Page 24 of The Delivery

“Lex?” I say, sitting up quickly in bed. My adrenaline rushes as the shadow looms over me, and I blink my eyes in the dark.

“It’s me, Lana. Mozey,” he whispers, and two things happen with the sound of his voice—my heart heaves itself off of Niagara Falls in a barrel tumbling down toward the rocks, while my spirit soars like a rocket ship plowing through the atmosphere.

“What do you want?” I yell-whisper at him, trying to keep my cool.

“Your dad set me up in the basement, and I think it’s forty below down there. I have hypothermia, and I can’t feel my toes.”

“Sleep on the couch, then!” I bite back, turning away from him and pulling my covers up to my chin. But my blood is roaring through my veins with the mere proximity of him.

“I tried that, too. But you have a crazy Russian couch stuffed with horsehair and hay. And I’ve slept on cement before, so you’d think I could swing it, but it’s triggering my asthma, and I’ve only got a few pumps left in the inhaler.”

“Do you even have asthma?” I say, sitting up. But when I say it out loud, it brings forth a memory of seeing it listed on his intake form under personal medical history. Mozey takes advantage of my momentary shift and plants his butt on my childhood twin bed.

I press my body as far as I can into the freezing cold wall.

“If you come anywhere near me. You’re sleeping on the floor!”

“I promise I won’t touch you. Just sleep. I don’t even snore.”

“If you touch me, I’ll scream.”

“I would hope so. I’m more of a moaner, myself.”

I ignore the joke.

I’m using the temperature of the wall to cool down the need that’s swirling through my limbs with the thought of having him pressed up against me. I’m wet just thinking about lying next to his body.

“Thanks, Lana,” he murmurs as he snuggles under the covers. I’m immediately assaulted by the distinctly manly smell of Mozey. It’s cedar and turpentine, musk and spray paint, and it’s become a reluctant opiate to my olfactory preference. I breathe him in like oxygen and delight in his smell. I want to hold him and make out with him until my lips hurt. I want to press my body into his, to feel all of this pent up desire returned. I place both of my hands palm flat against the cold wall.

Social work. Damaged child. Obligation. Respect. Distance. I conjure up words, hoping to trigger a bucket of cold water to pour over my perverse attraction to a client who happens to be sleeping in my bed.

“Lana?”

“What?”

“Are you asleep?”

“Yes.”

“Can I hold you?”

I don’t answer him, and the seconds tick by like celestial slugs as big solar systems. Seconds that are everywhere but go nowhere and suffocate me with their infinite presence. Seconds where I can’t fathom an answer to that question because holding him might just be the one thing I want more than anything else in the world. But holding him might mean the downfall of everything I know—everything I’ve worked for and struggled to become. Trash it all away forever in a single embrace.

Embrace him I would, but what would it lead to? Sex. I can’t control myself around him. And then? The unraveling of all of my carefully assembled existence.

“Lana?” he whispers.

I exhale hard and raspy like I’m releasing a snore.

“I followed you here because I think I’m in love with you.”

I force myself to breathe and not react with my body. The seconds are looming again like dark storm clouds and the tension is unbearable. How can I not answer that? How can I pretend to sleep through this monumental moment? No one has ever told me they were in love with me. Not one person. Ever.

I reach out behind me and my hand bumps his hard stomach. I want to turn and face him, to discover what our love is. But instead I grab his hand, and I pull his arm around my shoulder. He takes the signal and moves his body across the small space that divides us. A few inches that represent the complete rearranging of my world. He presses his body to my back, and we fit together perfectly, seamlessly. Just like I knew we would.

The seconds soften and melt into symbiosis with time. We are two hidden lovers, embraced against the world, warm and perfect under the covers. We hold each other with stillness and a universe of promise. We hold one another against the unknown and declare silently together, I am his protector, and he, is my protector.

CHAPTER 12

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