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He moved to me and placed his hands on my waist, sliding them down to my hips over my towel. His eyes were lowered, head bowed as if in prayer.
“You haven’t sung like that in a while.”
“It hasn’t felt right, I guess.” I lifted a shoulder, trying to brush it off. It hadn’t felt right to sing, not since the boys were taken. It hadn’t felt right to eat, or sleep, or even breathe. With Rylan’s return, I’d started singing again. I hadn’t even realized it.
And wasn’t that a betrayal? How could I sing for one son while the other was still gone?
Xander’s eyes met mine. The greens in his irises were gentle as the wind through grass.
“Cheeks…”
“I know.” My shoulders hunched as my body tried to close itself off to him. “I know we have to talk about it. But…”
“Do you wanna talk about it?”
“Do you?” I lowered my eyes to the hotel room’s carpet. It was short and stubby, easy to clean, colored a dozen different shades of beige.
“Some of it, I guess,” Xander said, his hands rubbing up my sides to my arms. “I lost my temper; I can own up to that. I was so desperate to know where Ryder was, I didn’t manage keep myself under control. Denny was right. After I lost my shit with that woman, she wasn’t in any state to give us information. I gained us nothing and cost us time. Time we don’t have.”
I frowned up at him. “You had no idea Ryder wasn’t there. If I’d been in your position, I probably would have lost it, too.”
“No, you wouldn’t have. You’ve always been better than me. Even in high school, when those kids were making fun of you… I wanted to break their faces for it. Did, sometimes.” His fingers tightened at my biceps, like he was cracking his knuckles, recalling the way coming to my defense had often left them marked with blood. “But you never lashed out. You always took it on the chin.”
“I didn’t want to.” I slipped free of his hold, running my hands down his arms until his fingers were locked with mine. With my hand in his, I led him to the bed. “For every time you beat some idiot kid up for calling me fat, I imagined doing a lot worse. It’s like you said, when I got it in my head that I was going to kill Melony.” I scoffed at how stupid I must’ve sounded then. “A pack needs more than just killers, but it does need its killers, too.”
“I saw how you bared your teeth at that woman today when she tried to take Rylan from you.” Xander forced half a smirk. “You looked pretty murderous to me.”
“I felt murderous,” I admitted. “But ultimately, no one fucked up that badly. We can try again tomorrow. We have Rylan with us, no one got hurt, no one ended up dead. It could have been worse.”
“Yeah, s’pose so.” Xander rubbed the back of his neck. “You tired?”
I closed my eyes experimentally. They ached, which suggested that I was, but my brain felt too loud to allow for sleep. “I’m not sure.”
“Can I lie in bed and hold you anyway?”
“Of course.” I smiled and shifted up toward the pillows, crawled in beneath the sheets.
Xander lay on his side and folded his body against mine. One arm moved beneath my neck to wrap across my collar bones. The other was a pleasant weight over my ribs. I wasn’t sure which of us needed this comfort more.
Likely, it didn’t matter. What mattered was that we both needed it, period, and found it in each other.
We could survive this.
I reached to the nightstand and flicked off the light. In the darkness, it wasn’t Xander I found myself thinking about, or even my sons.
It was Melony Houghton.
“I can hear you, you know,” Xander murmured against my neck.
“What?” I was fairly certain I wasn’t singing without realizing it again.
“Thinking, Cheeks.” He snorted. “Sometimes, it’s the loudest sound in the entire world. What’s on your mind?”
I let his question linger in the air and in my brain. My thoughts weren’t just loud. They were chaotic. It took me several seconds just to order them into something I could communicate.
“I just don’t understand why she would give up one of the babies like this but not the other. Why would she only send one baby here?” I finally said. “There was only one crib. One nursery. But it couldn’t have just been a temporary measure. There were paint samples on the wall, like someone was trying to choose a color.”
“I noticed that,” said Xander. “You don’t paint a room in a house you’re not planning on staying in.”
