Page 100 of Wells

"I'm here," he says simply.

Something about the way he says it catches at me, a familiarity I can't place. I'm here. I'm not going anywhere. I've heard those exact words in that exact order before, in a different dark, in a voice that wasn't his. My breath snags on it. For one second, I almost lift my head to ask him why it sounds like something I already know by heart. Then I let it go, because chasing it feels dangerous in a way I don't want to name tonight.

The exhaustion hits all at once, the kind that comes after holding something heavy for too long and finally setting it down. My limbs go loose, and I sink into him, into the warmth of him wrapped around me.

Sleep pulls at me, lulling me into the safety of his arms.

I lift my head just enough to kiss him. "Sleep tight, don't let the bedbugs bite."

Wells's breathing has already started to even out, too, and I can tell he's on the edge of sleep. His voice comes sleep-thick, unguarded like I've never heard it.

"You too, Peoria."

I'm awake all at once, my breath gone shallow. I freeze.

The name hangs in the dark between us, and it takes a second to catch up to what I just heard, even though my soul knew immediately it was all wrong. My heart slams against my ribs while I hold dead still in his arms.

Wells is Midnight. It lands wrong, and then it lands true. Did he know? On the app, at the interview, every late night since, has he known exactly who I was the whole time?

Then I remember the shift in Midnight after we slept together, how his account vanished right after the second time.

I always had a sense that things between us became too familiar too fast, but chalked it up to fate, or some other bullshit thing people lie to themselves about love.

Wells' breathing deepens against my hair, his body gone under, unaware of what he just said, unaware that he just became the exact thing that broke my family before I could walk.

I have to get the fuck out of here. Now.

TWENTY-FOUR

Wells

The Unmasking: At the close of the season the maskers reveal their faces, and you learn at last who you spent the night beside. He wakes to two truths bared in the same hour, the woman gone and the killer finally wearing his own name.

I wake slowly, the way you do when your body is heavier and warmer than it has been in as long as you can remember, like something good soaked into you while you slept.

My hand reaches across the bed before my eyes open.

Cold sheets.

I blink, groggy, and push myself up on one elbow. The bed beside me is empty, the comforter pulled back and tangled where she must have gotten out early this morning.

Blurry outlines of the city start to take shape out of the floor-to-ceiling windows. The sun is nowhere to be seen, but it's already burning off the blackness of the night. I scrub a hand over my face and sit up fully, listening for her.

Nothing.

Last night runs back through my head in fragments. We hit a new milestone last night, a place I've never gone with any other woman.

The words almost came. They rose in my chest, right there on the edge of my tongue, and I could feel the shape of them ready to spill out.

I love you.

I caught them, though, and swallowed them back down before they could land.

Saying them would have made it real in a way I wasn't sure I was ready for. That is the truth I did not want to look at directly.

Now, sitting here with the empty bed and the sunrise pulling color out of the river, that cowardice is thin. I know how I feel and I know that saying them out loud to her doesn't change anything, just like not saying them somehow protects me. I want her to know my heart

"Cera," I call out. Maybe she's in the living room. My voice cuts through the quiet, no response.