“The shots.”
I glanced at her, and my brow furrowed at her expression until I realized what she meant.
There were a ton of gangs only a handful of blocks away, and they were always going at each other. Sometimes they had all out fucking wars, but a lot of the time, they just took potshots at each other, usually around four in the morning. When I first moved to this apartment, the gunshots would wake me up as well. After so many years, they only woke me up now if there was a shooting in the building, and that hadn’t happened in a while.
Tria took several more breaths, and I felt her fingers relax. She glanced at me, but then quickly looked away again.
“Since the very first night I moved here, I hadn’t been able to sleep,” Tria continued. “I probably didn’t sleep more than half an hour the first night I lived in this neighborhood and probably never slept more than three hours total any of the other nights. I just couldn’t.”
Her eyes still didn’t move back to me but remained trained on my upper arm. Her finge
rs moved over the edge of the muscle there.
“It was even worse after that night we met,” she said. “I don’t think I closed my eyes for days. I kept seeing them closing in on me.”
She finally looked back into my eyes.
“I was too scared to sleep,” she admitted quietly. “But with you…with you holding me, I feel safe.”
Without hesitation, my arm wrapped back around her, and my fingers took their place against her side. The arm underneath her lifted slightly so I could pull her a little closer against my chest. Her hand slid farther up my arm and held tight to my bicep.
“You are safe,” I stated simply.
I was never one to cuddle, but I wasn’t about to let go of her now.
Chapter 15—Toe the Line
The shit just got weird after that.
During the day, things went on just as they had been. Tria cooked and went to school. I ate and worked out. The nights when I wasn’t working, Tria usually made dinner, and she would study while I pretended to watch television but really watched her.
Then we’d go to bed.
Things would start feeling really tense right before our usual bedtime. Tria would gather up her homework or books or whatever and shove them into Chewbacca’s Carry-on so they’d be ready to go the next day. I’d go out on the fire escape for a smoke and then sit around on the couch and act like I had something to do. Eventually we’d look at each other, and one of us would mumble something about it being time to go to bed.
Tria would take her sweats and a T-shirt into the bathroom while I’d change in the bedroom, then we’d be all awkward and tense as we’d get into our respective sides of the bed. She’d usually smooth the blankets evenly across the bed—as if I were ever going to touch them again. I would turn off the light, and we’d both lay back on the pillows for a minute.
As the darkness would creep around us, we’d move to the center of the bed.
I would usually raise my arm up and over her shoulders, and she would settle against me with one hand on my chest. My other arm would wrap around her middle, and I would pull her closer to me. At that point, I could feel her relax into me as I eased against her. Our eyes would close, and we’d both be asleep moments later.
As weird as it would start out, it was still the best part of the whole day.
It was even better than breakfast pancakes.
It was like a little soft cloud of utopia. I didn’t wake up any more at night, which I guess I had been doing because I was feeling guilty about touching my “little sister” who was now my roommate. I was getting the best sleep I could remember getting in years, and Tria seemed pretty happy about the whole arrangement, too. As long as I could keep the morning wood away from her ass, everything was good.
If she ever noticed, she didn’t let on.
Not that everything was absolutely perfect. There were certainly a few points of contention. I was really bad about closing doors. I think I just lived alone for so long, it didn’t occur to me a lot of the time. I left the bathroom door open when I was in a hurry to pee, and I left the bedroom door open when I changed clothes. Tria didn’t walk in on me too many times because she developed the habit of just yelling at me from another room instead, just in case.
She wasn’t completely peaches and cream, either. I found out on several evenings that Tria did indeed have a bit of a temper, which I had suspected. There was something about her getting all riled up about various issues that I have to admit turned me on. Typically it had to do with some injustice she learned about in her classes or over someone being rude to her in one way or another or something just unexpected happening that didn’t fall into her plans.
On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, she was already bellyaching before she was even inside the door after returning from school. I could hear her stomping in the hallway before she had her key in the lock.
“It’s supposed to be the damn Thanksgiving holiday!” She was grumbling to herself as the door opened. “How can someone do that? I mean, really!”
“Something wrong?” I asked, like a complete and total fool. I knew it would get her going, and I was counting on it. Sometimes her tirades were better than porn.