Page 99 of Across His Line

I go to him across that huge room in his mother’s socks, around the end of the bed, until I’m standing in front of him at the couch.

He doesn’t look up at me.

I put my hand on his shoulder.

I feel it go through him. His shoulder goes rigid under my palm, and then, slowly, it drops. I can feel the heat of him through the T-shirt. I can feel the muscle under it, tight as a fist.

I’ve never touched him before.

Not once. I’ve never touched Rafferty Waleska on purpose, not his hand, not his arm, not his sleeve. He was the one person in that building I made sure I never got close enough to touch.

“Thank you, Rafe,” I say.

He doesn’t move. He keeps staring at the black TV.

Then, when he registers what I just said, he looks up. And I read his eyes, because I always read his eyes, because I don’t know how not to.

They’re dark. Almost brown. That color. The color I learned before I learned anything else about him, the one that always came right before the worst things.

But it isn’t for me.

It isn’t pointed at me at all. For the first time in my life, I’m looking straight into Rafferty Waleska’s darkest eyes, and I’m not afraid of them.

I look at his face. The swelling. The cut. The bruise on his cheekbone, purple going black at the edges. The way he’s sitting, a little tilted to the left, like his ribs are wrong on that side.

“Are you hurt?” I ask.

He closes his eyes. Not like it hurts. Like he has no patience for me whatsoever.

“You’re asking if I’m okay?”

It comes out rough, almost broken in the middle. And I don’t understand why. It’s a normal question to ask. He’s bleeding.

He opens his eyes.

And he reaches up, slow, so slow, with his good hand. I watch it come. I don’t move. He takes a piece of my wet hair, the piece that’s hanging down over my shoulder in front, and he moves it back. Just that. Just the back of his fingers, moving my hair behind my shoulder, so careful it barely touches me, like I’m something that could come apart.

And I know why. He’s looking at my neck.

I watch him look at it. His jaw works. I watch his eyes go darker still, and his hand stays there, in the air, an inch from my skin.

“I’m fine, Tessa,” he says. Then, quieter, “Are you okay?”

“I am now.”

His hand freezes.

His whole face goes still, and something goes across it, fast, that I’ve never seen on him before. Then his hand comes down, slowly, and goes back between his knees.

He doesn’t say anything else.

I don’t know what I said. I don’t know why it did that to him. It’s just true. I wasn’t, and now I am. I’m in a house with a gate and a room with a lock and him on the other side of the door, and I’m okay.

I take my hand off his shoulder. I sit down. Not next to him. At the other end of the couch, with a whole cushion between us, with my knees pulled up into his mother’s sweater.

“It’s okay,” I say. “Seriously. It used to happen all the time.”

He turns his head and looks at me.