Page 9 of Protected By Razor

“Go to bed,” I tell her.

“Are you??—”

“Couch is fine.”

She hovers in the doorway to her bedroom. The jumper sleeve is twisted in her fingers again.

“Razor.”

“Yeah.”

“Thank you.”

I don’t answer. I can’t. I nod.

She closes the door.

I stand in the middle of her living room for a long second, listening to her move around on the other side of that wall. Water in the sink. A drawer opening and closing. The soft thump of her sitting down on the bed.

I sit down on the couch and I lean back against the cushions she left for me and I stare at the ceiling of the apartment she’s made into a home, and I think about the fact that the wallbetween us is about six inches of plasterboard and there’s a bed on the other side of it.

I can hear her moving around in there. A drawer. A tap. A quiet clearing of her throat that she probably didn’t even know she did.

She’s in that room in whatever she sleeps in. Pyjamas or sleep shorts probably. Something soft. Something I am absolutely not going to let myself picture.

I’m thirty-four years old. I’ve done a lot of stupid things. I have never in my life slept ten feet from a woman I’ve spent a decade trying not to want. Ten feet, that’s all.

This is going to be a problem.

I knew it would be and I came anyway.

I close my eyes, but already know I’m not going to sleep well.

CHAPTER 3

DARCIE

By the third morning I’ve stopped pretending I slept.

I wake up at five and lie in the dark listening to the silence on the other side of the wall, and I know without checking that he’s already up. He’s always up before me. Every morning I walk out of my bedroom and there he is — at the kitchen counter, coffee made, hair still wet from the shower I somehow don’t hear him taking, reading something on his phone like this is his apartment and I’m the guest.

He’s wearing a black t-shirt this morning. The sleeves sit high on his arms because his muscular arms don’t really fit into sleeves. Ink from wrist to shoulder, detailed work that disappears up under the fabric and reappears at his collar. I’ve had three days to stop staring and I still can’t.

“Morning,” he says without looking up.

“Morning.”

He slides a mug across the counter. Black, one sugar, the way I take it. I don’t remember telling him.

“You want toast?”

“I’ll do it.”

“Sit down.”

This is how it’s been. Three days of him running my apartment like a quiet, efficient operation I didn’t know I was signing up for. He’s there when I leave for the clinic and he’s there when I get home.

And I am losing my mind.