Page 26 of Wraith

The yawn that comes out of me is not dignified. It is not small. It is a full-body, jaw-cracking, eyes-watering, every-bone-going-loose yawn, and it just keeps going, long past what any reasonable yawn has any business doing, and by the time it ends, my vision has gone slightly blurry at the edges and the room has taken on a gentle, floating quality.

I blink it away.

Wraith is watching me.

“You should sleep,” he says.

“I slept.”

“Not enough. Get some more rest.”

“I’m fine.”

“You just yawned for approximately forty-five seconds.”

“I was tired for a second.” I straighten up in my chair. “I’m not tired anymore.”

He looks at me for a long moment with the expression of a man who is choosing his next words carefully.

“June,” he says. “I will not do anything to hurt you. I promise. You can sleep.”

“I don’t trust you enough for that yet,” I say, and it comes out cleaner than I expected, without the shaking edge I thought it might have, and I’m weirdly proud of that. I stand up. “I’m making coffee.”

Because coffee is what responsible adults drink in the morning when they’re tired after chaining their exes to radiators and whipping them and they realize they still need to plan their day.

“Sure,” he says.

I carry my plate to the kitchen sink, find the coffeemaker, and start opening cabinets. I find coffee — actual good coffee, which means the club’s ol’ ladies stocked this place with some taste — and I measure it out with the shaky, slightly off precision of a person whose fine motor control is currently running on ambition rather than actual capacity.

I am fine. I am making coffee. I am a responsible adult who makes good choices.

I sway.

Just slightly. Just a little dip to the left, as if the floor has had enough of being level, and I catch myself on the counter with both hands and blink until the kitchen stops doing that.

“Okay,” Wraith says from the table. “Sleep.”

“I’m fine.”

“You nearly went down.”

“I caught myself.” I turn the coffee maker on and turn to face him. “See? Fine. Stable. Normal.”

He leans back in his chair, arms crossed, watching me with an expression that in anyone else I might describe as concern. In him, I don’t know what to call it. “How much did you drink last night?”

“A responsible amount.”

“Of what?”

“Chardonnay.”

“How many bottles?”

“One,” I say. Then: “And some of another” And then, because he’s still looking at me: “They were small bottles.”

He says nothing.

“Stop looking at me like that.”