“We both know there are intimacies beyond sex. And for me, sharing a bed is one of them.”
Probably the thing to do was leave it at that. But I was me, and I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. “You never did tell me why you hated it so much.”
“Oh, Arden, I didn’t hate it. I…far from hated it.” His gaze slid past me to the window and the gleaming sky beyond. “I have trouble with the sense of…with the sense of…physical vulnerability. Of course, rationally, I know you would never…never…” And then he fell silent with the force of Wile E. Coyote crashing into a concrete wall.
“It’s okay,” I said quickly. “I get it.”
He gave me this awful look, half-defiant, half-stricken. “I don’t like feeling helpless.”
“I shouldn’t have asked.”
“I should have told you.” I was going to protest, but then he turned away and, from behind his own hand, muttered, “But I don’t know how to speak of…of any of it.”
I tried to beam my tangle of adoring-him-hurting-for-him-desperately-wanting-to-help-him feelings at his back. “It’s impossibly difficult.”
“I…Lately I…” He bowed his head. “I have come to wonder who I am protecting with my silence. If it is truly myself.”
“Please,” I burst out. “I don’t want to be alone tonight. And I don’t want you to be either. Stay with me. At least for a little bit.”
Slowly, he faced me again, so much despair in him, and so much longing in his eyes. “Of course I will.”
“Really? I mean…really?”
“Until you sleep.”
I nodded, breathlessly. “Okay. Yes. Anything. Thank you.”
We were almost painfully decorous about it. Me, under the sheets, in an unsexy ball, and Caspian sitting on top of them, having shed only jacket and tie, his back against the headboard and his long legs crossed at the ankles. We didn’t touch—although I could feel the shape of him and, faintly or perhaps it was my imagination, the heat of him. I couldn’t help sneaking little glances at his face. His profile offered nothing but its beauty: those fine masculine symmetries, pure as marble.
“This is, um, all right, right?” I said. “You’re, like, not bored.”
“Go to sleep.”
I was trying. I really was. But the moment I closed my eyes, Jonas was waiting, like some smiling, bespectacled bogeyman. I flipped onto my back. Then my side. Then my other side. My back again. My front.
Caspian made a low, exasperated noise. “Arden…”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I promise I’m not I’m doing it deliberately. I’m just having trouble dropping off.”
“Lying still would probably help.”
“It’s my brain that won’t lie still.”
“Well”—he cast a strange, sweet look at me—“what do you normally do when you feel restless?”
The words echoed inside me, silvery as wind chimes, but way less annoying. “Oh, you know. The usual things. Read a book. Get myself off.” I gave an uncertain laugh. “Which would so not be appropriate right now.”
“I can leave the room.”
“OMG, Caspian. No. I’m not wanking in your bed.”
“I wouldn’t mind. And the sheets are changed daily.”
I whacked him in the leg. “Not the point. It would be weird, and I wouldn’t enjoy it.”
“Then…I suppose you’ll have to fall back on a book.”
“Look.” I propped myself up on an elbow. “It’s not that I don’t appreciate theArden has a problem that must be resolved and I shall resolve itapproach you’re taking to me getting a healthy amount of rest, but it’s not going work. I’m scared and I’m anxious, and I really don’t have the concentration to read.”
