I stayed awake a while longer. I wanted to know what the room sounded like with her in it. I'd been a man with somewhere else to be my whole life, and tonight, I had nowhere to be but here.
I went under sometime after four.
CHAPTER 17
Astrid
I opened my eyes to the light coming through the hole in the curtain at the side of the bed.
The hole was the size of a quarter, where his grandmother snagged the curtain on a hanger one summer a long time ago. The light came through it in a single straight beam and landed on the back of my hand that was on his chest. He had his hand over mine, set there sometime in the dark before he went back to sleep.
I lay there for a moment without moving.
Easton was on his back. His chest was warm under my hand. His breathing was slow and even. The breath in him had gone all the way down at some point in the night, the same deep settling I'd felt the night Penny went, and it stayed there. Blond hair pushed back from his forehead, the pale line at his temple where the cat scratch had healed weeks ago, the stubble I'd felt against my mouth the night before.
Eyes closed. Mouth slightly open. His hand on top of mine.
I'd never, in my life, looked at a man asleep beside me and felt this safe.
I didn't check his breathing for clues. I didn't clock the set of his shoulders or his jaw to figure out what morning was coming. I just looked.
My eyes drifted past him to the rest of the room. His grandmother's dresser against the wall, a doily on top. Her vanity under the window with her hairbrush still on it. And on the seat of the small floral armchair across from the bed, my green dress, the one I'd stepped out of the night before and dropped where it landed.
My dress. His grandmother's chair. Same Wednesday morning.
He stirred under my hand. He didn't wake. His hand on mine tightened a quarter of an inch.
I closed my eyes.
I thought about the night before in pieces. The cast iron on the stove. His eyes were on me across the kitchen table. His hand at my wrist in the doorway of this room, not letting me lead him into a place he'd been leading me into for six weeks. The Queens-tinted laugh when Moose scratched at the door. His grip on my hip when I told him my hands were shaking. The twoI'm okaysI'd said on purpose, because I'd decided, in the dark of a man's bedroom, that with him I was going to be heard the first time and the second time both.
I'd been waiting six years to know what that felt like.
I got up at six-fifteen.
Carefully, because Easton was still asleep, and because the only thing I had to wear in this house was a dress that wasn't going to make it through a vet appointment with a basset hound. I slipped my hand out from under his. He didn't wake. I crossedthe room, took the gray Hartsdale Fire T-shirt from the top drawer of his dresser—the soft one he'd given me the morning of the bath towel—and pulled it on over my underwear.
Moose was on the rug by the back door when I came into the kitchen. Penny's rug. He lifted his head, gave me one slow tail-thump, and put it back down. He'd decided some time before sunrise that he was a dog of this house, too, and he wasn't going to be talked out of it.
I put the coffee on.
Easton came into the kitchen five minutes later.
He had pulled sweatpants on but not a shirt. His hair was sticking up on one side. He looked at me at the counter in his gray T-shirt with the coffee pot already filling, and he didn't say anything for a count of three. The corner of his mouth turned up.
"Good morning."
"Hi yourself." I poured the second mug and held it out.
He took it. His eyes went to the hem of the t-shirt at my thigh, then back up.
"You're in my shirt."
"I needed a shirt."
He came around the counter, set his hand on my hip, and kissed me at the corner of my mouth—the small one he'd been giving me for six weeks—and then he kissed me on the mouth properly, the one he'd been giving me for a week.
"Did you sleep?" His thumb stroked the bone at my hip through the cotton.
