I’m still watching him.
“I know it was you,” I blurt. “Marcus.”
Something shifts in his face. Not surprise. Something quieter.
“I know it was you in that alley,” I add. “I don’t know what you did or how badly you hurt him. I don’t know if I should be afraid of that.”
He holds my gaze. “Are you? Afraid of that.”
I think about it honestly. “No,” I say.
He nods. Once. Slowly.
The space between us has contracted without either of us moving, or maybe I have moved, or maybe he has.
But approximately eighteen inches now exists between my face and his chest, and I can feel the warmth of him from here.
“You should sleep,” he says. His voice is low and careful.
“I know,” I say.
He doesn’t move.
I don’t close the door.
The eighteen inches become twelve. I am not entirely sure who is responsible for that.
“Saint.” I say his name directly to him for the first time. Not in my head. Not in a notebook. Out loud, to his face, in the doorway of my room at night.
He goes very still.
The kind of still that is not absence but the opposite, the stillness of something at full attention.
I reach up, and I put my hand flat against his chest. Over his sternum. Just my palm. Just the warmth of him through the fabric, and his heartbeat underneath hard muscles, steady, slower than mine, steady in the way that everything about him is steady, that maddening, inexhaustible patience of a man who has decided he can wait and means it.
“Thank you,” I murmur.
He looks down at my hand on his chest. Then up at my face.
The expression that crosses his face is the most unguarded thing I have ever seen on him, brief, involuntary, there and gone in under a second. But I see it.
I take my hand back, step back into my room, and close the door.
On the other side of it, I press my back against the wood, and I slide down until I am sitting on the floor with my knees pulled up and my heart hammering and my palm still warm from his heartbeat.
I tip my head back against the door, and I breathe.
In the hallway, I hear him standing there for a long time, like he can sense my inner turmoil through the door.
Then his footsteps, slow and deliberate, go back toward the stairs.
I close my eyes.
And for the first time, it feels like the beginning of something rather than the end.
Saint
She put her hand on my chest.