Ch. 13

They stayed in the rain until the dark hours of the morning when the rain finally lightened up. They went inside and enjoyed the leftover pizza. He watched her, eating and laughing like a teenager at a slumber party still soaking wet. This wasn't the girl who jumped in front of his truck a few weeks ago. The rain had washed her away, even if it was temporary. Here was the woman she was supposed to be, with the same peaceful look as the girl in the picture.

Shortly after they ate and Eliot threw the clothes in dryer (after Savannah compulsively hosed them down in peroxide), it was time for bed. She flopped on the bed, hair still wet with a happy sigh, almost a laugh he had never heard before. He laid down next to her and felt her chilled skin against his arm. "You're freezing. Are sure you don't want to risk a blanket for tonight?"

There was a pause as she looked at him. Her stare sent a chill down his own spine; it was like she was staring through him, for some reason, or looking for something. "Okay."

His thoughts became words. "I wasn't expecting you to agree to that."

Her gaze left him for a second, as if in thought. "You're here."

The explanation left him speechless. Two words that spoke an epic meaning. That night, for the first time, Savanah only woke up once in the middle of the night. She rejected the blanket after that, but once she had confirmed Eliot was still beside her, she settled back in.

The next day, Savannah was quiet, even for her. Her appetite was higher than usual. The way she moved, however, whispered that the little girl who played in the rain the night before was still shadowing. She missed the rain. After the hair-burning routine, she sat on the roof, still wet from the storm, for over an hour, tracing her fingers in nearby puddles as the ghost of a peaceful smile played on her lips.

She looked at Eliot. The corners of her eyes crinkled a little. He was in awe at how she could say so much while speaking so little. It wasn't even the way Sophie, not the manipulative body language, but like she looked at him, telling him secrets just meant for him. He sat next to her. Most of the rest of the day she spent a lot of time in her room.

The others looked to him for answers, furtively taking him to the side and asking if something consequential happened the night before. He shrugged, having no definitive answer. The questions came with the predictable subtext: Was something beyond business, beyond friendship, happening between him and Savannah? Again, he had no real answer. It seemed no one knew that he continued to share her bed like a watch dog.

Night fell and she acted like nothing was amiss when he came in. He knew he couldn't press her about her behavior. He answers were like cats; she came when decided, not when called. Her sleep was much less peaceful than the night before. She awoke at least twice. Eliot would just over and pat her arm, reminding her he was still there.

"Eliot." His eyes snapped open at the sound of his name the next morning. Savannah looked at him with an intense curiosity. "Why are you touching me?"

He didn't understand the question until his eyes traveled down her body to see his own arm wrapped her waist. He snatched his arm away as if the contact burned. Guilt choked him. "Um, I'm sorry. Normally, when I'm in bed with a woman, I…It...I don't know why-"

"Okay." She brushed him off and went off to the bathroom.

The way she brushed him off, just accepted his explanation, didn't even hit him, it said something that he hadn't considered before, not out right. Was it trust? Did she actually trust him? Well, it was plausible. Why wouldn't she? She spent the most time with him, saw him as a protector...maybe something else?

Then the guilt intruded on his questions. He had touched her, in a way one could consider intimate. It wasn't that he touched her that bothered him so much as it was that he knew she wasn't normally touched at all.

She was barely hitting puberty when she decided to start running; romance was no priority. She told him about her childhood a lot; it never included the mention of crushes, male or female. Romance was so lost on her that she had asked why she was being touched. But she understood his explanation, and he had barely hashed it out. So she knew about romance, sex; she knew other people dealt with it, that he dealt with it. But he had touched this girl, this untouched girl. How could he do that? She wasn't his to touch. She was no one' had gone weeks without incident. What made him touch her?

The guilt ate at him further when Savannah was acting especially jumpy the rest of the day, particularly fidgety. She barely ate. She paced during the hair-burning, almost burning herself. She was in the gym multiple times that day. She spent a lot of time in Parker's jungle gym, too. Parker's jungle gym was a room in which the entire ceiling was laced with repelling rigs. The girls would swing from one to the other, clipping and unclipping carabiners with lightning speed, neither rarely falling.

The rest of the team answered more and more questions about Savannah's increasingly erratic behavior that Eliot. Adding onto it was the guilt, so they could tell he was hiding something, who knew what, but the suspicions screamed inside his own head.