It is hard to say how long he has been asleep when her shaking wakes him. It has started raining, so he knows that he did actually sleep for at least a little bit, and the full moon illuminates the room so he can clearly see the beautiful woman as she quakes in his arms. Her body shudders, the occasional whimper escaping her mouth, but her eyes never once flicker open. He tries to tighten his grip on her and pull her back to his chest, but her body only rebels against that and vehemently fights his hold.
"Becca," he whispers, but his voice does not seem to penetrate her nightmare. "Becca! Wake up." Still nothing. He wishes that he could shake her awake, but the nightmare wracks her body so much that he knows he would have no effect on her.
She squirms again, but her body stills momentarily, and he uses the opportunity to press his lips against the burning, sweat-beaded skin of her forehead. Her eyes immediately fly open, but they are not the eyes he is used to seeing. These were wild and lost and seem to look straight through him even though they find his eyes instantly. He takes his arm from around her waist and rests it on her cheek, lacing his fingers through her hair. That seems to focus her, and, after a heavy blink, she seems to realize that he is there.
"It was a nightmare. It's okay."
She is still for a moment, an odd contrast to the shaking of moments ago, and then her body slumps as realization strikes. "Shit," she hisses, squeezing her eyes shut. "M'sorry."
"It's okay," he assures her softly. "I'm here. Go back to sleep." He gently tugs her head back to his chest, and she is not awake enough to protest. Instead, she sighs into him, and her muscles relax as she returns to a comfortable position. He gently massages her temple and then moves his fingers down her neck and to her shoulders, something he remembers his mother doing when he was little, and she lets out a tiny moan that sens shivers right to his stomach.
The next time he is aware of her is when she shivers an hour or so later; it seems painfully obvious to him that she does not shiver from the cold, but he wraps her body in his in hopes that he can put an end to this. It is not surprising, however, when her shivering continued. His chest feels cool and damp, and a quick brush of his fingers against her cheek reveals silent tears.
"Shhhh," he soothes. "It's all right. I'm right here. I've got you."
He has no idea if her subconscious is aware of him or not, but he has to try. He has to wrap her in his arms and rock her gently back and forth, has to make those gentle circles at the base of her neck with his fingertips, has to brush his lips against her hairline. She has never felt so far away from him, lost in a world he could not access, and he has never wanted to understand someone as desperately as he wanted to understand her in that moment. He knows her pains, knows her stories, but he just doesn't know what he can do in moments like these. How do you take away the pain someone has carried for a lifetime?
Anger flares through him, starting somewhere deep in his stomach, as he holds her body against his. She is so close to him, but so far away, so alone. He hates every force in the universe that has done this to her; the things that make her so strong in the daytime have also made her so heartbreaking in the moonlight.
He kisses her forehead again and puts his head on top of hers. Silently, he sends a prayer up to a God he doesn't talk to much just in case someone is listening.
Please, God, let this be the last one tonight. Give her some peace. Let me help her.
She lets out a sob, and he clenches his teeth to hold in his anger at the kind of world that could do this to a girl. His beautiful girl.
"You're all right," he tries again. "You're safe."
"I know." The whisper astonishes him, but he keeps his tight hold around her and continues making those small circles at the base of her neck. Her voice is too tiny to be anything but a barely-conscious murmur. Her body sags back into his, and he reciprocates from relief. "You're here."
"I'm here," he agrees. "I've got you. I'm not letting go."
NWNWNWNWNWNWNWNWNWNWNWNWNWNWNWNWNW
He found out about the affair when he just couldn't take the questions swirling through his head anymore, and it damn near killed him but it didn't really surprise him. He called her to say that the needed to talk because it was just driving him absolutely crazy that she was all right with Sig moving hr furniture an accepting her packages and negotiating her car deals – her new CR-V apparently came at quite a steal between the two of their heads together – but wasn't all right with him knowing about her mother.
But it was the middle of the day when he couldn't stand it anymore, so of course she was at work. She told him to come on over if he was so frantic that he couldn't get a full sentence out over the phone, so he was finding himself pulling up to a little beige building with a black lacquer door and a pretty sick looking genie coming out of a lamp on the window advertising Three Wishes Tattoos. He could just see her cheeky smile, elbowing him in the ribs, saying, "Because I'm Becca Grant. Like, grant your wishes. Get it?"
Which is exactly what she did when he asked about the name. He still gave her the decency of an eye roll and a groan because bad humor always has to be acknowledged, right?
Her hair was up in a sloppy bun today so he could see the tiny black and white cupcake tattoo on the back of her neck, and he had never thought she looked more like an artist than she did in that paint-splattered tank top with the giant armholes that showed her lacey coral bandeau and the tree curving over her ribs. He had never seen even a hint of that tattoo before, and it made him wonder just how many she had that he didn't know about.
Speaking of things he didn't know about. "You don't like Sig, do you?"
"Oh, we're jumping right in then, are we?" she grumbled, checking something on her laptop at the old wooden counter. "Pop a squat." She pointed to the worn yellow couch on the customer side of the counter. But Edgar was not sitting down, not after spending all week thinking about thisl
"I don't understand how you're perfectly fine with him being in your home all the time and helping you with all this stuff, but you're telling me about the personal things in your life and keeping it a big secret from him. How does that make any sense?"
"It's not like that. I'm just private, ok? Don't get so worked up." She laughed a little, the kind of light, nervous laugh people give when they know they're on the losing side. And Edgar did not think this was funny at all.
"Don't tell me how to feel, Becs. I've been trying to figure out why you're trusting me more than him here, and the only thing I can think of is that you don't actually like him as much as everyone thinks you do-"
"Ed."
"But that doesn't make any sense, either, because I don't know why you'd let him stick around if you don't like him, so then I'm stuck all over again!"
"Ed!" She rounded the counter to stand right up in front of him, the only way she could think of to get his attention. "I need you to calm down. I can explain."
"Can you explain it so I don't think you're a liar?"
"I…what?" She took a step back, and he thought for second that maybe he shouldn't have said that because she looked so hurt. But then her face hardened, and the fight was back on. "I never fucking lied to you. I never said that I liked Sig."
"I'm 100% sure that you did."
"Fuck, okay, yeah, I probably did, shit, but it's more complicated than that. Sig is…fuck." She waved her hands through the air like it held the words she didn't have. "I don't want him around all the time, and I don't want all his attention, ok? I didn't ask for any of this, and I want it to just go away, but I don't know how, and it's driving me crazy. But he's got this way of just convincing you that everything's fine, and making you feel safe, y'know? And that's not easy to walk away from."
And that's when he started to wonder. Because that didn't really sound like a neighbor who wanted less help around the house.
So maybe he was still confused about what exactly was going on, but he could feel her frantic energy in the air between them, and he didn't like it. Not one bit. And it was an instinct, really, to pull her close and wrap her in his arms and let her sputter herself out into his chest. It just felt right to use his thumbs to make soothing circles on her neck, right over that cupcake he noticed earlier, to shush her calm, to press his lips to the top of her head and then rest his cheek over that same spot.
When she finally let herself relax into him, he tried again. "Tell me what's going on, Becs. I'm right here."
"I can't."
"I'm right here."
"You'll hate me."
"I'm here."
"You won't stay if you know, and I want you to stay. Not, like…" she sniffed, and it was the first hint he had that she was crying. "Not like here, but, like, in my life. I don't want you to go."
"You told me about your mom for a reason. You let me come here today for a reason. I'm here. Tell me what's happening."
She took in a deep breath. And another. And a third. And maybe it was that third breath that braced her, or maybe it was his second kiss on the top of her head, or R2-D2's muffled chirp from somewhere further into the shop.
"I'm sleeping with Sig."
His first instinct was to let her go but his second was to hold on tighter as she fell apart in his arms, and he listened to that second one because, as much as his heart was twisting up and his head was spinning, he mostly couldn't bear how hard she was crying. And anyone could have walked in the shop at that moment, but thank God no one did, because all they would have seen was a beautiful girl clinging to Edgar as if maybe he could stop the runaway train he didn't even know he was standing on the tracks of. So he held her as tight as he can, hoping maybe he could take some of her pain away, stroking her hair, but he didn't tell her that it was all right because he just was not sure that it was.
Because, as much as he cared about her, even he had to admit that this was pretty fucked up. Sig was married, after all, rather happily, with two kids and a public image and absolutely no hint that he had be looking to risk all of that with a neighbor that just popped up. A neighbor that seemed to fight with him and avoid him more than anything. Then again, Edgar wondered if he had known Becca before all of this started; he suspected that he had not, and that would explain why she seemed so uncomfortable talking about Sig. If she had been sleeping with a married man the whole timee, she probably wouldn't be all that excited to talk about him. Made sense. Made way too much sense.
He wanted to be mad at her, but he couldn't be. Not after he had spent all this time with her. He could be pretty mad at his brother, though, and he let that happen. Let that anger well up at how Sig let an attraction get so out of hand. And maybe it was a little bit of jealousy, too, or maybe a lot of jealousy, because he cared about this woman, he really fucking did and he would not lie about that, and Sig had to go and do this to her.
His thoughts continued to race as she cried herself calm, and when she had nothing left to cry out, they just stood there holding each other in silence as the evening dim began to set in. And it was hard for him to tell if he was hugging away her pain or if she was keeping him standing at that point, because he felt pretty damn exhausted himself.
"What do you need to know?"
"What do you need to say?" Because there were a lot of things he could ask – how it started, did she want to end it, why didn't she love him instead – but none of it really seemed to matter. She obviously was not proud of it and did not want it – his soaked shirt could attest to that. And dragging out the story would not do anything but hurt, so why bother? He would find it all out in time, anyway, although he was hardly to know that at the time.
"I don't know what to say. I feel like I'm letting you down."
"You're not. Becs." He took her face in his hands to force her to meet his gaze. "I'm not happy, who the fuck would be? But don't think for one second that I think any less of you. We'll get through this, ok? I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere."