She’s lying where I left her. She doesn’t turn over. She doesn’t ask.
I take off the boots. I lie down behind her. I fit my chest to her spine and my arm over the curve of her and I pull her closer, and the heat of her floods the cold of the hallway, and the antiseptic fades under the scent of her.
Her hand finds mine where it rests. She laces her fingers through.
The crack in the plaster runs its dark thread above us. She doesn’t ask where I was, and I don’t volunteer the information, and the fact that she could ask and doesn’t is a trust I can feel settle in my chest beside the other thing I’m carrying, the one sitting in a medical wing room with her arms around her knees, and I hold both, and neither cancels the other, and that’s the ground I’m learning to live on.
The heat wakesher at four.
I feel her distress through the bond before I understand what’s causing it, a flare of discomfort that spikes through the low hum of her rest. Then the heat hits, physical, radiating off her in waves I can feel from six inches away. She’s moving before I’ve placed it, fast, throwing the sheet off with a sound that’s half gasp and half fury, her skin so hot the sheet warms in the shape of her after she’s gone.
“Don’t,” she says when I reach for her. Her voice is tight. Her jaw is clenched. “Don’t touch me. I’m on fire. I’m actually on fire. Cold water. Now.”
She’s up and moving toward the bathroom before I’ve finished sitting, and I hear the shower turn, the knob cranked hard, and the sound of water hitting tile, and then a sound I haven’t heard from her.
She gasps. I hear it from the bedroom, clear through the wall and the running water, and it stops me where I sit. A vampire who hasn’t felt cold since the night she turned, and she felt it. Her body dragged back to the human register where temperature is a thing that can hurt, the pregnancy pushing her past what vampirephysiology was built to hold, and now the correction is water cold enough to ache and a woman who forgot what aching from cold feels like.
I’m up before the sound finishes. She said not to touch her, and I won’t until she asks, but there was never a version of this where she shakes in cold water and I stay in bed.
The bathroom is fogged despite the cold water, the heat coming off her body meeting the cold air and producing a low ground-level mist that clings to the tile. She’s standing under the spray with her back to me, both hands flat on the wall, her head down between her arms, and the water is running over her and she’s shaking, fine tremors through her shoulders and down her spine, and the sound she’s making is barely audible, the furious private sound of a body being betrayed by its own biology.
“I hate this,” she says. She hasn’t turned around. She heard me come in, her hearing is as sharp as mine, and she’s keeping her face to the wall. “I hate that I can feel it. I hate that it helps and I hate that I’m standing in here like a human who forgot her coat.”
The tiles are cold and wet under my feet. The mist curls at my ankles. The water splatters off her shoulders in droplets I can track individually, the vampire precision of my vision turning each one into a separate event, and her skin is flushed red across her shoulders and her spine and the small of her back where the heat runs strongest, and I can see the crimson glow of the crescent throwing light against the tile in front of her, the mark over her heart bright enough to stain the water pink where it catches, and she’s shaking and miserable and furious and carrying my children and she won’t turn around.
I step into the spray. The cold does nothing to me. I close the distance behind her and press my chest flat to her back, and the effect is immediate and total.
Her whole body goes still. The trembling stops. The sound shewas making cuts off on an inhale that fills the bathroom, and her head drops back against my shoulder, and the groan that comes out of her has nothing to do with cold.
My skin against hers. My cold against her impossible heat. The temperature differential is bigger than it’s ever been, her heat against a cold that goes all the way through me, and the contact is relief so complete she sags into it, her hands coming off the wall and finding my forearms where they cross over her chest.
“There,” she breathes. “God. There. Don’t move.”
I don’t move.
The water runs over both of us. Her heat seeps into my skin and my cold answers hers and where we meet the temperature is something new, something neither of us runs on our own, and I can feel the bond flare open at the contact, the marks pulsing in sync, the crimson glow filling the stall through the water. Her heartbeat is rapid against my forearms. The two faster ones folded inside her are rapid too, all four running high, and my own matches hers in time and I stand in the cold water and hold her and let the relief do what it does.
What it does is change.
The relief doesn’t crest and settle. It crests and keeps climbing, the gratitude of cool skin against hot skin tipping into something hotter than the flash that drove her here, and her breathing changes, and her fingers tighten on my forearms, and when she presses back against me what comes out of her is not relief anymore.
“This is your fault,” she says. Her voice has gone low and rough. “Your entire body temperature is a provocation.”
“I’m standing still.”
“That’s the provocation.” She turns in my arms. The water runs between us. Her face is flushed and her eyes are dark and her hands come up to my jaw, her face holding the misery and thewant in the same expression, and she’s stopped caring which is which. “You came in here to help.”
“I did.”
“This isn’t help.” She rises on her toes. Her mouth finds the hinge of my jaw, her lips fever-hot against the cool of my neck, and the shudder that goes through me is the one I never learned to control, the one her heat has pulled out of me since the first night she ran warm. “This is the opposite of help. You’re making it significantly worse.”
“I could leave.”
Her hand fists in my hair. She pulls my mouth down to hers. “You could try.”
The water runs cold over both of us and neither of us feels it anymore.
The shadows respond before I can think about keeping them. They slide off my shoulders and down her arms, dark against the flush of her skin, and the contact makes her gasp into my mouth because the shadows run cooler than my hands and they find the places where the heat burns loudest, the small of her back, the curve of her hips, and they grip, reflexive, my body past the point of distinguishing between desire and instinct. She arches into the cold of them and the sound she makes is the one that strips every rational process I own.
