Lahat ng Kabanata ng CRAVING THE WRONG BLACKTHORNE BROTHER: Kabanata 71 - Kabanata 80

Nobody answered.How long have you been sleeping with my wife. The words were still in the room, filling every corner of it, and the silence that followed was the loudest thing I had ever heard.Levi straightened from the doorframe slowly. His hand dropped from his jaw. The mark from Nate’s fist was already darkening, a deep red that would be purple by morning, and he looked at his brother with a steadiness that I recognized, the steadiness of a man who had decided to absorb whatever comes next.“It’s not what you think,” Levi said.“Don’t.” Nate’s voice was very soft. “Don’t insult me.”“Nate—”“I said don’t.”The softness was the warning. I knew that now, had learned it over months of living with this man, reading the register of his voice the way you learn to read weather. The louder he was, the more manageable. The softer, the more dangerous. And right now his voice was barely above a murmur, which meant we were standing at the edge of something I had never seen before.“It was me

The ceiling was wrong.That was my first thought — not where am I or what happened but simply that the ceiling was wrong, too high and too white, and the light coming through the curtains had the particular flatness of mid-morning rather than the deep amber of the soiree. My body felt like something that had been taken apart and reassembled slightly incorrectly, every joint a degree off from where it should be.I turned my head.Dr. Hayes sat in the chair beside the bed, writing in her chart. She looked up the moment I moved, with the alertness of someone who had been waiting for exactly that.“There you are,” she said quietly.I opened my mouth. My throat felt like gravel. “What—”“You fainted. Exhaustion, dehydration, low blood sugar.” She set the chart down. “You’ve been unconscious for about six hours.”Six hours.I pushed myself upright slowly, taking inventory. I was in one of the medical wing guest rooms — not Levi’s room, a different one, smaller, with a window that looked out

He stood at the window for a long time.I sat in the chair and watched his back and let the silence be what it was. I had learned, in the months of being married to this man, that there were different kinds of Nate silences. There was the silence he used as a weapon, deliberate, pressurized, designed to make the other person fill it with something they hadn't meant to say. There was the silence of him thinking, which had a particular quality of aliveness to it, like standing near something generating heat. And then there was this kind. The kind that happened to him. The kind that meant something had landed too deep for the usual machinery to process and he was simply standing inside it, waiting to find out what he thought.I did not rush him.Outside the window, the gardener had finished his pass along the lower path and moved on to somewhere else. The garden sat empty now in the flat morning light, dew still on the grass, everything very still. A perfectly ordinary Tuesday that had s

Underneath the grief and the guilt and the constant low ache of Levi’s absence, I felt it. Warm and tentative and real. I reached across the table. My hand covered his. He turned his hand over and held mine, his thumb moving across my knuckles in the slow, absentminded rhythm of someone who doesn’t realize they’re doing it. Muscle memory. Something his body did without consulting the part of him still keeping score. I looked at our hands and let myself feel that too, the grief and this, both at once, coexisting the way they’d been coexisting in me for months without my permission. “Ella.” His thumb had gone still. “Whose baby is it.” Not a question. Seven days of building to it and it came out flat and final, and I felt it hit the soft place where the hope had just been sitting. I didn’t let go of his hand. “I don’t know,” I said. He looked at me. All the way at me, the phone forgotten, the carefully maintained distance of seven days collapsing into something raw. “You don’

He stepped through the door and I kissed him. Not carefully, not with any of the hesitation that had lived in every moment between us for months. I closed the space before he had finished crossing the threshold and kissed him the way you kiss someone you have been trying not to think about for eleven days and failing completely, and he made a sound low in his throat and kissed me back with three hundred miles of driving through the dark behind it. His hands came to my face. Mine found the front of his jacket. We stood there in the gray morning light of the bedroom while the estate woke up around us and I stopped thinking about the east wing and the breakfast table and the steadiness in Nate’s eyes, and there was nothing except this, him, here, real. When we finally broke apart we were both breathing harder than we should have been. Levi pressed his forehead to mine. “Hi,” he said. “Hi.” His thumbs moved across my cheekbones, gentle now where the kiss hadn’t been, and he looked