Page 65 of Wild Thorns

"I know what you mean," he said. His fingers moved to my hair, threading through it slowly. "You don't have to translate everything."

I pressed my face into his chest. Let myself have this: the warmth, the weight, the particular safety of lying beside someone who knew something true about you and stayed, anyway.

At some point, he said he should go downstairs. That his brothers would notice his absence and draw conclusions he wasn't opposed to, but that I might not be ready for.

"Not yet," I said. "Five more minutes."

"Five more minutes," he agreed.

He stayed for twenty.

Then he was gone. I stayed in my apartment with the door locked, really locked, the deadbolt turned, for the first time in weeks. The sound it makes is a small, solid click I feel in my chest. I stand there for a moment with my hand still on the knob and notice what I'm feeling, the way my therapist had taught me to notice things. Name them. Let them be what they are.

Scared. I'm scared.

And underneath the scared: something quieter, something that knows the locked door doesn't actually stop Marcus if Marcus is determined. It never did. The alarm systems, the security chain, the restraining order working its way through the courts, none of it had stopped him from leaving a rose on my pillow. A locked door is theater. A locked door is what you do when you need to feel like you're doing something.

But I do it anyway. And then I checked it again. And a third time, my fingers finding the knob in the dark, confirming the resistance of the deadbolt.

Three times.

I haven't done that since the first week I arrived.

I stand in the middle of my apartment and look at what's around me; the space I've made mine, slowly, without noticing I was doing it. A print I'd bought at the town market tacked above my desk. A mug with a chip in the handle that I'd kept anyway because it fit my hand right. The photographs I'd taken of the magnolia tree, printed and leaned against the windowsill, charting the way the light changed through it week by week.

A life. Accidentally built. Marcus's presence in this town felt like a hand on the back of my neck, a thumb pressed to all the careful work of being safe, threatening to undo it.

And yet, and this is new, I can still feel Jasper's hands on my skin. Not as a haunting, but as a reminder of what touch means when it's freely given and freely taken. Of what it feels like to want something, reach for it, and not be punished.

I'm not going anywhere, I told myself that morning on the porch after his first text. I had meant it then. I mean it now, but meaning things and being able to hold them are different skills. Tonight those skills are not cooperating.

Tara calls at nine-fifteen. She calls most Tuesdays and Thursdays, a rhythm we'd established without discussing it, like most of the architecture of our friendship.

I almost don't answer. Then I pick up because not answering would require explaining, and explaining would cost more than I have left tonight.

"Hi," I say.

A pause. Tara has known me for eleven years. She hears things I don't say.

"Hi yourself." Her voice is careful in the specific way it gets careful when she's trying not to alarm me. "How's the great romantic adventure?"

"Fine."

"Uh huh."

"It's fine, Tara."

"You sound like someone who just discovered their apartment has been robbed and is trying to decide if it counts." A beat. "What happened?"

I don't tell her about Marcus. I don't know how to say it without making it real in a new way, without watching all the progress I've made here become a story about him again. Marcus is very good at becoming the story. He's been the story for three years, and I'm tired of that being true.

So I talk around it; about the studio, about Lila's fabric swatches, about the coffee shop, Eli's tea, Jasper's hands, and the deadbolt I've turned three times.

Tara listens. She's very good at listening.

"You sound scared," she says finally, "about something that isn't the hot werewolf brothers."

I go very still.