Page 40 of Omega’s Fold

I don’t.

11. Wyatt

I wake up before the light.

This is normal for me. What isn’t normal is the other body in the bed, heavy against my side, one arm across my ribs. I lie still for a second and work out what I am feeling.

It’s our fifth day in bed.

What I am feeling, mostly, is that the weight I have been carrying in my chest is gone.

I don’t have a better word for it than that. It was a thing. It had weight and a shape. It sat under the sternum and it has grown lighter since he has been here.

Julian breathes evenly against my shoulder.

I turn my head, slow, so as not to wake him. In this light his face is younger. The line between his eyebrows has gone soft. His hand is open on my chest, fingers loose.

I lie there a while longer listening to the sounds of the morning. There is a crow somewhere out past the fence, complaining. I listen to him breathe and I do not think about very much.

The last few days have been intense. I don’t know how many times he has been inside me, on top of me, under me, behind me. It has felt endless and inevitable and nothing like what I was expecting.

After a while I slide out from under his arm. He makes a small sound and resettles. I pull the quilt up to his shoulder. I watch him for a second to make sure he has gone back under, and then I pick my jeans up off the floor and I go downstairs.

My head is clearer than it has been in days.

The heat is done. I can feel that too. There is a clarity in the body, the way after a fever breaks.

The kitchen is cold. I put the kettle on and I stand at the window and look out at the yard while I wait for it to boil. My hands are steady around the mug when I make the coffee.

He is sitting up when I come back in, his hair is pushed up in every direction. He is wearing my t-shirt, which I have no memory of him putting on, and he has the quilt pulled up to his waist.

I hand it to him. He takes it with both hands and he closes his eyes over the first sip and makes a small sound in his throat that is almost a laugh.

“Good?”

He gives me a soft smile. “Yes, but I was going to be polite about it either way.”

I sit on the edge of the bed with the coffee. For a minute neither of us says anything and it isn’t awkward. It is almost the opposite.

He looks at me over the rim of the mug.

“How are you feeling?” he asks.

I think about it.

“Fine.”

“Just fine.”

“Better than fine. I don’t have a word for it.”

There’s that smile again, the one that softens his face and makes my heart skip a beat.

He doesn’t push. He finishes the coffee. He sets his mug on the floor and he lies back down and he looks at me, and it is the first time I have looked at him in good light without the heat underneath, and what I notice is that his mouth is nice.

That isn’t a thing I would have said about him before.

I get back under the quilt with him.