Softly,I place a cautious hand on his head, mussing his hair a little. “All right down there?”
Skylar says nothing for a long moment.
Then he sighs. “I’m sorry I’ve given you something else to fret about.”
“I’m not fretting.”
He snorts. “Did you have a life lobotomy when I wasn’t looking?”
“Lots of things happen when I’m not looking. Doesn’t mean they’re your fault instead of mine.”
Skylar shifts a little to look at me. In the murky light of another cold morning, he looks younger than I’m used to. As if being without Mal has stripped him down to who he was before they loved each other. “You’re a stubborn idiot, but you were made that way. The rest of it is someone else fucking things up or fate doing you over.”
My gaze drifts to where Jack is still asleep. “I’m not the one who got the raw deal from fate.”
“Yes, you are. He made a choice and he’s living with the consequences. You didn’t get a say in any of it.”
Skylar’s said some version of that before. So has Jack. And they both believe it—but I don’t. Jack stepped in front of that mortar on instinct, and we don’t get to choose who we are.
Not Jack.
Not me.
Not even Skylar as he does the unthinkable and goes back to sleep still using me as a pillow.
I hardly dare move.
So I don’t. I keep my hands where they are, loose on his head and shoulder, so he knows where I am when he wakes up, and fluctuate between staring at the ceiling and staring at Jack on the opposite sofa. Tracking the faint twitches that run through him as he starts to wake up.
Slow.
Incremental.
Cell by cell.
Piecing himself back together before he’ll risk opening his eyes.
He takes a deep breath, listening to his body, listening to the world around him, fighting the pull of the strange and liminal place his brain sometimes wants him to stay. I’ve never been sure if he knows he does this—the listening part. Or if he’s always done it and all that’s changed is that it’s overt now.
Gods, I love him.
So much I almost die right here on this couch.
Maybe I would without the weight of Skylar’s head on my thigh. Without the slow rise and fall of him as he sleeps, slack-limbed and trusting, just little old me between him and a world that’s making him afraid to be alone.
He’s coming back.
Mal.
But what if he doesn’t? An unspeakable horror that hits me as Jack opens his eyes for real, blinking in and out of focus before he gets a hold on it and finds me.
For a long moment, he stares.
At me and whatever my face is doing.
At Skylar.
Then he tilts his head a little.Something happened?