Page 47 of Ransom
"What happened the night of the lightning?" he asked.
I closed my eyes.
I remembered the rain. The man we worked for had told us to stay out in it. Chance had grinned at me and told me to stop worrying.
Then the flash came. The sound followed. The air smelled like something burnt.
And my brother was on the ground, not moving, not breathing. His heart stopped for six minutes. I spent every one of them on my knees in the mud with my hands on his chest, screaming at him to come back.
"I don't want to talk about it," I said.
The word sat heavy in the dark room.
Winston didn't push. He just lay there beside me, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, and let the silence hold what I'd given him and what I wouldn't.
Then he reached over and picked up the photo from the nightstand. He turned it face up and set it back, careful, propping it against the flowers.
I reached over and turned off the lamp.
The dark settled around us. Winston's breathing slowed, deepened, and went heavy against my shoulder. He fell asleep easily. He rested his hand on my chest. His weight shifted toward me in the narrow bed, warm and solid and trusting in a way that made me want to shove him onto the floor.
I didn't shove him onto the floor.
I lay there in the dark with his hand on my chest and his breath on my shoulder and the photo of my brother propped against stolen flowers and I thought about the shack. About the ridge. About my finger on the trigger and the long time I'd spent not pulling it.
I'd kept him alive because I'd wanted to keep him alive.
The rest had been Rafe's words coming out of my own head.
Winston's hand rose and fell on my chest with each breath I took.
I put my hand over his and left it there.
Mine, I thought.
I waited for the part of me that always pulled back from the word to pull back from it now.
It didn't.
I closed my hand around his and held on.
I woke with Winston'sarm across my chest, and the math wouldn't work.
Chance's room was nine hundred a day. Rafe needed the work done. The land had teeth that needed feeding. The bills at UNM didn't care who'd slept in my bed, and the operation didn't care either. Every variable held. The man breathing against my shoulder shouldn't have been enough to break anything, and he had, and I couldn't find where.
I turned my head on the pillow.
Winston slept on his stomach with his face pushed into the pillow, and his hair sticking up in the back. The marks I'd put on his throat last night were already purple. Below the jaw, where a collar wouldn't cover it, the skin was clean. I lay there and thought about that clean skin longer than I should have.
I slid my arm out from under his and sat up slow. He made a sound of complaint and rolled into the warm spot I'd left, still asleep. I stood up in the cold and grabbed a clean pair of jeans off the chair.
Winston woke while I was at the stove, waiting for the coffee to brew.
"What time is it?" His voice was rough with sleep.
"Five."
"Jesus. You always get up this early?"
