I smile. "...thank you."
"Don't thank me, baby. Sleep."
He kisses my forehead again. Pulls the duvet up over me. The duvet, which is ruined, which we are both ignoring, which Zero is going to throw out and replace and pretend nothing happened to.
He goes to the door but pauses, then turns back. “Maxie?"
"...mm?" My eyes are fluttering closed again. His bed is warm and comfortable and my asshole ache is slowing down to a gentle throb that I canalmostignore.
"Don't disappear on me."
I open my eyes.
He's half-turned, hand on the doorknob, not quite looking at me. The bond between us is going warm and wide and a little frayed at the edges, like something that has been stretched out of shape for Zero.
"...I won't."
He nods and then shuts the door soft. I hear him pad down the hall in his bare feet but then I lose track of him.
The room settles. The bond settles. I’m in his bed, in his t-shirt, in his briefs, wrapped in a duvet that is going to need to be replaced, and the soreness in my hips and the rasp in my throat and the heavy used-up feeling in every muscle I have are all of them, somehow,good.
I roll onto my side. Curl into the warm spot Zero left behind. Pull the duvet up under my chin.
I have spent most of my life not being entirely sure I was in my body. I was, in foster homes, mostly above it–watching down as my body was abused and hated. I was, even those first months in this house, watching it from a small careful distance, the way you watch an animal you have been told you are responsible for. My body was my own, but I was afraid of it.
Ashamed.
I am, right now,in it.
I am, right now, moreherethan I have ever been.
My throat aches. My hips ache. My jaw aches. The bond pulses warm in three different directions. I’m wearing my stepbrother's shirt and I am going to sleep in his bed and when he comes back upstairs he’s going to find me here because I told him I wouldn't disappear and Imeantit.
I fucking meant it.
Chapter 9
Wren changed her mind about what to wear nearly a dozen times.
She is currently wearing it—the navy one, three-quarter sleeves, a hem at her knee—the one she declared in her apartment, in this order, too short, too dark, andtoo obviously trying. She has small gold earrings on that accent the dark tint of her slightly curled hair. She kept the boots she wears every day, because, she said, planting both feet on her own floor like she was prepared to defend the position in court, "I'm not breaking an ankle for these people. I refuse."
It’s a fifteen-minute drive from her apartment to the estate. We're eleven minutes in and she hasn't said anything for the last four.
I let her have the quiet. If I were in her shoes, I can’t even fathom how nervous I’d be. The road unspools in the long gold light of a Sunday afternoon that has decided, against the forecast, to be beautiful, and I keep my eyes on it and my hands at ten and two and let her sit with whatever she's sitting with. Wren doesn't like to be asked how she's feeling while she's still feeling it and I can definitely appreciate that.
She's like me that way. She'll get there.
She gets there a mile later.
"...I'm a little nervous." She says it to the window, not to me. Her hands are folded in her lap, and the thumb of one is pressing a slow circle into the palm of the other, over and over. "I know that's obvious. I just thought I'd say it out loud so it stops being a secret."
"It was never a secret. You've tried on four different dresses."
"Three dresses."
"You're wearing the fourth option. That's four."
She huffs—not quite a laugh, but the shape of one—and the thumb stops circling for a second.
