Chapter 8: Resting
The phone kept buzzing, a frantic, insectile hum in the quiet of the porch. Mya stared at the screen, the blue light making her look ghostly. The names Derek had called her in the texts weren’t new, but seeing them stacked up, one after another, in the wake of everything, felt like a physical sickness.
She let out a long, shaky breath that fogged in the cold air. Then she huffed, a sound of pure, tired defiance. Her thumbs moved over the screen, swift and decisive. She wasn’t typing back to Derek. She opened a different thread.
Hey, it’s Mya. I woke up with the flu. Really bad. I won’t be able to make my shift tomorrow. So sorry.
She hit send, then powered the phone off completely. The screen went black, a tiny, silent rebellion. She turned and handed the dead device to Craig. “Go nuts. I’m taking a shower and putting on comfy clothes and shoes that don’t make me four inches taller.”
Before he could reply, she grabbed his wrist—not his hand, his wrist, her fingers circling it with surprising strength—and pulled him across the threshold into her apartment. She released him immediately, walking straight across the small space to a door, closing it behind her with a soft click. The sound of a lock engaging followed, then the rush of water through old pipes.
Craig was left standing just inside the doorway, holding her switched-off phone, utterly alone in her space.
The studio apartment was a soft assault on his senses. After the cold, sharp night and the sterile opulence of his own world, this was all warmth and gentle decay. One whole wall was a landscape of overstuffed, leaning bookshelves, the wood aged to a honey brown. They bowed slightly in the middle, piled double-stacked with paperbacks and hardcovers, their spines a faded rainbow. Some looked one gentle nudge from collapsing entirely. The air itself smelled like clean linen, vanilla, and the faint, distant ghost of coffee grounds.
It was painfully personal in a way his penthouse never was. There were no generic art prints, no designer furnishings chosen by a decorator. A small, worn sofa upholstered in a faded blue fabric sat across from a used coffee table bearing a single, thin laptop. Her bed, a queen that seemed to shrink under the weight of a thick cream comforter dotted with small, cheerful yellow flowers, took up the far corner. It looked impossibly soft.
His eyes found the only photograph. On a shelf, crammed between novels, a simple frame held a picture of Mya, younger, maybe fourteen. Her curly hair was a wild halo, her smile broad and awkward with braces. Thick glasses slid down her nose. She was standing in a muddy clearing in the woods, jeans splattered with dirt, an older man with a kind, weathered face and the same blue eyes beaming beside her, an arm around her shoulders. It was a version of her he’d never seen. Unedited. Happy.
He didn’t want to leave.
The water shut off. Some time later, the bathroom door opened, and steam curled out into the room, carrying the scent of her soap—something simple and herbal.
Mya walked out, transformed. The cocktail dress and punishing heels were gone. She was dressed in an oversized, soft-looking gray shirt and black bike shorts. Her hair was wet, dark gold strands clinging to her neck and temples, but the curls were already beginning to spring back to life, forming damp tendrils around her face. She wore glasses now—simple, wire-rimmed frames that magnified her blue eyes.
She looked younger. Softer. Real.
Except on her arms.
Craig’s gaze, which had been wandering appreciatively over the domestic scene, snapped and hardened. On the smooth skin of her forearms, now exposed, a constellation of bruises bloomed. Yellows and greens, older ones fading at the edges. Darker purples and angry reds, newer, sharper. They were thumbprints, grip marks. A violent map of restraint.
It was the unspoken knowledge they had both known about and danced around since the moment he’d seen the fear in her eyes at the club. Now it was just… there. Evidence laid bare in the warm, vanilla-scented air.
She saw him looking. She didn’t try to cover them. She just stood there, waiting, her expression unreadable behind the glasses.
“You said he was scared of me, right?” Craig’s voice was quiet, stripped of all its usual teasing cadence.
She nodded, a tiny, sharp movement. “Yeah. He was close to throwing up on the way to the meeting at the club.”
A smirk touched Craig’s lips, but it was a cold, sharp thing, devoid of humor. “Alright. Then he’s clearly still heated. I’ll stay tonight. If he comes, I’ll deal with it.”
She crossed her arms, a defensive gesture that also framed the bruises. “You’re inviting yourself to stay.”
He moved then, crossing the small room in two strides. He didn’t touch her. He just sank onto her worn blue sofa, the cushions sighing under his weight. He made himself at home, stretching his arm along the back. “Just for tonight. I’ll have Marco bring over an air mattress and some clothes for me.” He met her gaze, a challenge in his. “Then you can invite me to stay tomorrow night.”
His eyes flicked back down to her arms, and all the pretense, all the lighthearted bargaining, evaporated. His jaw tightened. The look on his face was one of pure, undiluted violence, but his voice, when he spoke again, was softer than she’d ever heard it.
“Come here.”
“Come here.”
Mya raised an eyebrow, a silent question hanging in the steamy air between them. He saw the calculation in her eyes, the weighing of risk against the bone-deep exhaustion she was carrying.
He huffed, a sound of frustrated concession. “Relax. I’ll behave. Put on a movie on your laptop, we can watch it.” His gaze dropped to her forearms again, and his voice lost its edge. “I just want to see your arms.”
She grimaced, a flicker of old defiance surfacing through the weariness. “Please. No more lectures or speeches about it.”
He nodded once, a sharp, clean motion. “Alright. Just let me see.”
She huffed, a mimicry of his own sound, then turned. She grabbed two throws from a woven basket beside the sofa, handing him a soft, cream-colored one. She kept a gray, chunky knit for herself. Setting the blanket on the cushion beside him, she retrieved the slim laptop from the coffee table.
She sat down, leaving a careful foot of space between them. The old sofa cushions dipped, pulling her slightly toward him anyway. She balanced the laptop on her knees, typing in her password. The blue glow illuminated her face and the bruises on her extended arm, which she held out toward him, palm up, without looking.
Up close, it wasn’t much better. The patterns were clearer—four distinct marks from a large hand on her right forearm, a ugly, blotchy purple on the delicate skin inside her left elbow. He didn’t grab her. He simply let his fingertips, startlingly warm, ghost over the edge of the darkest one.
She winced a little, a tiny inhalation, but didn’t say anything. She just typed in her login info for the streaming service, her focus apparently on the screen.
“You have to pick the movie,” she said, her voice carefully neutral.
He scanned the rows of thumbnails, his thumb absently stroking the unmarked skin just beside the bruise on her wrist. He picked something he’d heard about, a loud, colorful sci-fi blockbuster full of explosions. It was noise. It was a shield. She clicked play, set the laptop on the coffee table, and pulled her knit blanket over herself, tucking her feet under her.
The opening sequence boomed with synthetic music. About five minutes into the movie, the tension began seeping from her body. Her head, which had been held so carefully upright, listed sideways. It came to rest against his arm, a gradual, trusting surrender. Her legs were curled up, taking up maybe a fourth of the space on the sofa.
He held himself perfectly still. Slowly, so slowly, he moved his arm from the back of the sofa and draped it behind her shoulders. She shifted slightly, a small, sleepy sound escaping her, then settled more firmly into his side, her nose brushing his shirt. He moved again, pulling her gently with him so she could stretch her legs out more along the cushions. She complied, a limp, warm weight.
He pulled the cream-colored throw blanket over both of them with his free hand. The room was quiet except for the movie’s distant lasers and the soft, even sound of her breathing. He rested his chin on top of her head, the damp curls cool against his skin. He didn’t watch the screen. He watched the light from it play across the shelves of books, across the photograph of the muddy, happy girl, and felt something in his own chest fracture and settle into a new, terrifying shape.
He watched the light from it play across the shelves of books, across the photograph of the muddy, happy girl, and felt something in his own chest fracture and settle into a new, terrifying shape. It was quiet peace, thick and syrupy, and he was drowning in it willingly.
His phone buzzed in his pocket twenty minutes later, a harsh, foreign vibration against his thigh. The sound jerked him from the haze. Marco. The air mattress. The real world, waiting outside with a duffel bag and a knowing smirk. He shifted with infinite care, sliding his arm from beneath Mya’s shoulders.
She murmured, her forehead furrowing, but didn’t wake. He tapped out a quick text to Marco, who was apparently already outside.
2 minutes.
He looked down at her. In sleep, all her careful observation was gone. Her lips were slightly parted, her glasses crooked. The frantic girl from the closet, the defiant woman on the porch, was just… soft. He leaned down and pressed his nose into the crown of her damp hair, breathing in the clean, herbal scent. He kissed her forehead, a slow press of his lips, soaking up the few stolen moments he had left of this.
Then he moved. He slipped one arm under her knees and the other behind her back, lifting her against his chest. She was a warm, pliant weight, her head lolling against his shoulder. He carried her the short distance to the bed, the flowered comforter cool under his knuckles as he pulled it back.
He laid her down on the sheets, her body curling instinctively into the mattress. He carefully hooked a finger around the arm of her glasses and slid them off, placing them on the nightstand with a soft click. He pulled the thick comforter up over her, tucking it around her shoulders. She sighed, a contented sound that lodged in his throat.
He watched her for three more heartbeats before turning away.
The night air in the hallway was a slap. Marco leaned against the opposite wall, a large black duffel at his feet and a pumped-up air mattress tucked under his arm. His eyebrows were near his hairline.
“Took you four,” Marco said, his voice low.
“Shut up,” Craig muttered, grabbing the door key from his pocket. He unlocked it and nodded Marco inside.
Marco stepped in, his calm, observant eyes doing a swift inventory of the cramped, book-crammed space, the single laptop playing a silent space battle, the figure buried under blankets on the bed. He set the duffel and mattress down silently by the sofa. “She alive in there?”
“She’s sleeping. Keep your voice down.” Craig’s whisper was a rough command. He ran a hand through his hair. “What’s the word outside?”
“Your new best friend Derek is having a meltdown at a dive bar three miles from here. Spent twenty minutes crying to the bartender about a stolen truck and a stolen girlfriend.” Marco’s mouth quirked. “He hasn’t made a move this way. Probably too busy praying for your eternal damnation.”
“Good. Let him stew.” Craig glanced toward the bed again, a muscle in his jaw ticking. “I’m staying.”
“No shit.” Marco folded his massive arms, leaning back against the bookshelves. They groaned in protest. He didn’t move. “You gonna set up this romantic bed for yourself, or should I?”
“Get out, Marco.”
“You text me if you need back-up. Or, you know, instructions on how to work a pump.” Marco pushed off the shelves, heading for the door. He paused, looking at Craig with an expression that wasn’t quite teasing anymore. “You look freaked out.”
Craig didn’t deny it. He just stared at the mound of blankets on the bed. “She has bruises on her arms. From him.”
Marco’s face went neutral, a blank slate that was more telling than any snide remark. He gave a single, slow nod. “Right.” He opened the door, the cold alley air rushing in. “Pump’s in the side pocket. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
The door clicked shut, locking automatically with the new, heavy deadbolt. The apartment was silent again, save for the faint, ragged sound of Craig’s own breathing. He was alone with her, with the sleeping shape in the bed, with the terrible, fragile thing growing in the space between his ribs. The air mattress lay at his feet, a blatant reminder of the line he’d promised not to cross.
He didn’t touch it. He just stood there in the dim, movie-flickering light, utterly still, listening to her sleep.
He just stood there in the dim, movie-flickering light, utterly still, listening to her sleep. The quiet was a living thing, pressing in on him, filled only with the rhythm of her breath and the hum of the laptop’s fan. He finally moved, bending to unzip the duffel Marco had left.
He found the sweatpants and a plain black t-shirt, the fabric soft from wear. He changed in her small bathroom, the space dominated by her things—a single toothbrush, skincare bottles with handwritten labels, a hairbrush tangled with blonde strands. His own reflection in the mirror looked unfamiliar, stripped of its usual tailored armor.
Back in the main room, he knelt beside the flat, rolled air mattress. He found the pump in the side pocket, just as Marco said, and plugged it into an outlet near the sofa. The machine whirred to life with a low, electric growl, inflating the vinyl rectangle on her floor.
Mya made a sound, then sat up rubbing her eyes. Her hair was a wild cloud around her head. “I called off work right?” she asks, her voice thick and disoriented with sleep.
He nodded, watching the mattress slowly rise. “Yup. From what they know, you’re sick.”
He plugged in the air mattress and she watched, leaning forward on her elbows watching him. He flips it on and it quietly starts to fill with air. The vinyl squeaked faintly as it expanded, taking on form beside her bed.
“That is significantly quieter than I thought it would be,” she murmured, her voice still scratchy.
He looked up at her. “Aren’t you supposed to be asleep?”
She shrugged, the comforter pooling around her waist. “Allegedly I’m sick, so yeah. But who was going to tell you that there’s spare clean sheets that will fit over that air mattress under my bed?”
He shook his head, a small smile tugging at his mouth. He reached under the bed frame, his hand brushing against dust and the smooth plastic of a storage tote. He grabbed the folded light blue sheet.
“Here. Go change, I can do it.”
She took the sheet from him, their fingers brushing, and shuffled back to the bathroom. He finished inflating the mattress, turning off the pump. The sudden silence felt louder. When he came out from changing into sweats and a shirt, a light blue sheet was pulled taut over the air mattress, along with a pillow from her bed and a spare comforter he assumed she had in a tote under the bed as well.
She stood back, assessing her work with a critical eye. He crossed his arms, leaning against her bookshelf.
“Well, now I’m thinking you don’t want me to leave, sweetheart.”
She rolled her eyes, but a faint blush colored her cheeks. “I was just being nice. You’re the one who invited yourself to stay, remember?”
He pushed off the shelf and walked over to her. He leaned in and kissed her forehead, a soft, deliberate press. Her skin was warm from sleep. “I know. Go to sleep. It’s late.”
She blushed a little but nodded, climbing back into her own bed. She laid down, pulling the flowered comforter up to her chin, watching as he lowered himself onto the air mattress. It sighed under his weight. He adjusted the pillow, staring up at her ceiling where streetlight shadows played through the blinds.
He decided to throw out one more line, his voice a low tease in the dark. “Let me know if you get cold. I’ll join you.”
She let out a laugh, a genuine, sleepy sound that wrapped around him. Then she said, “Maybe next time.”
He smiled in the darkness, the words settling somewhere deep and hopeful. He heard her turn onto her side, facing him. He could feel her watching him. He kept his eyes on the ceiling.
“Craig?”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you. For not… pushing.”
He swallowed. The honesty in her voice was a gift he didn’t deserve. “Go to sleep, Mya.”
Silence stretched between them again, but it was different now. It was a shared thing. He listened to her breathing even out, slow and deep. He stared at the faint outline of the new deadbolt on her front door, a dark, solid shape in the gloom. His mind replayed the feel of her forehead under his lips, the way her laughter had sounded, the terrifying trust in her simple ‘maybe’.
Down the hall, in the walls of the old building, a pipe groaned. Mya shifted in her bed. A car door slammed outside, making them both flinch. He heard her breath catch.
“It’s just a car,” he whispered into the dark.
“I know,” she whispered back.
But neither of them moved. Neither of them slept. They just lay there in the close, vanilla-scented dark, separated by three feet of floor and a universe of unspoken things, listening to the sounds of the night and the even more deafening sound of their own hearts.