His breathing hadn’t changed, hadn’t shifted the way it does when someone wakes up, which meant he’d been lying here, conscious, with me draped across his chest, and he hadn’t moved.
His arm was still around me, his hand resting at my waist, warm through my shirt, steady and unmoving.
He was watching me.
I froze.
For a long moment, neither of us moved or spoke.
Then I looked up.
His eyes met mine; they weren’t guarded, nor sharp or calculating or closed off the way they’d been for years. They were quiet, steady.
Funny enough, that terrified me more than anything outside those walls.
I tried to sit up as panic surged through my chest—not fear,worse. Exposure. The sudden, overwhelming awareness that he had seen me. All of me. Every ugly, broken, desperate piece, and I couldn’t take any of it back.
His hand tightened around my waist, only enough pressure to pause me.
“Shh,” he murmured.
Low, rough with sleep. A voice I’d never heard from him before now.
“Sloane, don’t.”
I hovered there, caught halfway between pulling away and staying where I was; to put distance between us, rebuild whatever wall I could before this got any more complicated than it already was.
My body, the treacherous bitch, didn’t listen.
“Just rest here with me,” he said.
His thumb sliding against my side, stroking.
“Don’t worry,” he added quietly, his eyes still on mine. “I don’t hold what happened against you as anything more than a moment of complete lunacy in a world that seems to be falling apart rapidly.”
The words should have relieved me; they should have been exactly what I needed—a door left open, an exit offered freely, permission to pretend none of it had happened and go back to whatever version of normal we could cobble together.
Instead, something in my chest ached because he was letting me off the
hook, offering me a way out.
But he wasn’t letting go.
“Lie here,” he said softly. “Just rest.”
His heartbeat was steady beneath my cheek. I could feel itthrough his shirt, strong and even and real. The most real thing I’d felt in two days other than fear.
My body won the argument, and I felt myself settle back against him, the tension draining out of me despite every alarm going off in my head. My fingers against his shirt, the warmth of his skin underneath, the solid weight of him.
He let his breath out, and his arm stayed around me as we lay there.
Too close. Too aware of each other. Too aware of what had happened and what it meant, neither of us willing to say it out loud.
* * *
After a while, I forced myself to sit up.
Callan let me go immediately.