Page 48 of Plain Sight

This is the most normal I’ve felt since I lost Walsh.

Since I didn’t kill him.

I don’t feel like my brain is about to tear out of my body. My ribcage is still flattened, but I can breathe well enough to push a pillow under Lily’s hips and cover her with my body and line myself up.

“Oh, don’t,” she says softly. “Don’t do this.”

“I have to,” I tell her, and lean down to kiss her temple.

It takes me back to the cabin, with Lily in that windowsill, begging me to fuck her ass. She’s doing it silently now. Rolling her hips back onto me. Gasping. Taking it so well.

“You’re my best girl,” I managed.

“You’re—mine,” she says. “My husband. Move, Jameson. Move. Move. Now.”

I lose it, then.

I don’t hurt her. I would never. But I fuck her like I’m her husband. Like we promised to stay together until the end of time. Lily wraps her arms around a pillow and takes me and takes me and takes me until I get my hand around to her front and bring her to an orgasm that ripples through all her muscles and almost blinds me, it’s so strong.

And then I’m in deep, spilling into her, feeling the smallest layer of devastation lift off me.

Lily’s an angel on the pillows as I clean her up, then clean myself up, then put the bed back together. She opens her eyes when I lie down next to her and lifts a hand to trace her fingertips over my face.

Jamie, my mom says.

No, I answer.

Lily frowns. “What did you say?”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Hmm.” She studies me like I bet she studied her homework. A shiver starts at my shoulder blades and goes down to my wrists. Lily can see everything, can’t she? No. Not everything. Almost everything, but not everything, because then I would be fucked. “Did something happen tonight?”

I fucked up. I failed. That’s what happened tonight. I couldn’t make the world safer for her. And for the baby. I even had a knife.

In a life of crime, you can’t expect for everything to go according to plan, but fuck. I thought this would, at least. A higher power was on board at one point.

“No.” It’s true, isn’t it? “Nothing happened.”

“Are you going to stay in bed with me for a while?”

“Yeah.” I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine. “How was your day? Did you and Sunshine get to eat cake?”

“We all ate so much cake.” Lily laughs. I’m so obsessed with her. Laughing in bed with me after I just railed her ass. After I just showed up in the middle of the night, railed her ass, and then told her a half-truth. “It made me want croutons. The chef made such good salads. What did you have for lunch?”

“Uh.” Food. With Kirk. Mason and Gabriel were there. I smiled the whole time. I felt so fucking great, because I had Malcom Walsh’s address and a foolproof plan.

“It must not have been good,” Lily murmurs.

“No, it was—” God. What did I eat for lunch? I remember a lot of lunches. Vegetarian sushi from this place in the student union. A patty that was supposed to be a reproduction of chicken in the high school cafeteria. But those are from a long time ago. I’m not in school anymore, and when I was, Mason didn’t have time to go out to lunch with Gabriel and I wearing business clothes. And Kirk wasn’t there. Kirk was too young to have a job back then. I remember Gabriel’s outfit—he wore green today, and it brought out his eyes—and Mason’s—he was wearing a white shirt and dark pants, very normal for him—and Kirk in his glasses, trying extremely hard to be chill about being at lunch with all of us and Dev, who would not tell me anything I didn’t already know. He’s so cagey. And I was asking him questions at an outdoor table under an awning, and in front of me was… “Ravioli. It was butternut squash ravioli. It was really good.”

“I think you should get some sleep,” Lily suggests.

“Mmm.”

I close my eyes.

She settles her hand on my chest. After a few minutes, her breathing evens out.