I'd slept on bad surfaces before. Lana's beanbag, a bus station bench in Delaware. But this couch was built for photographs, not for lying on. It had the dimensions of an ironing board and the cushioning of a brick.
"You're sure about that," Cillian had said from the bed, watching me arrange a pillow and blanket on it like I was setting up the world's saddest campsite.
"Absolutely." I fluffed the pillow. "I love couches. This is basically a vacation for me."
He'd given me the kind of look that said he knew I was lying and had decided to let me find out on my own.
So now the suite was dark and I was on my back, knees bent because my feet hung off the edge, staring at the ceiling while my brain cycled through the same thing over and over.
I kept seeing Matteo's text behind my eyelids every time I blinked. People came to the house. I knew that feeling. I'd grown up in the same house. I knew what it sounded like when the wrong men showed up and your father suddenly got very quiet. Matteo didn't have anyone to explain that kind of quiet to him. He just had me, and I wasn't there.
"That Jack guy," Cillian's voice came from the bed, low and conversational, like he'd been waiting for a gap in my silence. "He was at the café this morning."
I blinked. "Who?"
"The one from your hallway."
"His name is Jason."
"I don't care what his name is." I could hear him shifting, the sheets rustling. "He has nerve showing up after I made myself clear."
I sighed and pressed my palms into my eyes. "He's not trying to challenge you. He's worried about me. I never encouraged any of it, for the record. He just decided he was my protector and ran with it."
"He can put his worries to rest after today's little performance."
He meant the sidewalk. The hand-grabbing, the darling, the whole public spectacle that was now all over the Ridgemont gossip page. He was probably right. Jason had seen me pressed against Cillian's side with a smile on my face. That should be enough to make anyone back off.
It didn't make me feel better.
Past one, I shifted again and the couch let out a groan that didn't sound like a normal creak. Then one of the legs just quietly folded, like it had assessed its life and decided this wasn't worth it anymore.
The frame tilted sideways and I slid off in slow motion, blanket tangling around my legs, and hit the carpet with a thud.
I lay there on the floor, tangled in hotel linen, staring up at the same ceiling from a new and worse angle.
I heard him sit up.
"The couch lost," he said.
"The couch was already losing. I was just the last straw."
"Take the bed."
"No."
"Ava."
"The carpet has a certain charm to it."
He crossed the room, got one arm under my knees and the other behind my back, and lifted me off the floor like he was moving furniture.
"I didn't agree to this," I managed, grabbing his shoulder because my survival instincts were faster than my pride.
He set me on the bed. The mattress was warm where he'd been lying. The sheets smelled like him, that cologne layered under something cooler, and my brain immediately and unhelpfully started noticing every detail.
He grabbed a pillow, dropped it on the carpet, and lay down on the floor.
"You can't be serious. You're like six-two."
"Six-three." He settled his arm behind his head. "Go to sleep."
"If you get off that bed," he said, calm and completely serious, "I will put you back on it. Every time. All night."
I believed him.
Silence settled, softer than the one in the car. The kind that happens at two in the morning when neither of you is sleeping and the dark thins the air until it barely feels like a barrier.
"Do you actually sleep?" I asked the ceiling. "Or is that just something other people get to do?"
His voice came from the floor, low. "Some nights are easier than others."
"What makes them easier?"
A longer pause.
"Knowing where everything is," he said. "Knowing nothing's about to move."
It was the most honest thing he'd said to me. A man who slept better when the world held still, and whose world had, at some point, refused to.
I thought about the article. The woman in the emerald dress. The boy who used to smile. And the man on my floor who hadn't smiled like that in a very long time.
I cleared my throat. The sound was way too loud in the quiet.
"Okay, this is stupid," I said. "You're six-three and you're on a floor. I'm five-six and I have an entire king-sized bed. This is a geometry problem with an obvious solution."
Nothing from the floor.
"Get up here," I said. "We're adults. You're technically my husband. We can share a bed without it becoming a whole thing."
A beat. Then I heard him shift. "You're inviting me into the bed."
"I'm making a practical suggestion based on square footage," I corrected, my face already burning. "Don't make it weird."
"You're the one making it weird."
"I am not. I'm being generous and mature. This is me being gracious. Accept it."
I heard him stand. The mattress dipped as he sat on the edge, and then he was lying beside me, close enough that I could feel the warmth coming off him but not touching. The bed was big. There was space. Plenty of it. An entire responsible, adult-appropriate amount of space.
My heart was hammering like I'd sprinted up six flights of stairs.
He smelled like hotel soap and underneath it, him. I could hear him breathing. I could feel the shift of the mattress every time he inhaled. I was suddenly, painfully aware of his eyelashes, which were unfairly long and catching the faint light from the window, and the line of his jaw, and the fact that his forearm was resting about four inches from mine and the heat radiating off his skin was doing something very inconvenient to my ability to think.
I stared at the ceiling so hard I could have burned a hole in it.
"Stop thinking so loud," he murmured.
"I'm not thinking. I'm sleeping. This is what sleeping looks like."
"You're holding your breath."
"I am not."
I was.
I exhaled very slowly, as quietly as I could, which was not quiet at all.
Then his hand found the top of my head. Just his palm settling against my hair and his fingers moving, slow, through the strands. One pass. Then another. Light and rhythmic and so unexpectedly gentle that my entire body went still.
My eyes prickled. I didn't know why. I blinked it away.
His breathing evened out. His hand slowed but didn't stop, and somewhere between the third and fourth pass, the tightness in my chest loosened enough to let sleep back in.
***
I woke up before him, which felt like a small, petty victory I was absolutely going to keep.
Morning light pressed through the curtains. I turned my head. He was asleep beside me, one arm folded under his head, face turned toward me. His jaw had gone soft and without the tension he looked younger. Human.
I stared at him three seconds longer than appropriate. Then I grabbed my bag.
I showered fast because I didn't trust the universe to leave me alone for more than ten minutes, scrubbed hotel shampoo through my hair, and stepped out feeling almost like a person again.
I wrapped the towel, reached for my clothes.
My shirt was not in the bathroom. My shirt was on the bed, right where I'd left it. Because of course.
I cracked the door.
He was awake. Sitting on the edge of the bed, phone in hand, hair still messy.
His eyes found my face first. Then they dropped, just once, down my bare shoulders and the towel across my collarbone and the water on my skin. Then back to my face with the kind of deliberate effort that lived in his jaw, tightening it, holding something back the way he held back everything else.
Something dark moved through his expression. There and gone.
I crossed to the bed. Grabbed the shirt. Stepped on the edge of the blanket in the process because the universe hated me, stumbled forward, caught myself on the mattress with one hand while the other clutched the towel to my chest, and for one truly spectacular second I was bent over the bed in a towel with my hand approximately two inches from his thigh.
"Laundry," I said, straightening so fast I nearly gave myself whiplash. "This is. A laundry situation. Completely normal."
His mouth did something it almost never did. It twitched.
I retreated to the bathroom, closed the door, and leaned against it with both hands pressed to my face.
When I came out dressed, he was standing by the kitchenette counter, sliding the room service menu toward me.
"Order something," he said, already heading for the bathroom. "You need to eat."
The bathroom door closed. I heard the shower start.
I was reaching for the menu when the burner phone buzzed on the counter.
Matteo: Ave please. Dad's been locked in his office for two days. Men came again last night. Different ones. They asked about you. I hid but I'm really scared. Please answer me. Please.
I read it twice. The please at the end, typed twice, like if he asked hard enough the sister who left him would finally answer.
The bathroom door opened. Steam curled out. Cillian stood there with a towel around his waist and water still running down his shoulders and for one delirious half-second my brain just left. Packed a suitcase and departed. Then he saw my face and the ease dropped out of him like someone had flipped a switch.
"Show me," he said.
I handed him the phone.
He read it. Read it again. Something moved behind his eyes as the words settled. The kind of recognition that only comes from having been the kid in the room once, the one who was scared and waiting for someone to come.
"He's twelve," I said. My voice came out even but it took everything to keep it there. "He's alone in that house."
The burner buzzed again in his hand.
Matteo: Ave there are men outside right now. I can see them from my window. They're not dad's guys. I'm scared Ave please I don't know what to do.
The room went still.
Cillian's eyes lifted from the screen and the green in them had gone flat and cold.
He looked at me and I looked at him and for the first time since the night we met, we were standing on the same side of the same fear.
"When did the first message come in?" he asked.
"Last night."
Something moved in his jaw. "And you didn't tell me."
"I'm telling you now." I held his gaze and it cost me, but I held it. "That's what this is. Me asking you for help."
He studied me for a long moment. Then something settled in his expression, heavy and final, like a door closing behind him.
"My wife," he said, "doesn't ask me for help."
I blinked.
He set the phone down on the table, screen up, Matteo's words still glowing.
"My wife tells me there's a problem," he continued, his voice dropping into that low, precise register that made the air in the room feel thinner, "and I handle it. That's how this works."
He pulled his phone from his pocket and dialed. When the other end picked up, he spoke in Russian, short and clipped, and I didn't understand a single word but I understood the tone. It was the tone of a man who was about to make someone very, very sorry.
And for the first time in three months, the weight on my chest eased enough for me to breathe. For once, I was glad he was the monster in the room.