The floor was harder than the couch, but it was warmer being closer to the low fire. Better near him. I dipped my head to rest it on my bent knees. I could sleep sitting up. I’d done it before.
I hadn’t meant to wake him, but I must have. A hand touched the top of my head. Warm and still.
“Blue?” he asked, his voice thick with sleep. “What are you doing off the couch?”
Opening my mouth to speak, I hesitated. Unable to articulate what I needed. To not be alone in the dark. To not be alone while I slept. To be near someone.
Which was wrong. He wasn’t just anyone. He was Wolfe. He’d rescued me and taken me in and hadn’t, as yet, asked questions I would be unable to answer. It would be wrong to ask for more than he’d already given me.
Above me, in the dark, he drew a deep breath, and I realized he’d fallen back asleep. Which meant that I could stay where Iwas, at least until morning. I wrapped the quilt tightly around my shoulders, gazed at the orange and blue and gray coals, and soaked in the warmth, the consistency of Wolfe’s breaths. In and out. Listened to the wind howl outside the windows.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt so safe inside of a moment like this one. I thought about the contents of the duffel that Wolfe had shown me, the odd assortment of things that didn’t seem to go together but had been hastily thrown together or haphazardly assembled.
The collection reeked of a kind of person who took things as they came. Lived moment to moment. Whose face showed an easy happiness. The face and name were just beyond my vision, even if I closed my eyes. The harder I thought, the more wobbly the memory became.
There was someone else, too, in those memories that skittered across my brain. Younger than the first. Seemingly quiet and sweet, but with an inner core of literal steel. A little black notebook. An obsession with maps. A wary watchfulness. Who was he?
Sadness rippled beneath my skin. I knew them both. But I could not name either. My head ached, and the screams of the wind and the pellet shots of icy snow against the windows only made it worse.
“Blue?”
Holding my breath, I realized that I’d made a sound. Cried out loud. Woken Wolfe up. Disturbed the deserved rest of the one man who stood between me and a black abyss into which I would surely fall if I took even a single move in one direction or another.
“Blue?” Wolfe asked again.
Down came the footrest, and I felt warm hands on my shoulders, stiffening beneath his touch for no reason I understood. The pounding in my head increased, as though I’dbeen smacked, hard, and I was hot all over as though with a fever. I brought my hand to my face to check if my nose was bleeding, because it felt like it was.
Wolfe knelt in front of me, blocking the low light from the fire. He smelled warm from sleep, his closeness like a blanket.
“It’s no good on the floor,” he said, the words nighttime low as though there was someone in the other room we might disturb. “Can I help you back onto the couch? Can I get you anything?”
Part of me remembered, somehow, being sick, home from school, calling on the house phone to someone named Bettina. She was the housekeeper. She was from France, and her accent had faded, except when she was cross with me, which wasn’t very often.
If I couldn’t find Bettina, I’d find Rosalinda, who was the cook. Her background included Michelin-star kitchens, and she made the most amazing food. Cuban. German. Simple Irish beef pies. Anything you could want. Either one of these ladies might bring me a hot drink and an aspirin. A cool cloth for my head. All I had to do was ask.
I stared hard at this mental image and watched it fade from view. Tried to hold on to it so I could unravel it.
“You’re hot,” Wolfe said, his broad palm on my forehead. “C’mon.”
He lifted me to my feet and guided me to the couch. There, he pulled back the blanket and sheet, and helped me lie down. I felt utterly helpless, like a child who’d gone too far and done too much that day. But so grateful to Wolfe.
Moving into the kitchen, Wolfe flipped on the light over the stove and brought back a glass and a small bottle of Tylenol. After he helped me take it, he went back to the kitchen and brought back a small towel filled with ice.
“I’d go outside and get some snow, since there’s plenty,” he joked, then said, “but the blizzard makes that more trouble than it’s worth. Here.” He tipped my head forward and placed the makeshift ice bag on the back of my neck. His other hand was cold as he placed his palm on my forehead. “There. That should feel better. Can you hold it in place? I’m going to get something for your feet.”
It was the oddest thing, but within a minute of holding that ice bag to the back of my neck, I started to feel better. The Tylenol began to kick in. Wolfe came back, peeled the covers from my feet, and wiped each one with a cold, damp cloth. All of me relaxed. I was no longer boiling. The headache subsided by degrees.
“Can you rest?” he asked. “It’s only two in the morning.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to wake you. I just wanted to be near you.”
This seemed to take him aback. His eyes tracked me up and down, his expression cautious in the light from the stove.
“I’ll be right here,” he said, as though answering a question I hadn’t asked rather than addressing the statement I’d just made.
Maybe it was easier for him to be evasive, though I could hardly blame him. He didn’t know me. I didn’t know him. Yet in those eyes, I saw kindness. I wanted to reach for him and grab hold and never let go. Just so I didn’t have to walk into the darkness of my own mind, completely lost forever. And also, because I liked his smile. The fine lines next to his eyes. The hardness of his muscles beneath the gentlest touch.
“Wolfe?” I asked.
