt gets up before you do. Left side a slab of it where the ribs were, the deep ache that means a bruise still coming into its full self under the skin. The forearm stiff to the elbow. A bright sting at my eyebrow when I moved my face against the pillow. My hands sore in a way I felt before I remembered why. The whole left of me filed a complaint at once, the way it had every morning of my life that followed a bad night, and I lay there and took the inventory the way I always take it, flat, no drama, just counting what still worked.
Then the weight on my chest shifted and made a small sound, and everything else went quiet inside me.
Ryan. Asleep against me. Sometime in the night we’d turned, and the man I’d held into sleep was now the one who held me, his head tucked under my jaw, one leg thrown across mine, his breath going slow and even into my throat.
That’s when I opened my eyes. His hair was a wreck. There was a crease from the pillow pressed up one cheek. His mouth had come open a little in an adorable and seductive way.
My body was still a ruin, I just stopped caring about it. I lay still so I wouldn’t wake him, enjoying his warmth.
He’d said it first. That was the part that made me grin. He was the one who’d cracked. In the bathroom, shouting.I worry about you because I love you.And then again, quiet, the third time, handed over like a fact he was done arguing with.There. It’s yours.
I could not believe my luck. Some part of me I’d kept boxed up so long I’d forgotten it could make noise wanted to shake him awake just to hear him say it again. Wanted to do something stupid with the day. I felt like a teenager. He loved me. He’d said so, out loud, more than once, and somehow I got to keep it. For a few minutes I let myself just have that. Big and stupid and grinning at the ceiling like a kid who’d gotten away with something big.
I ran my knuckles down the line of his spine, slow, enjoying the contact. He made a small sound and pressed closer without waking. I held still and let him, and for one minute I thought about nothing but the warmth of him and the fact that he was mine to hold in the daylight now, and not only in the dark.
He woke slow, the change in his breath, the way his hand flexed against my side and then went still as he remembered where it was. He didn’t move for a moment. Taking his own inventory, maybe.
“Don’t,” he said, muffled, into my chest. “Whatever time it is, don’t tell me.”
“I don’t know, you’re blocking my view to my bedside clock.”
“That’s your problem.” But he tipped his head up, his eyes soft in a way they never were when he was upright, and he looked at me, the whole of my face, the eyebrow and the lip and the restof it, and something went tender and pained across him at once. “Morning.”
“Morning.”
I tilted my head and kissed him, slow, careful of the split in my lip. He went still, then leaned into it, and we stayed there a while, unhurried, a kiss with nowhere to be and nothing to prove. Morning breath and all. Neither of us minded. It was a different thing from the night before. That had been the loud part, the lock finally going, the whole of it coming down at once. This was the quiet on the other side of it. The morning after, the part I’d spent my whole life finding reasons to skip. He drew back an inch and looked at me like he was making sure he hadn’t dreamed it. Then I watched him decide he hadn’t. Real. Still here.
He pushed up onto an elbow, which made him wince, a small involuntary catch he tried to cover and couldn’t, and a flush went up his neck the second he realized I’d seen it.
“Don’t,” he said again, but different now, embarrassed, looking anywhere but at me.
“You’re sore.”
“I’m fine.”
“That’s my line. You’re not allowed it.” I reached up and pushed a piece of sleep-mussed hair off his forehead, careful, like he might bolt. “Ryan. Look at me. You’re allowed to be sore. It’s the most normal thing in the world.”
“It’s not the soreness.” He went redder, which I would not have thought possible, and dragged a hand down his face. “It’s that I don’t know how to do the morning. The after. I know how to do a hundred mornings after a hundred nights and not one of them was. This. With.” He gestured at me, at the bed, at all of it, and gave up on the sentence. “I’m out of my depth and I hate being out of my depth and I’m aware that’s exactly the kind ofthing I’d normally make a joke about, and I can’t find the joke, which is how you know it’s real.”
It was the most naked thing he’d said to me without a shout behind it.
“Come here,” I said.
“I am here.”
“Come here properly.”
