Page 41 of Iron Debt
I was tired. The kind of tired that isn’t sleepiness but is the body recognising that it has reached the end of what it can hold awake and is asking, gently, to stop. He saw it. He saw it because he saw everything – the shift of my weight, the softening of my shoulders, the way my eyelids moved.
“Stay,” he said. The word was quiet and low and it sat in the room like a piece of furniture that had always been there.
I lay down. On his bed, on top of the covers, still holding the locket in my closed fist. He pulled the edge of the duvet over me – not tucking, not arranging, just placing it the way he placed everything: with considered care. Then he sat on the edge of the bed with his back to me and his hands on his knees and he watched the dawn come through the curtains.
I fell asleep. The last thing I felt was the warmth of his back against my shins through the duvet, and the locket warm in my hand, and the impossible safety of being in a room with a man who had been carrying me since I was nine years old and had never once asked me to carry him back.
I slept. He didn’t.
Something later – minutes or hours, I don’t know – the thin blue light of a phone screen. I heard him pick it up. The faint buzz of a message arriving. He read it insilence. One message from Lachlan:Fergus came in last night. We have a problem. Come in at six.
He looked at me sleeping. I know he looked at me because the weight of his gaze had a quality I could feel even through sleep – the gravity of Alastair Drummond’s attention, which was not light and was not heavy but was as constant and as unignorable as the tide.
He got up very carefully. The bed shifted. The door opened and closed without sound.
I slept on. The locket held the warmth of both our hands.
CHAPTER 23
The Body Remembers
MORVEN
He was very careful with me. I did not expect this from a man who broke things for a living. I didn’t know what to do with careful.
I woke in his room. Not my room – his. The pillow smelled of clean soap and something warmer underneath, the scent of his skin that I was beginning to catalogue the way I catalogued the smells of this house: sandalwood was Lachlan, expensive coffee was the study, cold granite was the cliff path, and this – this warm, clean, solidly human smell – was Al.
He wasn’t there. The bed beside me was cool. The curtains were half-open and the dawn light was the grey-blue of winter Cairndhu – not sunshine, never sunshine, but the light that came before the clouds decided what they were doing with the day. His phone was gone. His shoes were gone. Lachlan’s six o’clock message had taken him.
I lay still. The locket rested on my chest, warm fromsleep. The chain was thin and old and it rose and fell with my breathing and I watched it catch the light and I thought about the twelve years it had spent in his pocket, in his locker, in the envelope behind the wraps, close to his hands. Close to whatever it was he kept locked in the box in his head – the one Ewan had described without naming, the one I had felt the lid of when he’d kissed me on the studio floor.
The door opened.
He stood in the doorway. He was dressed – jeans, a dark T-shirt, his hair damp from a shower he’d taken somewhere else, the smell of soap stronger now, and in his hand a mug of tea. He looked at me. I looked at him.
He came in. He placed the tea on the bedside table beside the glass of water that was still there from last night, and he stood at the edge of the bed and he looked at me lying in his sheets with his pillow under my head and my bare feet visible where the duvet had shifted, and his face did something I’d never seen it do – it softened. Not dramatically. Not the kind of softening you’d notice if you didn’t know what you were looking at. But I knew what I was looking at. I’d spent my whole life reading bodies, and his body – in this moment, in this light, standing at the edge of his own bed – was telling me that the six o’clock message could wait.
“Come here,” I said.
He didn’t move. Not because he didn’t want to. Because the wanting was the thing he was managing, and managing it was what he’d been doing for twelve years, and old habits are structural.
“Al.” I said his name the way you say a word you’ve been tasting in your mouth without speaking – with weight, with the shape of it fully formed. “Come here.”
He sat on the edge of the bed. The mattress dipped.His weight beside me changed the geography of the entire room – the angle of the light, the pull of the sheets, the smell of the air.
I sat up. I put my hand on his jaw. He turned his face into my palm and the breath he released was unsteady and the unsteadiness of it – from this man, from this body that controlled everything including the rate of its own exhalation – went through me like a current.
The morning was ours for another hour.
He kissed me the way he’d kissed me in the studio – carefully, precisely, with the kind of attention that treated every movement as deliberate. His hands were on my waist, then my hips, then the small of my back, and each shift of them was negotiated in the silence between us – offered and accepted in the wordless language of two people who had spent enough time reading each other’s bodies that speech had become redundant.
I pulled the T-shirt over my head. He went very still. His eyes moved across my skin – my collarbones, the line of my ribs, the muscles of my stomach that years of ballet had carved into something closer to sculpture than anatomy – and his gaze had weight. Physical weight. I could feel it landing on my skin the way I could feel the light, and the combination of the two – his attention and the dawn – made me feel more exposed than the absence of clothing.
“You can touch me,” I said. “I’m telling you. You can.”
His hand – enormous, scarred across the knuckles, warm – settled on my ribcage. The spread of his fingers covered three of my ribs. He held me there. Not moving. Just holding. Learning the rate of my breathing through his palm, the way his body learned everything – through contact, through patience, through the devastating thoroughness of a man who would not do anything until he understood it.
I pulled him closer. I kissed the line of his jaw, the hinge beneath his ear, the solid column of his neck. He tasted of soap and tea and cold morning air and the layered warmth underneath that was simply him. His hand moved from my ribcage to my back, pulling me against him, and the breadth of his chest against mine was like pressing against a wall that was warm and breathing and wanted me closer.
