Page 108 of Wretched Thorns

“Serena.”

“Jasper. Please. Not tonight.”

He closed his mouth. He looked down at his own hands resting open on his knees, the cloth still caught in one of them, and after a moment he nodded once. “Okay.” He got to his feet and turned to go.

“Stay,”

He stopped.

“Stay until I’m out of the tub.”

“Yeah.” He sank down to sit on the floor with his back against the side of the tub, close enough that I felt the warmth of him come through the porcelain, and I lay back in the water and shut my eyes and let him keep watch.

I stepped out of the bathroom in a robe that smelled like Callum. Jasper was still on the bathroom floor where I had left him, and he did not move when I stepped over his legs. I crossed to the hall door, and he stayed exactly where he was, and I knew he would stay there as long as I was in the vicinity.

Tara sat on the bed with two mugs of tea and a plate of toast. She did not look up when I came in. I lowered myself down beside her. She set the toast on the bedside table without passing me a mug, and I waited, because I could feel something in her about to give, and feel that she needed me to let it.

Her hand started to shake. She set the mug down before it could spill.

“Reen.”

“Tara.”

“I am not going to be okay for a minute.”

“Okay.”

She pressed her hand flat over her mouth, and her shoulders climbed toward her ears, and then she wept, hard, the way I had not seen her weep once in fifteen years of knowing her. The sound of it was bad. I sat very still beside her and did not try to stop it.

Then I held her. The robe gaped open at the front, my ribs ached, my arms were still shaking from the climb up the stairs, and I was without question the wrong body in that room to be the one doing the holding, again, but I held her anyway.

She cried for a while. I didn’t track the time. When she finally pulled back, she did not apologize either.

“I drove down from Nashville and I got forty minutes past the parish line before I had to pull onto the shoulder of I-10 and put my head on the steering wheel for a few, because I could not shake the feeling I had. It was too much like the day my mom died. It felt so… unfinished. I have been carrying that wrong picture of you in my head for six days. Tonight, when you came out of that garçonniere, it wasn’t the picture. I can’t tell you how bad I needed it to not be that picture, Reen.”

I had nothing in me to give back to that. I sat with her and let it stand.

After a while, she picked up the mug of tea and folded my hands around it. “Eat the toast.”

“Tara.”

“Eat the toast.”

I ate the toast. She watched me do it. When I had gotten through the first slice, she let out a long breath and picked up her own mug, and for a good while neither of us said anything else.

Then she looked over at me. “The stamina thing.”

“Yeah.”

“I told you.”

“You told me.”

I laughed once, and it pulled at the rib. She did not laugh with me, but she grinned and cocked her eyebrow in a very naughty and knowing way. She lay down on the bed beside me and laid her arm across my ribs, careful of the cracked one, and on the pillow next to mine the shadow gathered itself in close and settled into a slow, patient breath.

I slept.

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