Belle's hand rests in the valley between Nosty's sharp shoulder blades, rising and falling with every ragged breath he takes. His left hand tightly fists the fabric of her blouse at her waist, and his right has crept upwards to tangle in her hair.
He jerks and mutters in his sleep, lost to strange, unfathomable dreams.
Although the tension flowed out of him the moment Nosty spent himself inside her, his heartbeat continues to race ahead of hers, and his eyelids clench and flicker. Even in sleep, even within the warm embrace of a lover who whispered, "sweetheart" and "stay" over and over until he succumbed to his exhaustion, even then—Nosty is vigilant. Belle suspects the slightest noise or the smallest movement will wake him.
It is bliss to feel his slight, shuddering form draped over her chest while he sleeps. It is bliss to feel the steady rise and fall of his shoulders and to know that he is warm and dry beneath her blanket on this snowy November night. It is heavenly to feel his surprisingly soft, woolly head tucked beneath her chin and to twine her naked legs with his beneath the fleece.
Belle recognizes the raw, bittersweet ache within her chest when he flinches and groans in his sleep—love.
She loved him a little, before, guarding his uneasy slumber in the hospital, and now—now he has her heart. His unshaven cheek is pressed flush against it, shifting and sighing heavily, breathing through his open mouth.
It's love Belle feels when she oh-so-carefully sweeps aside the locks that have fallen across his angular face, and it's love she feels when she discovers that a hand gently stroking and cradling the crown of his head eases him back toward sleep.
These are Belle's last thoughts before sinking into her own strange dreams: "I carry your heart…I carry your heart…"
When she wakes, the clock on her kitchen wall reads "4:13 AM," and her arms are empty. The blanket is tucked snugly beneath her hips and up over her shoulders, but the lovely weight of him is gone, and for a moment she is in an awful panic, believing she's lost him once again.
But then—a flash of red arrests her attention, over in the dim corner near the bookshelves, and—oh, thank God—it's him. Nosty is examining her large collection of family photographs, displayed in ornate crystal frames upon her mahogany side table and also along the sturdy, built-in shelves. He's fully dressed, his dark hair and leather jacket fading into the predawn shadows, and his kilt is once again pulled taut around his narrow waist.
"You're fucking minted," he says dully, not bothering to look over at her, and she would call it an accusation if his voice weren't so dreadfully hollow and lifeless. "Adjunct professors can't afford three-bedroom flats overlooking the fucking Gardens."
He picks up an oval picture frame and stares at it. From its shape, Belle knows what it is he's seeing: her arms draped affectionately around each of her brothers' necks. The trio is dressed in their natty, black and white Westminster uniforms. The photograph was taken on her first day of sixth form.
"No, adjunct professors cannot," Belle agrees. "This flat belonged to my grandmother. The money was hers as well."
She wraps the blanket around her shoulders and crosses the room to stand beside him.
Reaching for a rectangular frame engraved with white dahlias, Belle points to a handsome young woman with flyaway curls and serious, gray eyes. "She was an inventor. An eccentric. She made her fortune registering patents, but barely spent a shilling on herself aside from this flat. She loved to walk in the Gardens. Her name was Isabelle. My namesake."
"When she died, the inheritance passed to my father, and soon after it came down to us." Belle gently plucks the picture of herself and her brothers from Nosty's hand. "Matthew and I used it mainly for our schooling. Cambridge costs a pretty penny. But James…"
She draws a shaky breath. "Sudden wealth isn't necessarily a blessing."
Nosty laughs at this unlikely conjecture, an ugly, scornful little sound, and Belle carefully places the picture back on the side table.
"Come to bed?" she asks quietly, clutching the blanket close and reaching up to touch his shoulder. "It's much more comfortable than the couch."
He stares at her small, white hand, stark against his black jacket, and unconsciously works his jaw. His brow is knit, and his expression is pained. At last, shaking his head, Nosty replies in a low voice: "Things are about to get extremely fucking maudlin, Belle. It's best I go."
Feeling her grip tighten instinctively on his shoulder, he tries again: "I'm a—I'm a fucking Greek tragedy waiting to happen tonight, love. Soon I'll be rending my garments and beating my fucking breast. Ah, hell. I'm on a fucking downswing, Belle. You don't need to see this shite, yeah?"
She breathes easier, knowing that it's only shame that's edging him out her door and not regret for the intimacy they shared earlier. Tenderly catching up his hand, Belle presses a careful kiss to the inside of his injured wrist.
"Please stay," she urges, then leads him, unresisting, by the hand down the dark hallway to her bedroom overlooking the snow-covered Gardens. Though it's already approaching five o'clock, the crescent moon shines brightly through Belle's large, arched windows, illuminating the gleaming wood floor and the downy, white duvet covering her bed.
"Please stay," she whispers as she eases the battered leather jacket off of his shoulders and carefully drapes it over the back of an elegant, upholstered armchair. "Stay, Nosty," she whispers as she slips her arms around his narrow waist and draws him close, resting her cheek against his ripped cotton t-shirt.
Belle listens to the thudding of his heart for what feels like many long minutes, and then—at last—Nosty is tugging the ratty shirt up over his head and afterwards pressing her tightly to his pale, ruined chest.
It could be Belle's imagination or the late hour, but she thinks she feels lips brushing back and forth over her hair and the whisper of warm breath against her forehead. Yet, when she tips her head back to claim those lips, Nosty hastily extracts himself from her arms and crawls onto her large bed, wearing nothing but his threadbare kilt and shabby wool socks.
It's strange, the way he lays himself down lengthwise, his back pressed to the solid, maple headboard and his knees drawn up to his stomach. He pushes the plump feather pillows aside and draws the duvet up to cover his head and wiry body.
Should she go to him? Is she welcome within his dark, stuffy cavern of sheets and blankets?
Belle suspects the answer is complicated. Likely, she isn't entirely welcome, but she's needed, nonetheless.
After hurriedly scrubbing her face and brushing her teeth, Belle changes into her softest flannel bottoms and a well-worn cotton pullover. Tentatively, she burrows beneath the bedclothes, cautious of waking him should he have already drifted into sleep.
He has not.
The scant light that creeps in around the edges of the white duvet reveals his brown eyes to be wide and unblinking. He is fed and warm and safe…and he looks absolutely wretched.
Belle slips her warm palm into his and whispers against his dry, cracked knuckles: "This bed is yours, sweetheart. I'll have a key made for you tomorrow. Whenever you want to sleep somewhere warm and safe, day or night, this bed is yours. This flat is yours."
He shuts his eyes.
"The food in the cupboards, the wine in the rack, the washer and dryer, the books on the shelves, the telly…it's yours Nosty, all of it. You're safe here. I know it cannot stop the…the peaks and valleys, but…"
His eyes fly open at the word 'safe,' and his thin lips draw back to reveal his sharp, white teeth. This expression could easily pass as scorn, but his downturned mouth and glassy stare give him away: this is grief. His face is twisted by grief.
"I'm tucked up safe in your snug little flat, eh?" His voice is dull, but Nosty grips her hand tighter. "I've had homes before. So many I fucking lost count."
He laughs quietly, and Belle has never heard a sound so mirthless and hurting.
"Fuck 'safe.' I thought I was safe in the last house I lived in. Foster mum seemed like a real sweet lady. She looked after the three other wee bastards she'd taken into care real nice. Even bought us new school clothes with the stipend; most of 'em didn't bother with that, but she did. Fixed our meals, did the baths…"
His too-long fingernails are digging into the fleshy part of her palm, and his eyes are pinpricks of light in the stifling dark beneath the blankets.
"A few months in, minger starts accusing us of lifting things from her purse. Well fuck, for all I knew one of the wee beasties was lifting her bawbees. We all fucking stole, just usually not from the hand that feeds us, yeah? So I didn't think anything of it. I was fucking eleven. Just a muppet."
"Then she fucking starts holding court with herself. Having conversations with the fucking air. She says we're demons sent up from hell to test her. Says we're watching her, watching her, won't give her any rest."
"I should have fucking left, but I thought a house meant 'safe' then. I thought a roof and four walls fucking meant something then. And the other three were so wee, all under six…"
"One day she left for the grocery and never came back. Just…fucking locked us in and left. I fixed them cheese sandwiches, and we waited. There wasn't much in the cupboards. If I'd known she wasn't fucking coming back, I wouldn't have used so much bread and filling…"
"We waited five days, or thereabouts. I cannae recall precisely, just that the food lasted for only a short while and then the wee bastards started fussing and wouldn't stop. We had water from the tap, and you can fill a belly up with that, but they wouldn't fucking hush. Fucking awful racket, but nobody came."
"Foster mum had a dog. An ugly half-breed that was sweet with children. I gave its food to the wee 'uns, and after a day or so it went fucking feral. Locked it up in the back bedroom so it wouldn't bite, and afterwards the radge bastard started howling and throwing himself against the door…ah, fuck…"
Nosty's shoulders begin to shake, and it's this memory, the wretched animal that was shut away so that it's starving and suffering wouldn't be a danger to anyone but itself—this is the recollection that breaks him.
He weeps silently, clutching her hand to his open mouth, crushing Belle's delicate fingers within a vise grip.
But this story demands an epilogue.
"There was a low window," Nosty explains through grit teeth, "It was a garden flat, below ground, so finally I climbed a chair and smashed the glass with a fucking bottle she left lying around. Climbed out. Tore my chest all to shite. It took awhile before I found someone who would fucking listen.
"The others were probably adopted," he finishes quietly. "They were young enough for it. Folks still want 'em when they're under six. They believe there's still hope for 'em. I don't know what happened to the fucking dog."
Belle feels Nosty's teeth pressed to the back of her hand and feels his spare shoulders begin to quake and shudder once more, and she knows herself to be utterly inadequate to this sort of suffering. She has grieved and buried her loved ones, but love has always been tangible in her very fortunate life; it has always been present alongside her grief.
At a loss, she crawls over his weeping form and curls securely around him, so that her warm body is the solid wall his knobbly back presses against, and her warm arms are able to wrap tightly around his damaged chest.
What Belle wants to say is this: I'm terrified—so terrified—love will never be enough to heal a wound that cuts so deep. I'm terrified that if I fall asleep, I'll wake and find you gone.
Instead, she whispers: "You saved their lives, Nosty."
Instead, Belle waits until the worst of his wretched, convulsive grief has passed, and murmurs: "I carry your heart with me…I carry it in my heart…I am never without it…"
She kisses the fragile, warm shell of his ear and whispers the rest of it, her tender declaration, her loving, devout pledge: "…here is the deepest secret nobody knows…(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud…and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows…higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)…and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart…i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)."
He quiets, listening to her sweet, lilting voice, recognizing the timeless troth in verse: "I carry your heart…I carry it in my heart…"
"It's Arran," Nosty says faintly, just when Belle believes she's lost him to sleep. "My name is fucking Arran. The only thing my mum ever gave me."
"Is it Irish?" she murmurs, ready for the indignant jolt that quickly follows.
"Fucking Irish…?" Nosty replies, twisting round to look at her.
"Only kidding," Belle whispers, brushing her lips over his and settling in for what she hopes will be a sweet and restful sleep. "Only kidding, love."