The Survivors: Point of Origin (book 2)

Damages, pt. 3

WHEN EVERETT GOT BACK LATE THAT NIGHT, I WAS ALREADY IN BED, TRYING TO sleep again. I heard a soft murmur of hushed voices in the living room, then they faded and Everett’s footsteps came softly down the hall. He paused when he reached the door, hesitating.

He cracked the door open and slid inside. “Why aren’t you asleep?” he asked.

I smiled a bit, sitting up. “How’d you know?”

“Breathing’s different when you’re sleeping,” he said, reaching down to pull off his shoes and socks. He shrugged out of his coat and sweater. There were rips in his soft V-neck t-shirt, though I wasn’t sure from what. The stone skin beneath them, though, was entirely intact. I cringed, wondering where they came from and trying to not wonder at the same time. “Will you try to sleep?” he asked.

I shrugged. “I’m okay without it,” I said, though I was feeling more exhausted than I had been even in the six months I had stopped sleeping.

“But will you try? Can we just lie here together for a while? It’s been a long day,” he said. I slid back to the center of the bed and let my head fall back and my hair spread gently across the pillow, a clear indication of my assent. This was the problem with Everett. His presence was so convincing, so intoxicating, that all day I’d been thinking of his monstrous side, and now I felt safe lying next to him, unprotected.

I simultaneously loved and hated that he was capable of that.

Everett lay on his side, the line of his body mirroring mine. I looked into his eyes. I began to lightly trace the lines in his arms he had huddled in front of him in the distance between us.

“How was your day?” he asked softly.

“Uneventful,” I said. “Are we going to stay here?”

“Have somewhere you need to be?” he asked.

“We need to be in Montana, obviously. Or out trying to find my family and stopping them before they do anything like I saw in the vision again,” I said.

Everett tensed. I felt very strongly that he was holding something back, but before I could ask, he kept talking. “We can talk about it on Friday. Tomorrow is Mark’s birthday, and even though we’ve had thousands between us, it’s a big deal to my mom for the family to be together, so we have to stay for that,” he explained.

“Should I go ahead and leave for Montana so that I’m not here when you’re celebrating family things?” I asked, suddenly insecure, afraid of imposing.

“Are you kidding me?” he asked incredulously. “When we use the word ‘family’ now, you are included. I thought you realized that.” I shrugged sheepishly. It frustrated him that there was any question. “You’re a hard girl to love, Sadie. You don’t take it well,” he said. Something about that felt more insulting than he meant it.

“Sorry,” I whispered. I was embarrassed.

“Nothing to apologize for,” he said. “Hey, didn’t we lie down so you would sleep?”

“Sleep doesn’t come easy these days,” I said. My fingertips continued their glide over his satiny skin, down his arms and back up, from his collar, up his neck, and across his cheeks. I laid my palm on his cheek and stroked it. He tilted his head and placed a slow kiss on the inside of my wrist. He wasn’t breathing.

I let my hand drift down his neck again and then across the material of his soft undershirt until my fingers found his cool skin in one of the tears in the shirt. Everett shivered and inhaled sharply. I slid my fingers down the shirt until they found another tear, this one larger and more on his side. I let my fingertips rub back and forth across his granite skin, feeling the hard ridges and grooves of his muscles. Everett closed his eyes and swallowed hard.