Knowing instinctively he’ll follow me, I push the door open. It’s just past noon, but the shades are drawn. They weren’t like that when I tucked her in. She must have gotten up at some point to close them. The sun filters through in a muted, eerie glow, just enough to make undressing quick and painless.
Beside me, Sy follows suit, taking off his shirt, stepping out of his shoes, peeling off his socks. He hesitates with his thumb over the button of his pants, but eventually decides to shuck them off, just like I’m doing.
We climb in slowly, wordlessly, Sy taking the left side, me the right.
Lifting the covers, I’m hit by a wave of her scent. The punch of white-hot need that slams into me isn’t unexpected, but I still have to take a second to shove it back down, teeth clenched on a shudder. It’s worse than it used to be, which is saying a lot. Sy wasn’t lying before. Something about Lavinia just makes us fucking crazy.
She’s on her back, hand curled delicately on the pillow beside her head. Her hair has dried, the blue-dyed ends matted into an impossible nest. She’s in nothing but my dirty shirt and a pair of panties, tits pushing at the fabric. Sy and I both pause halfway into the bed, staring. She looks like the personification of sex. My mouth practically waters at the sight of her like this, so soft and ripe and finallymine. How many times did I see her like this on Daniel’s security monitor? How many times did I walk into that motel room and fuckingachewith the impulse to throw her into that bed and fuck the threat of myself into her? How many times back in the tower did I imagine coming home to her like this–in my bed for once, instead of Sy or Remy’s?
I’m so busy obsessing about it that it takes me too long to realize her eyes are open.
Shaking out of the trance, I whisper, “Hey,” and reach out to brush a lock of hair from her cheek. Her eyelids look heavy, slack, but she’s staring sightlessly into the darkness, lips slightly parted.
She doesn’t move.
I touch her cheek. “Little Bird?” Her eyes twitch, but she doesn’t respond, and that punch of need from before is joined by a sledgehammer of panic. I shake her shoulder. “Lavinia!”
Sy’s voice penetrates the staccato of my racing heart. “Hey, hey, chill.” It’s only when he pries my hand from her neck that I realize he’s beneath the blankets beside her, propped up on an elbow. “She’s okay, Nick. She gets like this sometimes. It’s just sleep paralysis.” He leans over her, searching her eyes, and his lips form a tense, unhappy line. “Shit. No telling how long she’s been like this. She can go in and out.”
I stare at her slack face, muscles still coiled tight against the urgency to wake her. “Sleep paralysis?” Little things are more noticeable now. The small, thin divot between her eyebrows. The tightness in her arms. The little jerking movement of her chest. I whip my gaze to Sy, suddenly horrified. “She can’t fucking move?”
“It’s a really common thing,” he assures, but the way the words are rushed out tells me he knows why I’m staring at him like this. Lavinia is claustrophobic. Being completely unable to move has to be fucking agony for her. Sy exhales heavily. “Yeah. It’s probably related to… well, you know.”
Her dad locking her in that chest.
Daniel locking her in that motel room.
Me, locking her in that goddamn elevator.
Sy pushes his fingers through his hair. “I guess with the river and everything, she was bound to–”
“How do we wake her up?” I ask, voice hard and demanding. “Hey!” I snap my fingers in front of her face. “Wake up, Lavinia!”
“That doesn’t work,” Sy says, voice clipped. “I need to–” I glance over at my brother when his words cut off. He’s sitting up now, avoiding my gaze. “Youneed to… stimulate her. When it’s bad like this, that’s the only thing that’s guaranteed to break her out of it.”
“Stimulate her?”
“You know, like…” He makes a slow, rolling gesture. “Physical arousal.” When I just stare back at him expectantly, he palms his face, groaning. “Jesus. Rub her pussy, Nick.”
My eyebrows shoot up. “All this time, you’ve been rubbing her pussy to wake her up?”
“Only when it’s really bad.” He shrugs, flicking his eyes toward me. Whatever he sees in my face makes his eyes harden. “It’s not like that. I just rub her a little and she wakes up, and then we go back to sleep.” A little more defensively, “Genital stimulation is a valid vasovagal maneuver, okay? It’s… fucking clinical.”
I’m remembering now the other reason why I couldn’t let Sy come to South Side with me.
My brother can’t lie for shit.
It’s not all a lie–that much I can see–but the tips of his ears turn a bright magenta, which tells me there’s some shame underneath all that righteousness. Something happened. Something he’s not proud of. Something that meant taking advantage of the vulnerable, frightened, incapacitated girl sleeping in his bed.
It’s not like I have any room to judge.
I add that to the bucket of reasons he’s tellingmehow to do it instead of doing it himself. Whatever that shame is about, it’s joined by the fact he doesn’t trust himself, as well as the certainty that Lavinia might not, either. Not after what he did that night at the party, forcing his cock into her.
I don’t stand for it. “What’s more important here? Your fuck-up or helping her?”
He curses at me under his breath, but rests his hand on her wrist, touching her more softly than I knew the brute could muster.
“Just draw her out of it,” he says, watching her face closely. “It’s like she gets stuck in that same shitty moment and can’t force her way back out.”