Page 42 of Captive

I roll out of bed and shuffle through the darkness, to the door. I don’t turn on any lights as I head down the hall, but a light shining beneath Hawthorne’s office door stops me. Hmm. Maybe I should poke my head in there and tell him he can take the bed for the night since I can’t sleep. One of us might as well make use of it, right?

After gently knocking on said door, I poke my head in the room. I’m seconds from offering him the bed that is technically his when I find him hunched over his desk, asleep.

Jeez. That really doesn’t look comfortable.

I step inside the room, slowly making my way toward his desk, not once taking my eyes off him. I stop when I stand before his desk.

Hawthorne is sleeping on his arms, his glasses resting a few inches away. His laptop sits beneath his arms, his makeshift pillow, apparently. His back rises and falls with steady, even breaths. One look at him, and he appears as if he’s used to doing this, like this is how he always sleeps. The only light in the room is a lamp in the far corner, its bulbs much dimmer than the ceiling light.

“Hawthorne,” I say his name, but he doesn’t stir. I try his name again, but still, he doesn’t move a muscle. He is out.

My gaze moves to his glasses, and since I’m curious, I pick them up and try them on. Instantly, my head pounds and my vision blurs. Shit. His vision really is terrible, isn’t it?

I close my eyes as I turn away from his desk and try to shake that feeling away. When I open my eyes again, it’s not so bad, but I can tell the muscles in my eyes have to work hard to focus through the frames of the glasses.

Is that a thing? Do eyeballs have muscles? Huh, the weird things you wonder about in the middle of the night.

I move over to his bookshelf near the floor lamp and study the spines. I run my hands through my hair, messing it up a bit. Wonder if I look like a sexy librarian or something. That’s a thing, isn’t it?

I pick up a book about psychology and open it to a page in the middle. There’s a whole lot of words on said page, a lot of mumbo-jumbo, and I quickly close the book, not wanting to strain my brain too much trying to read it. This sexy librarian doesn’t read her books.

But I must close the book louder than I intend to, because seconds after I do, I hear Hawthorne’s groggy voice say, “Abby? What are you doing here? Where… where are my glasses?” After I return the book to its shelf, I turn and find him feeling around his desk for the glasses that are currently residing on my nose.

“I thought you wouldn’t mind if I borrowed them for a little bit,” I say with a shrug, and then I realize he might not be able to see that shrug. Oh, well.

He rubs his eyes and then stands, moving around his desk—and knocking his foot into its one leg in the process. After stifling a grunt from the sudden impact, he moves closer to me and says, “May I have them back?”

“Why? It isn’t like you were doing any work, anyway. I think they make me look like a sexy librarian.” I fluff up my hair and give him a pose: puckered lips with my thumb and pointer finger touching the side of the glasses. “Don’t you think so?”

Hawthorne stands two feet away from me, his gaze squinted as he tries to study me without his glasses. He probably doesn’t see much of anything, and his next words back up that assumption: “You’re mostly a blur. May I please have them?”

“Sure,” I say, although I am sluggish in slipping them off my face. I think about offering them to him, but instead of doing that, I decide to stand on my tiptoes and place the glasses on his face, something he clearly doesn’t expect, given how rod-straight his posture becomes the moment I do it.

When his gaze focuses on me through the lens of the glasses, I can’t help but say, “Why don’t you get contacts? Your eyes are really bad.”

He doesn’t answer the question. Instead he remarks on the fact I’m here, in his office, in the middle of the night. “What exactly are you doing here? Surely you didn’t come to make fun of my terrible vision.”

I shrug, and this shrug I know he can see. Stepping around him, my feet draw me towards his desk, and I run my fingers along the edge of his desk as I walk around it. I plop myself into his leather chair and lean back. “I couldn’t sleep. I thought I’d come offer you the bed. Your spine’s gonna have a permanent hunch with how you sleep at your desk all the time.”

His chair is actually pretty comfy. It’s warm from where he was sitting in it before. Honestly, if he sleeps in here, I don’t know why he hunches forward over his desk instead of kicking his feet up and leaning back in this high-backed leather chair. I don’t know about sleeping, but I could take a nap in this thing, no problem.

Hawthorne follows me, though he stops when he stands on the side of the desk. For someone who was fast asleep moments ago, the man is wide awake now. “To be fair, I slept more often than not in here long before you came along,” he remarks. “Why can’t you sleep? Is it because of…” He coughs and averts his gaze, not saying it.

He doesn’t need to. The way he’s acting tells me enough. Royal and Ezra must’ve told him my story, and he thinks that’s why I can’t sleep.

I mean, it could be true. Maybe sharing that, reliving it, was enough to mess me up a little. After all this time, you’d think I’d be past it, but apparently if you thought that, you’d be wrong.

Quietly, Hawthorne says, “They shouldn’t have jumped you like that.”

I run my hands along his laptop. The metal top is warm from him, you know, being passed out on it moments ago. “It’s okay. It is. I wouldn’t have shared if I really didn’t want to.” Leaning my head back on his chair, I look up at him and study the way he stands.

He’s close, but not too close. He’s trying to show interest, but at the same time, trying to act nonchalant and cool about it, like he doesn’t care too much either way. But he does care. I can see it in his eyes, their intensity, how solid that eye contact is. He cares and he doesn’t want it to be obvious.

I scoot the chair back and lift up my feet, placing them on the corner of his desk, near where he stands. “So, what do you do in here all night, every night? You can’t really be working the entire time. You have to have some games installed on your computer or something, right?”

The corner of his mouth quirks upward. He doesn’t answer my question though; he only gestures for me to get up. “Come on, go back to bed. Try to get some sleep, Abby. Things will feel better in the morning.”

“I told you, I can’t sleep. I’m awake. I’ve been trying to sleep for hours. I just thought I’d stop by and offer you the bed so someone can use it tonight. Tell you what, you go take the bed, and I can be you for the night. I’ll pretend to work—”