Page 144 of Rage
“Always,” he says.
That night, I don’t wait for the nightmare. That night, I turn to him first.
There is a difference between the nights the nightmare brings him to me and the nights I bring him to me myself, and I have been learning, slowly, that the second kind matters more. That choosing to reach for someone before you are already broken is a different thing entirely from reaching for them after. It is the version of trust that does not require a crisis. It is the version that says, I want you here. Not because I need rescuing. Because this is where you belong.
He is sitting against the headboard when I turn to him, his book closed in his lap, watching me with the dark, unhurried attention that I stopped trying to look away from weeks ago.
I move toward him. He makes room.
He learns me the way he learns everything, completely, without missing anything, without rushing toward the end of the lesson. Every thrust. Every whisper of his name on my lips every time I come. Every stroke of his tongue on my skin. Every moan he makes when he empties inside me like a gift.
And I let him.
I give him everything he asks for and several things he doesn’t ask for, but that I want him to have, and when it is over, I lie against his chest in the dark, and his heartbeat is under my palm, and the room is ours and the night is ours.
He presses his mouth to the top of my head once, quietly, the way he does when the words would be redundant.
I close my eyes and fall asleep without dreaming.
Saint
Iwake before she does, which is always.
But this morning I don’t move immediately. I lie with her against my chest and her hair against my chin and her hand on my sternum where she placed it in her sleep, and I look at the ceiling of her room, and I let myself have the morning. My mind races with thoughts of what she means to me.
This is new. Letting myself have things. The ward stripped the habit from it. When you live in a place where everything is conditional, everything administered on a schedule controlled by someone else, you learn to stop wanting the spaces between the conditions. You learn to want only what is in front of you because wanting something in the future is the fastest route to a kind of pain.
But she has given me back the future.
Not all at once. In pieces. The way she does everything, carefully, honestly, one piece at a time so I can hold it without dropping it.
The first piece was a note I slid under her door.
The last piece was last night, which I’m going to be thinking about for a very long time. It wasn’t rough sex. It was a vow.
I look at her face in the morning light.
Her hair is fanned out across the pillow. Her lips slightly parted. Her pink nipples and the dip of her waist.
I think about what I want. The actual version, the one I have been allowing myself to build since the roof at golden hour and both hands flat on my chest.
I want to keep her.
Not the way Roman kept her. Not the way the Order expects me to keep her. Not as a resource or a territory or a body to organize control around.
I want her the way you want something that is already yours in the only sense that matters, not legally, not by force, but freely given that neither of us has ever had access to before.
I want her permanently. I want her safe. I want her in every morning I have left.
And I want—and this is the part that has been forming in the dark of my own mind for weeks now—the thing I haven’t said because I’m still working out how to say it honestly. I want more than this. More than a dorm room and modified terms and the borrowed time of a campus that will eventually end. I want the version that starts here and keeps going. That has no expiry date. That is ours in the way that nothing in either of our lives has ever been ours before.
She opens her eyes and finds me immediately.
“Good morning,” she says. Her voice is rough with sleep.
“Good morning.”
“You were thinking,” she says.
