Page 226 of What We Become

“It’s okay.” I say it against his mouth. “I saw you trying.”

He shakes his head against my cheek. He doesn’t believe me yet. That’s fine. I have the rest of our lives to convince him, and right now I have hot water and ten stolen minutes.

I get his belt open. He gets mine. The rest is clumsy—damp denim, hisses when fabric drags over raw skin, his knuckles knocking my hip. He eases the dirty dressings off my wrists. By the time we step under the spray, we’re both breathing hard.

The water runs rust and salt off him. I watch it swirl down the drain and don’t think too hard about whose blood that is.

When he turns to rinse, I get his back full on. The cage with the bars bent outward. The thing climbing through them. And above all of it, six birds, wings open, each one farther from the wreck than the last.

Sage put that on him. I’ve counted the birds more times than I’ll admit and never once asked him whether he has.

“Which one of them do you think is me?” I ask, reaching out and touching a finger to each of them.

“The one closest to me.”

“Which one are you?”

“The last one.” His eyes find mine as he turns around. “Took me the longest to figure it out.”

Eli reaches for the soap and starts with my wrists. He doesn’t say anything more. He just lathers and rinses, like he’s scrubbing the day off in layers. When he’s satisfied, he lifts my arm and presses his mouth to the inside of my wrist, right over the worst of the marks.

“I was so fucking scared,” he says.

The mask is gone. It’s just him, wet-haired and wrecked and holding my hand like a tether.

“I know.”

“Micah.”

I laugh, because he knows me too well. “I was scared too.”

His eyes come up.

“I wasn’t scared of dying,” I say. “That left me a long time ago.” I work shampoo through his hair, slow, careful of everything I can’t see. “But I kept thinking about you watching. And I kept thinking—if this asshole kills one of us, the rest are going to see it happen, and it’s going to live in their head forever. That’s what scared me—you having to carry the loss.”

His forehead drops to my shoulder. His arms come around my waist, careful, always mapping what’s hurt before he touches. Water sheets down both of us.

“I couldn’t have,” he says. “Carried it. If she’d—if you’d—if any—” He doesn’t finish. His hands tighten.

“Then it’s a good thing we’re all so hard to kill.”

He huffs against my neck, and it’s almost a laugh, and I’ll take it.

We kiss under the spray, slow and deep, bodies sliding together, and there’s heat in it—of course there is, there always is with him—but mostly it’s proof. Warm. Alive. His heart going hard enough against my chest that I can count it. His mouth softens, and I chase it, and for a while there’s nothing but water and his hands relearning me.

I wash the salt and soap and sand from his hair. He checks my ribs with his fingertips, and I lean into it. We trade the soap back and forth until there’s nothing left of today on either of us except the bruises and cuts, and those we’re keeping.

The water starts to cool. Eli reaches back and shuts it off, but neither of us moves.

“Come here,” I whisper.

“I’m here.”

“Closer.”

His arms go around me. Mine close over his back. We find an angle that doesn’t press too hard on either of us, clumsy and careful, and then his face is against my neck.

The first shudder goes through him so hard I feel it in my knees.