He contemplated this and then reached out, smoothing the wrinkle on my forehead. “Nothing will change with us, Hail. I know that.”

My face blazed. I didn’t mean to get louder and more defensive. I took a breath. “I walked in on them once. While they were, you know. I was, like, ten.”

He straightened my collar. I could nearly see the blush on his face. There was empathy, and then there was Declan’s empathy. He could identify with my emotions so deeply that I could see them written on his face. “That must have been awkward for all parties involved.”

“They didn’t even notice,” I said, thinking back to that day. “But I’ll never forget it. The way my mom looked. She was just lying there, staring at the ceiling with these dead eyes, as if she’d rather be anywhere else. It made me wonder if she ever liked it.”

“Ah. It made you wonder if you would like it. Or if you would be the same as her,” he corrected.

I swallowed. He knew me too well. “That’s not true. I mean, you touch me, even innocently, and I…” My voice trailed off.

Declan straightened, suddenly acutely interested. “You what, exactly?”

I glare at him.

“So if I… I don’t know,” he said, studying my body. “Did this…?”

He reached out and touched my elbow.

I giggled.

“Or say, if I did this…” He ran a finger down my thigh to my knee.

I nodded. Then I pointed to the field of goose bumps there. “See?”

He looked up and breathed the hair out of his face. “That’s sweet. Hell, you make it so hard. In more ways than one.”

I pulled him onto me, and we kissed some more, until I could feel just how hard I made it. Finally, I became so frustrated that I said, “There are other things we can do. You know?”

He sighed against me. “Yeah. I know. But that’s all…lust. This is love. This is bigger than that.”

My spirit sank. “Oh.”

He pulled away and looked at me, surprised. “You want to?”

I thought I could see disgust behind his eyes. So I said, “No. I just thought you might.”

He pursed his lips together and shook his head. “No. No. I’m good.”

Fantastic, I thought bitterly. But then I thought of my mother. I thought of Kane, on top of me. Knowing what I knew of sex, why did I fill so many hours thinking about it?

Speak of the devil. Just then, Kane’s door swung open. He was only wearing boxers and unabashedly scratching his crotch. He ambled toward us, to the bathroom door. “As you were, soldiers,” he mumbled, yawning.

Declan watched him, then averted his eyes, embarrassed. Sometimes it was hard to believe two people living under the same roof could be so different.

Monday, February 25