Page 60 of The Beast
"I'm doing my best." His hand was moving slowly on my bare skin. "You broke me. I've got limited resources."
He slid out of me, gently, as we repositioned, then I turned my face against his chest and smiled at it. The studio held us in its quiet—the turpentine and the old wood and the canvases against the walls, everything I'd made in five years of private work witness to this. I found I didn't mind.
His heartbeat had gone slow and steady under my ear.
“What are you thinking about?” I asked.
He was quiet for a moment. "I've never—" He stopped. Started again. "I've been through a lot of places and a lot of situations and I have never once wanted to stop the situation and just—stay in it. Stay in it and let it be what it is." His hand stilled against my back. "I want to stay in this."
I lifted my head and looked at him. Natural light across his face. The jaw, the eyes, all of it.
"I want that, too," I said. "And I also need you to understand that I'm a person who has things. A life. Things I'm responsible for and people I love and—" I paused. "I'm not going to dissolve. I'm not going to become just this, just us, and nothing else. I'm not built that way."
"I know," he said. No hesitation.
"You can't say nobody else and also try to make me smaller," I said. "Those two things can't live together."
He looked at me steadily. "I know that, too." A beat. "I said nobody else because I meant it. Not because I wanted you smaller. Because I didn't want to lose you to—" He stopped. The jaw worked. "To something stupid. Something preventable. Someone not paying attention to you the way you—" Another stop.
"The way I what?"
"The way you deserve," he said. Like it cost him something.
I held that for a moment.
"Nobody's ever said that to me," I said quietly.
"Then everyone's been doing it wrong."
I looked at him—at this man I had known for two days who had somehow become the axis of a life I was still building the shape of—and felt something settle in my chest that I didn't have a precise word for. Not quite love, not yet, not in the form I understood love to take. But the precursor to it. The ground it grew in. The feeling of recognizing someone as necessary before you'd fully worked out why.
"I'm developing feelings for you," I said. Blunt. It was the only honest way to say it.
Something moved across his face—relief, and something fiercer underneath it.
"Yeah," he said. "Same."
"That's terrifying," I said.
"Completely," he agreed.
"We just met.”
"I know."
"I was supposed to be on a plane to Dublin today."
"I know that, too."
"None of this makes any logical sense."
"Mary Catherine." He said my name the way he always said it—all four syllables, deliberate, full weight. "I know. I know all of that. And I'm telling you—" His hand came back up to my face. "I don't care. I am not a man who does this. I am not a man who feels this. And I am sitting here feeling it, anyway."
I looked at him for a long time.
26
BROCK
