HE WAITED 1,095 DAYS TO CLAIM ME

Chapter 7

I didn't sleep.

I tried the way you try to do a thing your body has already decided against. I was lying on my back with my hands folded over my belly and waited as the compound came to rest around me, and I watched the ceiling turn from black to grey to the light of nothing before dawn. The door remained slightly ajar. Just as he had left it.

I thought about my father. I thought about Marcus in the east room and whether he was sleeping and what that said about the kind of person he was. I remembered the three men in the cellar; I didn't have to do with them anymore, but their weight sat in my chest anyway.

I thought about Raze's hands on my wrists. The cloth. The water. like looking would have been something he hadn't earned yet.

I stopped thinking about that.

As the pale light of morning appeared, I rose.

The yard was cold.

Not the chilling cold of winter but the cold of early morning before the sun is fully awake, the air with something unfinished. I was on the edge of the doorway for a while before I exited. Old reflex. You don't enter a room without reading it first.

There he was.

On the opposite end of the yard, where four of his men were in a loose line. No weapons. Just the kind of drilling they don't need: the kind that's all about weight and leverage and where a man puts his hands before his mind catches up. In the cold, Raze was without a shirt, and it made no difference. He went through the sequence as he had gone through hard things before; it wasn't hard for him; it was just part of him.

I said to myself, I had to get back inside.

I didn't.

His back was to me. Here I was able to see the scar on his left shoulder, one that I hadn't thought about for three days, then a week, then a month. It was so long I didn't expect. Thicker. It had been barely closed, and the tissue had become hard. He had been shot and survived and was still constructing, and I had not heard from her for six months, and I was in a city six hundred miles away from where I thought I was supposed to be, with a man that I was going to marry.

Last night, I was standing in the compound, and now, sitting in it, it's different. Now it was a reality. Now it had weight.

Before he turned, he knew that I was there. I noticed it in the nonchalance of his shoulders, the one that indicated that he had seen something and had decided to accept that as the law of the land and not react to it yet. He completed the pass. Gave a confidential message to his men. They dispersed.

Then he turned.

He was eyeing me just like the things he's expecting. Not surprised. Not particularly careful, either. Just plain and simple, like a man without anything to deal with.

"You didn't sleep," he said.

"No."

He reached for the shirt draped over the fence post beside him, and I watched him pull it on and tried not to track the movement and mostly failed. After 3 years, my body still had opinions about Raze that were completely different from my decision.

He started to approach me. Stopped short of the end, about a few feet away.

The yard was quiet. Now it was nothing but this, this cold, this pale light, him standing in front of me like he hadn't done anything wrong being here.

“I need to speak to Silas," I said.

"After breakfast."

"Raze—"

"After breakfast." Not hard. Just settled. “Silas knows; he will be there when you are. Give yourself an hour.”

I looked at him.

"You're going to argue with that," he replied. There was a slight intonation in his voice. Not quite amusement. Something quieter.

I said that I was not saying that I disagreed. I said, “I'm not arguing,” I said. “I just don't see the point of the hour."

“You are all on an empty stomach since the funeral, and you'll find something missing if you walk into that room right now.” He held my gaze. "You know that."

I did know that. I hated that I knew it, and I hated that he knew it, and I hated that he said it outright just to be accurate, not to be mean or trying to start an argument or anything.

"One hour," I said.

He nodded. Didn't say anything else.

There was always a quiet between us. Long before, when we were younger and our names for each other weren't yet, and the world wasn't even our world, our silence was not empty. It always had a load on its back. I had been in another silence for three years, a simple silence, a quiet silence, a silent one that didn't ask anything of you. I had anticipated that I would like it more.

I didn't know what to think of it.

"Why did you wait?" I said.

He looked at me. Not confused. He was of course aware of which weighting I meant.

"I didn't."

I waited.

"Waiting implies I was sitting still," he said. I was not sitting idle; I was here. I was building things, I was clearing things, I was working on all the problems that your father left behind, and I was working on a few that he wouldn't have known about. A beat. I was making the place worth coming back to.

Something shifted in my chest. I couldn't name it, and I didn't try.

“Well, that's not the same thing," I said.

"No," he said. "It's not."

He gazed at me for an instant more. It was getting bright, and the light was growing warmer, perhaps toward morning. I noticed a bruise on his knuckles last night that I didn't see this time. All nice and new, it must be assumed. I didn't ask.

"The wanting,” I said. “Was that—" I stopped.

"Was it what?"

I didn't finish it. I pressed the thought flat, the way I pressed everything flat, the way I'd learned to do it so young it was nearly instinct now.

He remained silent for a while. I glanced up, and he was gazing upon me in that kind of patient look that people who have made up their minds and don't want to hurry to tell you something give.

The desire and anger were the same thing all the time, he said. Not until you were gone long enough did they cease to feel different; I didn't realize that.

It was like it flowed through me. Not heat, exactly. Something older.

I didn't answer. I can't think of anything they could have said that wouldn't have made something explode, and I didn't want to be standing in the yard in the early morning with something exploding in my sight.

He appeared to be aware of that. He didn't press. He simply stood there, so close I could see right where the scar finished on his shoulder, and he allowed the silence to hold what I couldn't.

He said quietly, “One hour.” A reminder, and a mercy at the same time.

I nodded.

I went back inside.

I felt him watching me go, but I did not turn, and I felt that the fact that I wanted to was the most honest thing I'd felt since I walked back through the compound gates.