The thunder doesn't care that I need sleep.
I've been lying here for two hours counting the gaps between the crack of lightning and the groan that follows it. The way Pop taught me when I was seven and convinced the sky was being torn apart at the seams.
One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three…
Measure the distance, make it math, make it manageable.
The problem is that I've gotten as far as one Mississippi before the next crack hits, and math stops being useful when the storm is sitting directly on top of you.
I give up at midnight.
The kitchen is dark except for a single candle flame guttering in the draft from somewhere I can't identify. Beckett is still there — sitting at the island with a glass of water he doesn't seem to be drinking, his forearms resting on the granite.
He looks up when I walk in. Neither of us says anything for a beat, which establishes immediately that we are two people who did not expect company and are slightly annoyed to find we're relieved by it.
"Can't sleep?" he asks.
"The storm is aggressively loud."
"That's generally the nature of storms." He gets up, fills a glass from the tap, and sets it in front of the stool across from him without being asked. "Sit down before you vibrate out of your skin."
I sit and wrap both hands around the water glass.
"When will the power come back?" I ask.
"Whenever it wants to. The whole east side of the neighborhood is out." He glances at the window, where the rain is doing serious structural damage to his patio furniture. "Could be morning."
"Comforting…"
"I try." He leans back and crosses his arms because the stool doesn't offer much else to do with himself. "I've been down here since eleven, for what it's worth. The storm isn't the reason I came down."
The honesty of it is so plainly stated that it catches me off guard. I look at him across the candle. He meets my eyes and doesn't walk it back, which is disarming.
"What is your reason?" I ask.
"Couldn't tell you." He pauses. "Does there need to be one?"
I decide that it doesn't. We stay like that — the candle flickering, the rain hammering the windows. Such silence only exists between two people who have run out of the energy required to be guarded.
"I used to sleep with the television on," I say, because the dark and the smallness of the room seem to have loosened something I hadn't intended to loosen. "Not for the noise. Just… the light. Having a light on in the room meant the dark wasn't total."
"When did that start?"
When I was three and two police officers came to my grandparent's door in the middle of a rainstorm, and the world rearranged itself into before and after.
"Childhood," I say simply instead.
Beckett is quiet for a moment, turning the glass slowly on the granite.
"I used to sleep on the floor of my bedroom," he says. "I just… The bed felt too far from the door. I needed to be able to hear if someone was in the hallway."
I look at him.
"Eight, nine years old," he continues. "Collier and my mother went through a phase where the fights happened after dinner." The glass stops turning. "The quiet fights were the ones that lasted until morning, and I got very good at knowing from the sound of footsteps whether the night was over or not."
"Did it ever get better?"
He tilts his head. "They stopped having fights. I don't know if that's better or just… different."
There's a laugh buried somewhere in the way he says it — dry and self-aware — and it lands softer than his jokes do in daylight, like he's not performing it. The candle shifts in the draft, stretching his shadow long up the cabinet behind him.
"You're different in the dark," I say.
"More handsome?"
"Less practiced."
He considers this. "I'll take it."
When the thunder cracks again, my hand shoots out across the island before I can stop it, my whole body lurching forward on reflex. My pulse is in my ears. The glass of water tips and rights itself without spilling, though I'm not sure how.
Beckett's hand closes over mine.
He doesn't say ‘it's fine’ or ‘it's just thunder’ or any of the reflexive things people say when they want to end someone else's discomfort. He just holds my hand. The warmth of his palm settles over my knuckles — steady, not gripping.
I don't pull away.
He stands and comes around the island slowly without letting go of my hand. He stops beside me and the kitchen really is a smaller room than it is, because he's close enough that I can see the candle reflected in his eyes — a doubled flame, one in each.
"You're stronger than this," he says. His voice is low, pitched just above the rain.
He doesn't mean the storm. I know it the way I know my own pulse right now. Erratic and exposed at the inside of my wrist where his thumb has come to rest without either of us deciding it would.
"I know," I say, because I do know it, even if it doesn't always help.
"You can be weak here. With me." He says it without ceremony, without the softening that turns honesty into something palatable and therefore less true. "I won't pick it up and use it later. That's not what I do with people."
I look at him for a long moment. His face is open. The candlelight is doing no favors to the sharpness of his jaw, and I am aware in a way I've been actively fighting for days that Beckett Morrow is extraordinarily, inconveniently attractive, and that the inconvenience is getting harder to maintain.
He closes the distance slowly enough that I have four full seconds to stop it.
When I don’t, his mouth finds mine — unhurried and careful, asking without a word whether I mean to stay here or leave.
I stay. His hand is still holding mine, and I feel his grip shift, fingers threading between mine, palm pressing flat. Like he's decided that if this is happening, it's happening properly.
The kiss deepens by a degree, then another, and the storm outside and the birthmark and Gary and the whole architecture of the last two weeks dissolve into the warmth of his lips on mine.
My hand has found the front of his shirt and is gripping it without my permission. The granite edge of the island is pressing into my lower back, and I don't care about either of those things even slightly.
Then his free hand rises to the side of my face, his palm against my jaw, his thumb at my cheekbone, gentle in a way that makes the contrast unbearable.
The last hand that touched my face left a bruise.
That thought arrives without permission, and the tears come with it. Sudden and ferocious, and bypassing every wall I've reinforced over the last decade. When I pull back, my face is wet before I've understood what's happening.
Beckett sees it and his hand drops immediately. He doesn't reach after me, just stands very still in the dark and waits.
I press the back of my hand to my mouth. My chest is doing something I can't regulate. I look at him and I look at the candle and I look at the space between us that I just made, and I say the only true thing I can find:
"I can't do this."