Chapter Eight - While She Sleeps
620 Words
She had meant to wait up for him.
She had not decided this consciously. It was not something she planned or admitted to herself directly. But she had positioned herself on the living room couch with a book at ten in the evening and told herself she was simply reading.
She was asleep by eleven. The book had slid off her chest and her hair had fallen across her face and she had pulled her knees up without waking, settled deep into the cushions the way people only sleep when they feel, on some level, safe.
Lucian came home at half past midnight.
He saw her the moment the elevator doors opened.
He stood very still.
She looked different when she was sleeping. The careful steadiness she carried when she was awake, that quiet watchfulness she thought he did not notice, it was gone. She just looked soft. Her blonde hair loose across the cushion, lips slightly parted, the slow rise and fall of her breathing the only movement in the room.
He should have kept walking.
He did not keep walking.
He moved to the edge of the room and stood there in the dark with his hands in his pockets and watched her and tried to remember the last time he had stood still for something that was not a threat.
His demon was not still.
It pressed at the inside of him the way it always did when she was close, low and insistent and older than patience. It did not speak in words exactly. It was more like gravity. A current pulling in one direction with a certainty that did not need to explain itself.
She is yours.
The thought moved through him the way his demon's hunger always moved, not quite his and not quite separate from him either. He had spent centuries learning to hold the two things apart, what he chose and what the demon wanted. Most of the time the distance between them was manageable.
Around her it was not manageable.
Around her it was a wall with something very large and very old leaning against the other side.
She shifted in her sleep, a small unconscious movement, and made a soft sound that was barely anything at all. His jaw tightened.
She smelled like warmth. Like something living and unhurried. He had noticed it the first day and he had been noticing it every day since and it did not get easier with familiarity the way smells usually did. It got worse. More specific. More necessary.
He needed to walk away.
Take her. She is yours. You have waited long enough.
The hunger pressed harder and he pressed back, quiet and absolute, the way he had learned to do across centuries of practice. He was not going to touch her while she was sleeping. He was not going to touch her at all until he had himself under a control that currently felt very far away.
He crossed to where she lay and stood over her for a moment that lasted longer than it should have. Then he reached down and pulled the throw blanket from the back of the couch and laid it over her without touching her skin. He was careful about that. Deliberate.
She did not wake.
He straightened and walked to his wing and closed the door behind him and stood in the dark of his own room for a long time after.
In the morning when Nora woke she found the blanket and did not remember pulling it over herself.
She looked at it for a moment.
Then she got up and went to make coffee and did not let herself think about it too hard.
- Writer
