Page 135 of What We Bury

“Night.” The door clicks shut behind him.

I take a moment in the quiet. The TV has clicked itself off, the apartment settling into the hush of deep night. I click the deadbolt behind Milo, check the windows, and then—because some habits die hard—run a paranoid scan of every possible breach point. Kitchen window, bathroom window, both bedrooms.

All clear.

I linger in her doorway. The smell of her, layered with Eli’s cologne and traces of garlic from dinner, fills the tiny space. The covers are bundled around her, but one bare foot pokes from the cocoon. There’s something so innocent about it, so human and defenseless, that it makes my throat ache.

I want to tuck her in. I want to crawl in beside her. I want one million impossible things, all at once. All at a time in my life when I should probably know better.

I want to save her. I want to ruin her. I want to keep her safe from the world and show her every dark, hungry corner of it.

I tuck the foot back under the cover. I turn off the lamp. I close her bedroom door most of the way, leaving it cracked just enough so she won’t wake up to the panic of absolute dark. Then I go back to the living room, toe off my boots and drop onto the couch, trying to empty my head.

The same thought keeps coming to the surface, over and over.

What if Eli’s right?

THIRTY-SEVEN

SAGE

Iwake up in my bed and I don’t remember getting here.

The last thing I recall is the couch—Milo’s shoulder under my cheek, elves on the screen, his voice narrating over the dialogue with increasingly unhinged commentary about Galadriel’s hair regimen.

But now I’m in bed with covers tucked around me. Which means someone put me here. Most likely Milo. But when I stretch, joints popping, I spot it.

Eli’s jacket, draped over the back of my chair.

He was here.

I sit up and stare at it, my heart doing something complicated and painful. He’s been a ghost in my life for over a week. But he came here in the dark and tucked me in and left the one thing that means something between us.

Eli.

I press my palms against my eyes and breathe.

Then I’m up and moving before I’ve decided to be. I cross the room and bury my face in the jacket on the chair.

It still smells like me.

Mostly me—days of my shampoo, my skin soaked into the leather. The smell that made me send it back yesterday morning, because it had stopped being his and started being mine, and I didn’t want a piece of him that didn’t have him in it anymore.

But on top of all that’s me, he’s there too.

Faint. Only the top layer. Just enough to know he’s been wearing it since I sent it back, through to whatever brought him here in the dark. He put my olive branch on his body, wore it for a day and brought it back to me.

I don’t know what that means.

Either he’s giving it up—here, keep it, I can’t carry this anymore.

Or he’s giving it back, leaving it for me to find because he doesn’t have the words for what he means: I’m still here.

I press my face deeper into the leather and breathe him in, and I don’t know whether I’m comforted or wrecked.

Maybe both.

I set the jacket back on the chair and head to the bathroom.