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“Ah. I see.” “You see what?” “That you’re delusional.” “No, I’m an optimist.” “That’s essentially the same thing,”
“Look, I just need to sit for a minute, and I’ll be fine. When this happens, I, um…I like to imagine a rock in the middle of the sea. In a storm. The waves crash over it, higher and higher, but the rock doesn’t move. It’s still there once the waves are calm again.”
He looked as if he was torn between wanting to shake her and embrace her. In the end, he did neither; he only slid his grip down to her arms and held them so tightly that it was almost painful. “You could have been killed,” he growled.
He still didn’t look at her at first, not until she stood up, and then he said, “I’d rather you stayed close.” It still sounded like a command—as his words so often did—even in his weaker-than-normal voice. “Close?” He nodded toward the empty spot on the bed beside him.
“Sorry.” She thought of their conversation from the night before, of how he’d sat with her, and she felt brave enough to add,“It’s another anxiety thing. Touching things, tapping things…it helps me feel anchored. Keeps my thoughts from flying and carrying me away with them.”
He closed his eyes once more. “You don’t have to stop. I kind of like the feel of your fingers against me—it tells me that you’re still here.”
“But obsessing over it won’t bring back the dead. And it’s a terrible way to spend the extra time that you were given, for whatever reason you were given it.”
“It’s just interesting to me that the same woman who can’t sleep because of anxiety was also able to run straight at the Rook God’s monsters. You’re a rather…captivating combination of fearless and faint-hearted.”
“Come here,” he said. She hesitated. “I’m not going to bite you.” A corner of his mouth hitched. “Not unless you want me to.”
Then, perhaps against her better judgement, she scooted closer to him, and she let him wrap his arm around her and pull her against his chest. “Doesn’t that hurt?” she asked. “I’m fine.” He sounded like he was losing his battle to stay awake. “Just go to sleep,” he added, yawning again. “You’re safe here.”
He reached a hand forward and cupped her cheek. His thumb trailed across her lips. Parted them. “I wish you hadn’t come along and complicated things,” he said, his face angling toward hers as his other hand slipped beneath the hem of her shirt and found skin. “But now I just want you to be safe. That’s all.”
she was a ship drifting aimlessly about, and he was the lighthouse that she occasionally found herself looking for when she needed to see something real. Something solid. An anchor.
“I’m absolutely terrified,” he repeated as he reached and pushed aside a strand of her hair that had plastered itself to her forehead. Then he wrapped his other arm around her and pulled her closer. “And yet, the thought of missing my chance to hold you like this is somehow more terrifying.”
“Yes. Although tonight it’s more about the way you look in that rain than anything else.” “Which is like a half-drowned rat dredged up from the river, I suspect.” “The most stunning half-drowned rat I’ve ever seen.”
“Sorry to disappoint you, but it’s not an act. I’m all dark and dangerous, all the way through. My heart is actually just a barely-functioning blob of blackness.”
“Restless heart.” Asra’s hand squeezed hers one last time. “You have to stop fighting for me. There are bigger things that that heart is meant to beat for.”
But that frigid magic that had once terrified Cas now felt oddly comforting. She wanted to sink into the dark and the cold and never rise out of it again.
She willed herself to calm down. Imagined herself as that rock in the middle of a storm-tossed sea, waiting out this latest attack. She didn’t need him to be an anchor; she could wrap herself in a casing of stone and anchor herself.
