Chapter 11
1032 Words
**ARIA**
He walked like nothing had happened.
Like armed men hadn't just broken through his windows and two of them were not on the floor of his corridor.
He was probably used to things like this.
His cologne reached me suddenly, or I had just chosen to notice it. It was something dark, cedarwood maybe, I couldn't tell as sleep pulled at the edges of my vision.
I had to be losing it. How was I sleepy after armed men just shattered glass feet away?
He stopped at the end of the corridor and pushed open his door, standing aside for me to enter.
I stepped through.
The door closed behind us with a soft click that felt like a full stop at the end of a sentence.
Wow. He meant it.
I was going to be staying here now.
I took in the room without staring.
Memories flooded back. The humiliation from the last time I was in this room still stung like fresh salt. A day I would never forget.
He moved past me toward the desk in the corner.
"The left side," he said coldly.
I looked at the bed.
Then at him.
He was already working. The blue light from his laptop bouncing off the walls, and painting his face something cold and dismissive.
I sat down on the left side of the bed and tried to work out what version of this man I was supposed to respond to. Twenty minutes ago his hands had been on my face, checking every inch of me before he said a single word.
And now this.
I did not understand him.
I lay back against the pillow, still fully dressed because I wasn't going to tell him I needed to go get my pyjamas.
I didn't want to start any conversation with him at the moment.
I just stared at the high ceilings.
Sleep felt impossible now that I was in his room, sitting a few inches away from him.
---
I didn't know when sleep finally took me.
When I woke up everywhere was completely dark, apart from a source of light I hadn't figured out yet.
The room had shifted in the way rooms do when it's very late at night, or maybe very early in the morning. I didn't know.
He was still at the desk. The laptop was that source of light.
Doesn't he sleep?
His jacket was gone now. His shirt was open at the collar, sleeves pushed up to his elbows, and he was leaning back in the chair with one hand over his mouth staring at the screen with an expression that was not reading and not thinking and not really anything I understood.
I watched him without meaning to.
The line of his jaw in the light. The way his forearm rested on the desk, the muscle in it visible even relaxed.
I realized I had been staring for longer than was reasonable.
I turned onto my side facing the window.
The city glittered back at me. I made an agreement with myself to stop thinking about the line of his jaw in laptop light and go back to sleep.
Eventually I did.
---
The second time I woke it was a sound that did it.
Low and unclear, like a voice coming through a wall. I was halfway to deciding it was the television somewhere in the penthouse before I registered that it was coming from the bed I was in.
I turned over.
He had come to bed at some point while I was sleeping. He was on his back, still on his side of bed, one hand resting on his chest and the other fisted loosely in the sheet beside him.
He made the sound again.
Not words. Just a sound from somewhere low in his chest, strained.
His jaw tightened.
I sat up slowly, pulling my knees to my chest, watching him. His head moved against the pillow. His breathing had changed, no longer the slow rhythm of actual rest but something faster and shallower, his chest rising and falling quickly.
What was going on?
I could feel panic rise like bile in my throat.
Then he said a name.
"Elise."
My stomach dropped.
I knew that name. I knew it the way you know something you wish you could unknow.
"Elise."
He said it again and this time it was worse because of the way he said it. Not like a name. Like an apology.
His whole body was stiff now. His fist tightening in the sheets, his head pressing back against the pillow. Whatever he was fighting in his sleep he was losing, or had already lost.
I sat there and watched him struggle and did not know what to do with my hands.
Something in me said I should wake him, but another reminded me that it was none of my business and obviously not mine to interrupt.
But it was getting worse.
His breathing was wrong. His fists in the sheets had gone white at the knuckles, and a sound came from him that was not a word and not quite a cry and was somehow worse than either.
I reached out.
Stopped.
Pulled my hand back.
What if he woke up and thought I was the one attacking him?
He twisted against the pillow and the sound came again. I stopped thinking about whether it was mine to do.
I placed my hand over his.
Not moving. Just still.
The contact sent a strange jolt through me that I forced myself to ignore.
Then slowly, so slowly I almost missed it, his fingers uncurled from the sheet.
One by one.
Until his hand was open and still beneath mine and his breathing gradually found its way back to something close to normal.
I did not move my hand.
Suddenly his eyes snapped open.
Before I could move, he had me pinned to the bed, his hand tight around my wrist.
His eyes were still half-lost in whatever nightmare he had just escaped.
“Elise,” he whispered.
And for a terrifying second…
I realized he didn’t know it was me.
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