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Rosie’s place was quiet. Even more so than usual, the noises of summer in Georgia having died away as the temperature finally started to drop. No lawn mowers outside, no kids running up and down the street, not even the buzzing of insects outside the windows that she still kept open out of habit.
(It was fall in the south. It was still a clean sixty-five degrees at its coldest.)
She was sitting under one of those windows with her feet dangling off the end of the couch, long-sleeve t-shirt and leggings coupled with the fluffiest socks she could find bundled on her feet — even after ten years in New York, she hadn’t quite grown out of the whole “sixty-five is freezing” mindset. She was doing that thing where she stared through the TV rather than at it, trying to get her brain to restart after a long, hard day at work. It probably wasn’t the best for her sanity — or for her eye strain — but it worked for a while, or at least until the doorbell rang.
Now, when the doorbell rang, it was usually innocuous. The mailman dropping off an Amazon box too big to fit with her mail, or, if she was lucky, cookies being hawked by the Girl Scouts who lived up the road. Rarely if ever was it rung in the first place, given her whole reputation as the loner who lived on the edge of the woods.
So naturally, when she got up to answer the door, she wasn’t expecting to see Shane Walsh with his head shaved completely bald, standing in her foyer.
Well, not bald, but close enough to it. A buzzcut that would’ve convinced her a stranger had walked through her door had she not heard his voice, swearing as he attempted to fish the key she’d given him out of his pocket. As close to his skull as he could’ve gotten, all semblance of the hair she was familiar with — the tight curls she was always haranguing him to take better care of — was completely gone, replaced with nothing but the biggest scowl she’d ever seen cross his face.
She stood in her tiny foyer — barely more than a hallway, really — staring, one hip still propped against the archway into the living room. He wasn’t in his uniform, the one she’d seen him in that morning. Instead, he’d thrown on one of the work shirts he usually saved for when he was toying with his truck, the faded jean one he could afford to get oil stains on. Only half-tucked into worn khakis she’d never seen him wear, he looked a complete mess; like he was only halfway there, even as he made eye contact with Rosie.
“What happened?”
The words dropped out of her mouth as a mistake, something clutching so quickly at her heart that she didn’t have time to rein her mind in. It was the exact wrong question to ask, the worst possible thing she could’ve said given the look on his face — one that screamed “I am not okay” louder than he ever could’ve with his voice.
Besides, she already knew the answer, or at least she thought she did. Hell, she’d covered it.
It was one of the few times she ever did long-form live coverage, parked a block or so away from an active crime scene — this time, a live shooter situation, the first to hit their tiny, rural town in years. A situation that stretched out for hours in the hot summer sun, it would hardly have graced Rosie’s attention when she was still living in New York: two assholes who’d shot up a pharmacy in Atlanta and thought they could come to King’s County to hide, staking out in one of the old foreclosed houses not too far from Rosie’s place. But when the worst crime that happened in town was normally a grocery store robbery or a couple of kids getting canned for weed, it had sent her heart directly into her throat.
Particularly when she’d watched Shane rush out her front door when his radio buzzed in the middle of lunch.
She’d followed shortly after, throwing on eyebrows and concealer in the van when Erick picked her up to do on-the-scene coverage, as much of a rip and read asthey could manage with the little intel they’d had from the sheriff’s office. (Even her usual trick of sneaking info out of Shane or Rick hadn’t worked, the both of them too caught up in securing the scene.) It was chaos the moment they arrived, all shouting through bullhorns and the squealing of tires as more backup arrived when they realized this wasn’t going to be easy.
They’d grabbed a girl, Rosie quickly realized. A kid barely old enough for college, dragging her with them in a stolen minivan dumped — terrifyingly — about half a mile from her place. The sound of her voice coming out of the front door was bone-chilling, and from there out, they might as well have had a bomb on them, the way the air tensed up.
Her muscles still ached from the tense way she’d held them for the better part of the day. She watched as Shane’s mouth opened, then closed, then opened again, his eyes searching the room for answers to a question he couldn’t voice. He, the boy whose words were his strong suit, had been completely silenced.
He didn’t need to explain it to her.
Her voice had been hoarse by the time something finally happened, strained with worry — for the girl, for Shane, for the rest of the men and women stationed across the way from her. She’d spent every moment they weren’t live staring intently at what was happening, searching the faces of the officers working for any indication of what might be happening. It wasn’t often she ever relied on the police (hell, it was usually her job to keep them in line, more or less), but today she had, right up to the moment when she’d finally heard a radio crackle to life, Rick Grimes’s gruff voice signaling that the girl was alright and the situation was under control.
She watched, then, as Shane had frog-marched the grimy son of a bitch to a squad car — skinny white guy, barely even their age — with Rick following close behind with the other, and she’d be lying if she said her heart hadn’t dropped out through her stomach when she’d spotted a bit of blood running down Shane’s face from afar.
So to see Shane now, sweat still sticking to his skin and looking like he’d seen a goddamn ghost, she might as well have yanked her heart from her chest and chucked it into her hardly-used fireplace.
She didn’t bother to let him come up with an answer to her question, realizing the instant it was out of her mouth that it had been a foolish one to ask. She could put the dots together like a big girl. Instead, she crossed the foyer to him, meeting him halfway before he could slump against the door he’d shut behind him, barely remembering to pull his keys from the lock.
She slipped her arms around his waist, and it didn’t go unnoticed the way that he tensed against her touch.
“Are you okay?” she asked. Her voice came out less certain than she would’ve liked, her neck craned at an awkward angle to look up at him.
Shane only scoffed, looking down at her like he’d never seen her before. Like her face was unfamiliar to him and he wanted to memorize it.
“Off-record?”
It was a passive attempt at a joke, with none of the usual oomph in his voice to back it up. Instead it sounded hollow, his voice hoarse and rougher around the edges than she was used to — to blame, partly, on the way she’d heard him shouting through a megaphone for the better part of a day.
Even then, he didn’t sound like himself. Rosie frowned and smacked him gently in the chest, one of her nails colliding with the chain on his necklace. It made a tiny tinkling sound, like a discarded noise from a Tinkerbell movie, and she tried not to let it distract her as she looked at him.
“I’m serious.”
She could feel her face warping into that ugly pout she did when she wasn’t thinking and forced herself to pull back on it. It was a face that got reactions, the kind she wasn’t exactly looking for right now.
“Is this from today?”
She gestured at the side of her own head in reference to his. She could see where there was a wound on his hairline — not deep, but enough to hurt, starting to scab over where it hadn’t been covered after the fact. It looked as nasty as she was sure it felt, and it took everything in her to not immediately pull him to the kitchen to clean it off.
“Rick make you shave it off for health and safety stuff or something?”
Her words were just one theory that had run through her head in the brief seconds she’d had to take him in. It was the weakest one, the one that made the least sense, but was the least painful to voice. The one that seemed the least likely to throw a match into the pool of gasoline currently lying at their feet, that both of them seemed determined not to acknowledge.
Well, until Shane’s face crumpled, that is.
Before she could say anything to apologize, he collapsed into Rosie, and for a brief moment before he steadied himself, she panicked that he was hurt, that he’d come to her instead of going to the hospital for some other injury sustained when she wasn’t looking. Her heart dropped out through her stomach, and looking back on it, she was fairly certain she stopped breathing for a moment.
But then he found his footing, arms wrapping around her waist like a steel vice, and she felt all the air suddenly crushed out of her lungs — and not just because she was suddenly supporting the weight of a grown man who treated the gym like it was entertainment.
Shane’s head found a place against her shoulder, and he mumbled under his breath at her, the same way he did when he was half-asleep in her bed, watching her fiddle with video games and telling her aimless stories about Carl and Rick. But this time his voice came in spurts, the sound of what she was certain were tears cutting his sentences off at the font. Like a small child blubbering through a kind of pain they didn’t yet understand.
“Couldn’t stop myself,” he muttered, one hand opening and closing in rhythmic succession around the loose fabric of her t-shirt. “Didn’t want to.”
He was following a train of thought she wasn’t on, one she’d just about missed at the station as she struggled to form a response. He was babbling, all his carefully-crafted words suddenly gone, his talent for talking run into the ground. The words coming out of him now were the kind that came unbidden, the stress of the day opening some kind of floodgate in his brain.
“Crazy son of a bitch was gonna hurt her, and I just…”
He didn’t need to finish his sentence after that. She’d heard things earlier in the day, vague things whispered under breaths as she and her crew had finally packed up to go home after everything. Shane had snapped — the lieutenant’s word, not hers — practically throwing one of them through a goddamn wall when he laid a hand on the poor thing they were trying to help. Got a chunk of hair torn out in the process, though the scrawny bastard hardly stood a chance against Shane, who’d laid the fear of God into him before Rick could pull him off.
Something in Rosie’s stomach had churned at that, though she couldn’t be sure why. She certainly didn’t blame him — at least, not in the way she usually did when she heard about this kind of shit at work. Her perspective had shifted now that Shane was part of her overall picture, and suddenly everything she’d come to know as universal truth was jumbled in her head, objectivity chucked out the window and left like roadkill on the dirt road outside her place.
But she was following him now, slowly putting the pieces together about what he’d done. Why he’d shown up at her place. She didn’t have the full puzzle yet, but she was getting there, years of experience at pulling the pieces of a story together with only the bare minimum serving her well.
He was still a few steps ahead of her, the hamster in his brain still spinning the wheels faster than either of them could keep up with. But Rosie got there eventually.
“Couldn’t even look at myself when I got home.” His voice sounded shattered, so far from the Shane that Rosie knew that it almost scared her. “Couldn’t handle what I did.”
What he’d done was his job, what he was trained to do in the face of a threat to the public. A threat to an innocent young woman whose life had, as far as she knew, been in his hands. Reasonable was a word that was thrown out the window in these types of situations, Rosie knew that. Tensions that high broke all the rules, threw everything to the wayside — particularly when someone came in and thought they could disturb their quaint town’s soft peace.
“You did the right thing.”
She ran a hand over his shoulder and down his back, tracing the seams on his shirt methodically with one finger. She was self-soothing as much as she was trying to bring her partner back down to Earth, trying to rein in the heartbeat that had skyrocketed in her chest when he’d arrived home.
“You’re the reason a girl is still alive,” she said. “One asshole with a busted face is more than worth that.”
What she said felt too blunt. She didn’t have the right words for this kind of a thing; a thing that, before she’d come back home, she’d taught herself to brush off, to never bring across the threshold of her home unless she had to. City life had dulled her edges, made her hard to things she shouldn’t be. Particularly not now, when he’d come to her for what she assumed was comfort.
“Yeah, but…”
His sentence trailed off just as the rest of them had, oblivion stealing the rest of his words away. Rosie was about to press him further as he sat silent and unmoving, but then he raised his head from her shoulder and Rosie was met with eyes threatening to spill over with tears, gone so soft and bright that she wasn’t entirely sure he could really see her.
She knew what he wanted to say without him having to say it, in that eerie “couples finishing each other’s sentences” way that she’d always heard in those damn Disney songs society foisted on young women her age. He regretted the violence of it. In a situation when usually calm level-headedness was paramount, he regretted letting his temper snap and flare up like dry wood during fire season. There was fear floating behind his eyes, mixed with what she was almost certain was a healthy dose of paranoia. And shame. Oh, the shame.
There was a scared young man behind those eyes, stripped of all the bravado he usually wore as armor against whatever the world threw at him. It was the same man who’d shed his armor for her, leaving it on her front porch the night of that first date, who’d told her stories and laughed until they passed out in the back of his truck, the both of them feeling safer than they ever had before.
He was ten years younger and twenty years older in the same moment, his voice barely making it out as a whisper as his gaze traced over Rosie’s face.
“Don’t wanna hurt you.”
Her heart ached like he’d put a fist around it and squeezed, stinging the back of her throat in the way that signaled tears would follow soon after.
“You’re not going to, baby.”
She continued to trace the seams of his shirt, refusing to be the first one to break eye contact. The idea that he could ever hurt her was such a stretch she’d have to pull a muscle in her back to imagine that. He had a reputation, sure, but even that had crumbled in the face of her time with him, every rumor and story and whispered anecdote proven so spectacularly wrong that it hurt her worse to hear the way that he responded.
“Don’t know that.”
He said it with such conviction that it stung, like he really had done something to harm her. He seemed so convinced of his own misgivings, ones that Rosie was certain there wasn’t enough evidence to prove true. So convinced that there was some part of him she hadn’t seen yet, that he was unintentionally hiding from her.
“Yes I do.”
She answered with just as much conviction, her voice solid steel against the gentle way she held him. She knew why he was afraid. She hadn’t seen it firsthand, but she could imagine it — the way men were suddenly able to unload, some switch in their brain thrown that tossed reason to the wind when adrenaline was involved. It was human, a temper like that, but no less scary to think about. Particularly not coming from a man who’d laid out on her porch for two hours last week trying to feed the skinny feral cats in her yard.
She’d heard things about his line of work before. It was hard not to, in a town she could walk from end to end in half a day. The news about what had happened to Rick had trickled all the way up to New York, stories relayed through FaceTimes with Annie about the time he’d spent in the hospital, and Rosie thought about it a lot. About the way it had baked worry into Shane’s bones — at least, that was the way Annie told it, filtered through the mouth of Jean Walsh, a source nearly as reliable as her morning AP bulletins.
Shane was a good man. A man who loved his grandmother, the one who called her darlin’ and woke up at four AM just to make sure she didn’t miss her alarm. An uncle always there for his nephew, a best friend who’d kill and die for the brother he cared about. A partner who treated her better than she ever thought she deserved.
If he ever betrayed that, the world really was doomed.
“If you tried anything,” she said to him, “I’d kick your ass into next week.”
The laugh she’d hoped for didn’t come, her voice knocking off the still-sharp edges of her home — a place meant for a family that had only ever housed her.
And now him. Shane, who’d built himself into her routines right under her nose. Shane, who’d left a toothbrush on the vanity and endeared himself to her cats, dirtying that one specific corner of the entry hall where he always kicked off his boots at the end of the day. Shane, who spent more nights in her bed than he did at home, and who she was quickly getting too comfortable with for her own good.
“But I did not shack up with a fool.”
She was absolutely positive of that fact as it came out of her mouth. She’d’ve run for the hills in an instant if he was one, bailing even before she’d climbed into his truck on that first date. She’d had her fair share of them in the years she’d been on Earth, and there were certainly a lot of them roaming around the King’s County sheriff’s office. But she had a hard time believing Shane might be one.
Might he hurt her emotionally? Sure. Relationships were like that, and not always intentionally. People said things out of confusion, or anger, or just plain heartbreak. She’d done it plenty of times, and been on the receiving end even more. It was how humans worked. How the world kept turning. How, in some twisted way, she’d learned to recognize the kind of people that were good for her.
Shane was proud — a loud, confident peacock of a man — but he wasn’t an idiot.
He didn’t seem to believe her, the way he looked at her like he had something to be sorry for. And maybe he did, in some distant past or future. But not right now. Not here. Not tonight. And certainly not to her, at the very least.
“‘M sorry,” he mumbled. “Know how much you liked them curls.”
He gave her a weak smile, and she could’ve cried right then and there, holding him in her tiny foyer. He was sunburnt, spiraling, and probably a little broken, and he was apologizing to her . Like he owed her something for having what might’ve been one of the worst days of his life.
“Couldn’t think of anywhere else to go but here.”
His smile faltered for just the briefest of seconds, and for a moment Rosie was convinced that she really might cry.
He’d chosen her over everyone. Over his Rick, over his squadmates, over his grandmother, the person who probably knew him best in the entire world. All people who were better equipped to handle this — handle him — than a woman so disillusioned that the events of the day had barely fazed her.
His world had crumbled around him and he’d picked her.
She took a long, hard look at him, partially to fight back the desire to ask why despite knowing it was the exact wrong thing to say. His features were so much more defined now, like he’d shaved pounds off along with his hair. She could see the way his browbone cut across his forehead, and the way the cheekbones she liked so much could cut glass. His cheeks looked hollow, like the events of the day had taken the life from him, bled him dry so much that Rosie could’ve killed the bastards that had done it to him.
She’d only ever felt like that twice before — once when her father was in a car wreck in high school, and once when Annie had been let go from a job when she’d gotten pregnant. That kind of rage was special, saved only for the most important people in her life.
And Shane had become just as special as any of them before she’d ever realized it.
She traced the side of his face with a fingertip, running her hand from the mark on his hairline all the way down his temple to his jaw, where her hand rested to cradle it. She could feel him lean into her touch and she embraced it, shifting her weight until they were practically locked together, neither of them able to escape without falling to the hard tile floor. With him, it was comfortable where Rosie would’ve otherwise felt stifled.
“You could get a face tattoo and I’d still love you.”
She said those words like they were nothing, like they were obvious fact even though they’d been dancing around them for months. The words they’d been treating like estranged relatives, never spoken of and only alluded to when the other wasn’t paying attention. Words neither of them gave out easily, kept too close to their closely guarded hearts to see the light of day very often.
The kind that showed up in the way they looked at each other, or talked about each other, or the way that Shane offered to drive Rosie to work every morning even if it meant ruining his sleep schedule. The ones that manifested in little ways; the kind that built up so slowly that Rosie hadn’t really realized what they were until they hit her like a sack of bricks.
Of course I love him. I couldn’t possibly do anything else.
The admission shocked her as much as she was sure it shocked him. It seemed so clear, given the way they acted, but putting it out into the world felt like a confession that was decidedly wrong for the current moment. At least, not in the way she’d let it slip. He deserved bigger, better. Something to prove that everything he was doing wasn’t for naught.
He tilted his head, looking for all the world like a curious puppy as he realized what she’d just admitted. His eyes were still shiny with tears, one wrong word all it would take to push him over the edge. Rosie had never seen Shane cry, not in all the time she’d known him. She’d seen him frustrated, yes, pissed off the point of watered eyes and a red face, but she’d not seen him cry.
It was a good thing it hadn’t happened until now, she figured, considering the way his expression cleaved her heart clean in two.
“This?” She tapped the side of his face with a finger, smiling as gently as she could without bursting into tears. “This is nothing.”
So many things she said about him with absolute certainty. It was a confidence she possessed about few people — Izzy, for one, because her personality wouldn’t allow otherwise. Her sister, undoubtedly, and maybe no one else. Rosie was not a timid person, but people had never been her strong suit. It was what made her a good reporter, her ability to look and sound friendly while remaining completely disengaged. She’d never been convinced she could socialize normally, at least not long enough to keep people in her life.
And then Shane had swooped in and refused to let go, even after seeing her sailor’s mouth, and her lack of a filter, and her horrible hair routine that took two hours in the bathroom on Saturdays.
She let her hand drift, from his chin to the back of his head, where she was able to feel the texture of the buzzcut and take it in. She could feel where he’d nicked himself in the back, a razor with no guard cutting odd shapes into the skin at the base of his neck. The cut was uneven back there, and she could imagine him in that tiny bathroom at his place, steam fogging up the mirror as he struggled to use the razor with its short little cord, plugged into the outlet placed awkwardly over the wrong side of the sink.
“Thank you for trusting me,” she said quietly. “With this.”
She gestured to nothing, unsure of how to identify what had just happened between them. They’d only been dating for four months — maybe not even that, if she did her math right — just barely on the cusp of what adults would consider long-term. Some days, she felt like they’d gone too far too fast, diving headfirst into the deep end of their emotions without bothering to remember if they could swim or not.
This felt like one of those things, one of the deep, dark emotions people usually saved for marriage, when there was — to use the annoyingly sexist idiom she’d grown up with — no escape. She felt like she knew so much more of Shane than she was entitled to, purely by circumstance of their jobs. Like they’d stumbled on this purely by accident, like they had their entire relationship.
Rosie was not an “I can fix him” girl. She never had been. If a man didn’t know how to get his shit together enough to be a functioning human, that was his problem, not hers. She didn’t have the time to spend using men as extracurriculars, turning them into functional members of society by coddling them until they learned how to act.
But with Shane, she wouldn’t have hesitated to throw her responsibilities away to comfort him. To hold him and tell him it’d be alright until the tears had dried. He’d wormed his way into her heart that way, so much that he lived at the front of her mind, no matter what she did, and she wouldn’t have it any other way.
And it scared the shit out of her when she realized it.
Shane nodded, words now being too much effort for the day he’d had. Rosie watched as his head fell forward before it met with hers, staying there as she felt him breathe with their foreheads connected. They stayed like that, his eyes fluttering closed, before he moved in further, dropping down until his forehead rested firmly against her shoulder.
She swore she heard a muffled “love you too” from where his lips brushed her neck.
They stayed like that for a while, his arms around her waist, until Rosie’s back started to ache and she realized she ought to clean the cuts littering the back of her boyfriend’s neck. Shane was still a live round, more of a situation than she felt entirely equipped to handle, but she was here now, and she wasn’t leaving him to try and sort himself out. Not on her watch.
“Come on,” she eventually muttered, forcing herself out of her own mind. “Let’s go to bed.”
She nudged him gently, one hand pressing against his stomach until he relented and stood straight. She could practically hear his muscles creak, all dead weight against the exhaustion of everything that had happened. They’d both be sore and sunburnt in the morning, and Rosie was already dreading putting up with the sting of her shoulders peeling in the shower.
But she knew he liked it, sleeping in her bed. Called it her angel bed, a vast improvement from the tough mattress with no comforter that he slept on at home. It was one of the few things she took pride in in her too-big-for-one-person home, covered in an overly expensive duvet and covered with the best pillows she could find when she was still living in New York. Shane slept like a rock in it, more than content to spend an entire weekend lying in it with her when they could spare the time.
But much to her surprise, he only shook his head, eyes cutting away from her to examine the room around them.
“Nah, I should…”
He hesitated, one hand rising in a familiar gesture to his hair, a phantom motion no longer possibly with the buzzcut. It rested at the back of his neck instead, his eyes glued to the floor, like a kid too afraid to look an upset parent in the eye.
“I should scram,” he said quietly. “Let you sleep.”
“Shane Walsh, you are in no state to be by yourself right now.”
Jesus, she sounded like her mother.
She almost regretted it, the sharp ways the words left her mouth. It sounded like a reprimand, like he really had done something wrong. They were almost a reflex, a knee jerk reaction to his attempts to push her away, even subconsciously.
But she knew he wouldn’t listen otherwise, too damn stubborn to believe he was worth the energy unless someone proved it. They were the same in that way, always putting themselves on the back burner to save face, to avoid fracturing relationships with the people they cared about. They kept everything all bottled up, simmering just under the surface until the pot finally boiled over. She supposed it already had for Shane today, and he didn’t need anymore scars to prove it.
“I’m gonna order pizza,” she said gently, correcting herself. “And we’re going to lay in bed with the curtains shut, and I’m going to finally teach you how to play Animal Crossing.”
She mustered up a smile, lacing the fingers of her right hand through his. She tilted her head, searching for eye contact with him, hoping desperately he’d grant it to her.
She could already feel a plan formulating in her head: one to get him out of those old clothes and into the pajamas he kept at her place while she texted Rick, telling him what Shane wouldn’t about the way he was feeling. Maybe get him a couple of days off work if she was lucky. She doubted she would be, but she could try anyway.
She couldn’t do much to banish the loud, terrifying thoughts she knew were in his head, but she could try her best to quiet them for a while. She was lucky that she was loud enough to shout over them.
“It’ll be good. Trust me.”
She shifted to her toes, pressing one solid kiss against his cheek before he could back away. Remnants of the day’s lipstick stuck to the angle of his cheekbone as she pulled away, and she smiled wider, eager to let some of the day go and just look at him. He was still her Shane, even though the day had stolen some of his soul from him.
He gave her the eye contact she was looking for, and she thought she saw a little light behind his eyes as she squeezed his hand. He didn’t have to agree with her, didn’t have to acquiesce to anything she said, so long as whatever spilled out of her mouth was enough to pull his attention away from the day, from the kind of thoughts swirling in his brain.
To her surprise, he nodded, quieter than perhaps he’d ever been around her. The sun had fully set in the time they’d stood in the hall, and he gently let Rosie guide him through the dark and up the stairs to her bedroom, the master with the oddly shaped far wall that made up for itself with the most stunning view of the morning sunrise. She didn’t need to guide him, strictly. He’d slipped through her front door and up to her room plenty of times, boots and belts left at the door after a long, hard shift. His(?) side of the bed was permanently mussed now, Rosie too lazy to put the effort into making it when she knew he’d be back that night anyway.
They’d gotten so comfortable with that, with each other. Shane had joked about abandoning his lease once it was up, and Rosie had tamped down the way her nerves jumped to say ‘yes!’ at his suggestion, too wrapped up in the feeling of having him around to think about losing her solitude.
He was reliable, and she remembered that as they turned the corner to the master. He deserved someone reliable too.
It wasn’t until they were standing in the doorway that Shane stopped, tugging on the hand still connected to Rosie’s without saying anything more. She faltered, socked feet sliding on the carpet of her bedroom before she turned around.
His face looked even thinner in the half-light from the lamp on her bedside table, a shadow cast across those eyes that she knew so well. He looked small — not in a physical way, no, he was far too built for that — but in a different way. A way that she’d bet money that very few people had ever seen.
He wasn’t calm now, no. He wouldn’t be for a while. But he was different, if the look on his face was any indication. No longer teetering on the edge of a place he couldn’t return from. Somewhere she could be with him, if only in spirit.
She didn’t need to ask why he’d stopped — instead, she just let him gather her in his arms, his back propped against the doorframe with the flaking paint. She wasn’t a short woman, but short enough to fit there, cradled against his chest as he kissed her hairline.
She still wasn’t used to it, the random moments of affection. The sense of closeness that Shane seemed to prefer — not attached at the hip, no, but always nearby. Tactile, in a way Rosie never had been, but was learning to be. Shane was solid where she wasn’t, at her back even when she didn’t realize she needed him to be. A hand to hold, a shoulder to cry on, an ear to listen to her. Openly affectionate had never been her thing, but she knew it was his.
And honestly? She wouldn’t have it any other way.
“My Rosie girl,” he murmured into her hair. She hummed quietly in place of a nod. She could still hear a bit of a watery wobble in his voice, but her heart still swelled at the sound of his silly name for her, the one he’d come up with when she’d said no one ever really gave her new nicknames. It was so very southern, and so very Shane.
“Yeah,” she said quietly, almost afraid to ruin the moment. “I’m here.”