Page 71 of Travis
Chapter 18
Travis
I woke at four with Sera's back against my chest and my arm around her waist and the black kitten curled in the space behind her knees.
The room was dark. Underground dark, which was the only kind I trusted. No windows, no ambient light from the corridor, just the faint green glow of the digital clock on the nightstand reading 4:02. Her breathing was slow and even.
I lay there not wanting to move. Sera's warmth against my chest. Her hair against my jaw. The barely perceptible weight of her hand resting on my forearm where I held her. The kitten's purr, a tiny motor running at a frequency that vibrated through the mattress.
Then my brain woke up the rest of the way.
Sera. In my arms. In my bed.
Naomi's sister.
The warmth I'd been lying inside turned sick. My stomach clenched and my throat went tight and I held very still.
I'd slept with her. Not in the abstract, not in the theoretical space where I'd been keeping her for four years. I'd put my hands on her and my mouth on her, and I'd been inside her and she'd said my name, and I had wanted it more than I had ever wanted anything.
I'd known this would happen. Even while I was kissing her, even while I was inside her, some part of me had known I'd end up right here. Awake in the dark, sick with it, wishing I could cut the last six hours out of my body and knowing I'd do every second of it again if she let me.
The guilt didn't care that I'd chosen her. It just sat in the center of my chest with the full weight of a dead woman behind it and waited for me to stop pretending I was allowed to have this.
Sera shifted in her sleep, pressing closer. Her shoulder blade settled against my chest and the contact sent warmth radiating through me, and the warmth made the hollow worse because I could feel both things at the same time and they were pulling in opposite directions.
I had taken something good for myself last night. Her body, her trust, the way she'd looked at me in the dark like I was worth looking at. I'd taken it and it had been the best thing I'd felt in three years, and now something in me was demanding I give it back.
Not because it was wrong, and very fucking definitely not because it had been bad, but even thinking about it now had my cock getting hard.
It was because I didn't get to have this. I didn’t deserve it. Didn’t deserve Sera and her gentle stubbornness.
The reasons were tangled together so tightly I couldn't pull them apart in the dark. Naomi was dead, and there were things about her death, about me, that Sera didn't know. Things that would change the way she looked at me if she found out.
I wanted her right now. Lying in the dark with her breathing against me, I wanted to wake her up and pull her closer and bury myself in her again and let the stillness hold.
Instead, I moved.
Slow. The same controlled extraction I'd used a hundred times leaving positions in the field. Easing my arm from under her, shifting my weight inch by inch, letting the mattress absorb each movement so the surface barely changed.
Sera's breathing didn't alter. The kitten opened one eye, assessed me with the indifference of an animal that had zero investment in my psychological crisis, and went back to sleep.
I stood in the doorway and looked back at her. A shape in my bed. In my room. In the space I had designed for one person because one person was all I could justify. She was lying where I slept every night, and she looked like she belonged there, and the fact that she looked like she belonged there was the thing I couldn't stand.
The wanting and the guilt were the same size. I couldn't hold both, so I left the room and pulled the door closed behind me.
The kitchen was dark. I turned on the light over the stove because the overhead was too bright and I didn't want bright. The coffee machine was set on its timer the way it always was, but the timer was set for six, and it was four-fifteen.
I could make coffee manually. I stared at the two mugs sitting in the dish rack.
Two mugs. Hers and mine, washed together yesterday, dried and placed side by side.
One of the kittens was asleep on the chair Sera always sat in. The gray one, sprawled across the seat cushion in a position that suggested it had no spine. On the counter next to the stove, Sera’s legal pad sat where she'd left it, handwriting so precise it looked typeset, equations and variables mapped in a system only her brain could navigate.
Everywhere I looked there was evidence this compound held two people now. Not because I'd planned it or allowed it or engineered it into the design specs, but because she had walked in and stayed, and the space had made room for her without asking my permission, and I had let it happen because some part of me had wanted it to happen.
I left the coffee maker and went to the pool.
The pool had always been my reset. Three years of living underground, and the ritual was the one thing I could count on to bring my system back to baseline. Cold water, controlled breathing, the repetitive pull of my arms through the surface. Mechanical. Predictable. The kind of stimulus that quieted everything else.
