“Sleep,” he says.
My ear rests right by his heart. I can hear the steady thump thump. In contrast my heart beat’s a mile a minute. My eyes are wide open, looking at the plain white apartment wall. A wall I’ve seen a thousand times but never like this. Never cradled in the arms of a man who could crush me.
I’ve slept with a man before. The proof of that is in the bedroom.
But I’ve never slept with a man before.
I bite my lip. “How—”
“Go to sleep, little bird.”
It’s impossible. He smells like the outside, like ice and pine—with a metallic undercurrent that I think might be blood. His chest moves steadily with his breath. It’s like resting my head on the ocean.
And I never sleep well. It’s not the carpet that bothers me. It’s softer than the whitewashed wood slats in Harmony Hills. The memories haunt me most at night, when my hands aren’t busy, when my mind is still. That’s when I remember what Leader Allen did to me when everyone thought we were praying.
Luca’s hand moves over my hair, brushing softly, petting. The rhythm combines with the motion of his body, lulling me into a kind of trance. His muscles are brick hard. They shouldn’t be comfortable at all, but he’s hot. Burning. A rare comfort in a cold frontier.
I press my face into him, my very own pink and purple pillow. My stuffed unicorn in the form of a hard-muscled man. My hand clenches a fistful of T-shirt, holding him there.
“Shh,” he murmurs. “I’m watching over you. I’ll keep you safe.”
That’s the last thing I hear before the night falls away, replaced only with deep, dark waters. They swirl around me in an endless tide, back and forth, dreamless and warm.
Chapter Nine
Most mornings when I wake up, Delilah is still asleep. Even with the sunlight coming in through the blinds, that girl can sleep. I can’t complain because she’s all smiles when she’s awake.
If I’ve had a particularly rough night at the Last Stop, I might sleep in, which means I wake up to a snuggly body on top of me, chubby fingers grasping my hair.
This morning I wake up to the distant sounds of cheerful babbling.
A low voice responds, maybe asking a question.
More babbling, this time with a happy squeal as punctuation.
Ru
bbing the sleep from my eyes, I follow the sounds into the kitchen. What I find makes me blink, more confused than ever. There’s a picnic happening on the cracked caramel linoleum, a thin blanket spread out. Luca sits across from Delilah, him cross-legged, her little legs in front of her. Between them is a sleeve of crackers, an open jar of peanut butter, and a sippy cup.
“Do you want another one?” Luca asks.
Delilah responds with a string of syllables that probably mean yes, along with several other thoughts. She claps to illustrate her point. Or maybe to get him to hurry.
He doesn’t hurry. He takes his time with a butter knife in the jar, spreading thick, creamy peanut butter onto the cracker, making it completely even. “Take a drink,” he says, holding it out.
Her black curls shimmer under the kitchen light as she shakes her head. “No.”
That’s one of the few words she knows. And though I’ve never seen a more cheerful child, she also has a stubborn streak. She will say no plenty of times throughout the day, albeit cheerfully.
“One little sip.”
Another string of baby talk, ending with a very clear, “Water.”
“Water isn’t my favorite either,” he says reasonably. “But it’s all I could find right now. Maybe they’ll have milk on the plane.”
With a sigh Delilah picks up the sippy cup for a brief sip.
Luca hands over the cracker, and she munches away. My heart has turned into something less muscle, more balloon—expanding, stretching beyond what I’d known I was capable of.