Casey, in his sleep, with his eyes closed and his face slack and peaceful and his breathing deep and steady, rolls the final distance and settles against me. His chest presses against my side. His arm, that massive, heavy arm, drapes over my waist and pulls me in with a gentle, unconscious certainty, as if his body has been waiting to do this and is simply, finally, arriving at the destination it always intended as he pulls my back tightly against his chest.
He is warm. He is so warm. The heat of him presses against the entire length of my back, from my shoulders to my calves, and it is not uncomfortable nor is it oppressive, it is the opposite of those things. It is like being wrapped in something that has been heated specifically for me, something that fits the exact dimensions of my body, and I can feel his heartbeat against my back, slow and steady and sure.
His breath stirs my hair. His arm tightens fractionally around my waist. His hand comes to rest against my sternum, palm flat, fingers spread, and I can feel my own heartbeat hammering against his palm. If he were awake he would feel it too, and he would know, he would know everything.
I cannot breathe. I cannot think. Every framework I have ever built, every emotional defence I have ever constructed, every wall and protocol and carefully maintained margin of error, is dissolving under the weight of a sleeping man's arm around my waist and the sound of his breathing and the devastating, world-ending, unbearable feeling of safety when being held.
I have not been held like this in years. Correction; I have never been held like this before. Nobody has ever wrapped themselvesaround me in the dark and pulled me close with such gentle, unquestioning certainty. Nobody has ever made me feel like the space beside them was built specifically for me to occupy, as if my sharp angles and rigid edges and cold, careful architecture are not obstacles but simply the shape of me, and the shape of me fits perfectly.
Something behind my eyes burns. Something old, and tired, and locked away in a room I never open.
I close my eyes. I press my lips together. I do not make a sound.
And I do not move his arm.
I fall asleep. Despite everything, despite the hammering pulse and the burning eyes and the complete, comprehensive collapse of every boundary I have drawn, the exhaustion wins. Casey's presence pulls me under like a tide, and I sleep, and it is the deepest, most total, most undefended sleep I have had in months, possibly years, possibly ever.
I dream of nothing. For the first time in as long as I can remember, my brain stops running scenarios. It just stops. There are no surgical margins. No risk calculations. No tragic outcome projections. There is nothing but warmth, and darkness, and the slow, steady drumbeat of someone else's heart resonating against mine.
I wake up with my face pressed against Casey's chest.
At some point during the night, the migration has completed its full orbital trajectory. I have turned in my sleep, turned toward him, toward the heat, and now I am curled against his front with my forehead against his collarbone and my hand fisted in the cotton of his t-shirt. His arm is still around me, heavier now with the deep weight of sleep. One of his legs has hooked over mine, an anchoring, possessive tangle that pins me against him with a gentle, immovable certainty. His chin isresting on top of my head. His breathing is slow and deep and even.
I am inescapably surrounded by Casey Welling.
I do not move. I do not breathe. I conduct a rapid, silent, comprehensive assessment of the situation with the focused desperation of a surgeon who has opened a patient and discovered a complication that was not on any of the preliminary scans.
His t-shirt is warm under my clenched fist. My face is pressed into the hollow of his throat. I can smell him: vetiver and cedar and sleep-warm skin, and underneath it all, that particular scent that is just Casey, that I have catalogued without meaning to over two years of proximity, and it is everywhere. It is all around me, and my body is so relaxed, so fully surrendered against him, that I know that I did not resist this. I did not fight it. I did not wake up and rebuild the wall and retreat to my side.
I turned toward him. In my sleep, without walls or protocols or clinical detachment to stop me, I turned toward him and pressed myself against his chest and held on.
My hand is gripping his shirt like I am afraid he will disappear.
I hear the first bird call through the balcony doors. The sky is beginning to lighten, the deep Rajasthani blue going grey and then pink at the edges. In approximately forty minutes, the household staff will begin their morning preparations. In approximately sixty minutes, my mother will expect us at breakfast.
I need to extract myself. I need to do it carefully, without waking him, without leaving evidence, without acknowledging that this happened. Because if I acknowledge it, if I let myself sit inside the full, devastating weight of what it felt like to sleep in Casey Welling's arms, I will not be able to maintain this deception. I will not be able to call this fake. I will not be able to look at this man across a breakfast table and pretend that he is a strategic arrangement and not the first person who has ever made me feel safe enough to stop thinking.
I begin the extraction. Slowly. Millimetre by millimetre. I uncurl my fingers from his t-shirt, smoothing the wrinkledfabric with a reflex precision that is admittedly absurd. I ease my head back from his collarbone. I shift my hips away from his, navigating the tangled geometry of his leg around mine with the careful, controlled movements of a surgeon working in a confined space.
Casey murmurs in his sleep. His arm tightens.
I freeze. My pulse, which had been approaching something manageable, spikes back into arrhythmia. His face shifts, his brow creasing slightly, and for one terrifying second I think he is waking up, but then his expression smooths, and his arm relaxes, and his breathing deepens again.
I slip free. I slide to the edge of the mattress, put my feet on the cool marble floor, and sit there for a long, silent moment with my elbows on my knees and my face in my hands.
I look back at the bed. Casey has rolled into the warm space I left behind, his massive frame spreading across three-quarters of the mattress with the unconscious entitlement of someone whose body has always taken up exactly as much room as it needed. The pillow wall is a demolished ruin, bolsters and cushions scattered across the silk like the aftermath of a small, soft war. His face, in the dawn light, is slack and peaceful and openly, defencelessly beautiful.
I stand. I walk to the bathroom, and quietly close the door behind me. I turn on the shower, and I stand under the water, and I press my forehead against the cool marble tiles, and I allow myself, for thirty seconds, to feel everything I spent the entire night pretending I didn't.
Then I turn off the water. I dry my face. I look at myself in the mirror, green eyes red-rimmed, dark curls damp, jaw set.
Thirty seconds more. That is all I will permit.
I dress with my usual precision. I style my hair. I rebuild myself, piece by piece, in front of the mirror until the man looking back at me is the Dread Prince again, composed and clinical and betraying nothing.
Then I walk back into the bedroom and stand over thedemolished ruin of my pillow wall, and the enormous, golden, sleeping man who bulldozed it.
“Casey.” I keep my voice controlled. The voice of a man who absolutely did not wake up tangled in this person’s shirt with his face buried in his neck. “Wake up. Breakfast is in forty minutes and we need to present a united front.”