Just looking at him caused a different kind of ache inside of me. I lay down on my side, my hand tucked under my cheek, and I stared at him. Standing up slowly so my chair wouldn’t squeak, I tiptoed in the dark across to the bed and very gently eased myself back into it, checking constantly to make sure I hadn’t woken him as I pulled the sheets back up over me. I was afraid I’d wake him up and he obviously needed his rest. But looking at his sleeping face in profile I stopped myself. Gazing longingly at his muscular back and strong arms, I wanted to slip back into bed and wrap him around me. Or that he’d been so tired he didn’t wake up when I extricated myself from his embrace. When he’d returned home I must have already fallen asleep but I wasn’t surprised that I woke up in his arms. He’d called me late, explaining how he’d gone from meeting to meeting, and then he had been pulled into some emergency at his nightclub Fire, which turned out not to be such an emergency but a case of crap management.

We didn’t have “sides of the bed.” Braden was a cuddler-he insisted we didn’t need sides.

His bare back was uncovered, the sheets drawn up to his waist, his long legs tangled in them in the middle of the bed. I smiled and turned in my chair to look at him in the dark room.

I just didn’t let it overwhelm me by turning it into a gaping hole. Before my considerate bedfellow, I’d have sewn that cut completely shut and put a numbing agent over it. Pain slashed me deep across my chest and when I thought on the loss of my parents, of my little sister, Beth, that cut would widen into an agonizing gash. Breathing in and out, slowly, evenly, I controlled the wound inside of me. After saving the file, I shut the laptop down and stared at it for a while. I’d been typing for just over an hour and finally I’d come to the end of the chapter. This often meant late-night type-fests and despite the fact that I was partially consumed by their story, I was also very much aware of my considerate bedfellow and was trying to act as he would and not wake him up. Much of what I’d written was conjecture since I only knew the basic history of my parents’ relationship, but their world, or the world I’d given them, had taken me over these past few months and I found myself enjoying writing in a way I had never before. I’d woken up in the middle of the night, wide-awake and itching to finish the chapter in my manuscript where my dad finally makes progress in his relationship with my mom. My fingers moved fast but quietly across the keys of my laptop, and I’d adjusted the screen light so it wasn’t so blaring.

Castle hill by samantha young