The Reaping of Norah Bentley by Eva Truesdale Page B

every step was all but silent already, so he just walked normally behind me, through the living room and up the stairs, down the dark hall. We stopped outside my bedroom door, and I pointed at a closed door a few feet down.
     
    “The guest bedroom,” I whispered.
     
    He nodded but didn’t move. Neither of us did, even though it was cramped in that narrow hallway, with the antique, bow-legged table to the right of us and several of my dad’s old paintings hanging in bulky antique frames above us, threatening to crash to the floor at the slightest bump.
     
    I felt his eyes on me and looked up. Even in the darkness, they still seemed to shine an impossibly bright blue. He took my hand, lifted it and brushed his lips across the back of it. It was all one fluid, deliberate motion, like an artist brushing strokes across his canvas.
     
    “Good night,” he said, letting go of my hand, the tips of his fingers lingering in my palm until the last possible second. “And Norah?”
     
    “Yes?”
     
    “Thank you.”
     
    “I…You’re welcome?” I said, feeling incredibly lame all of a sudden. “And good night…good night to you too.”
     
    He turned away, and I was so caught up in watching him that I copied his every movement without thinking; only I didn’t turn into the open hallway, I turned right into the wall—smacked it hard enough that one of the paintings, the big watercolor of the sunrise over the ocean, rocked from side-to-side for a few seconds. When it finally looked steady again, I let out the breath I’d been holding and glanced back at Eli, hoping he hadn’t seen that less-than-graceful exit. He was already gone. Thank God.
     
    I stared at the closed guest room door, absently touching the back of the hand he’d kissed goodnight. Then, with a wary glance at the paintings on the wall, I turned again and this time managed to make it through my bedroom door without running into anything. I floated inside my room, like some sort of ghost that haunted the place but couldn’t really claim it. Not anymore. I went over to my bed, collapsed without bothering to change, and buried my face in the pillows.
     
    I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to feel. Guilt, maybe? Confusion? All of that and more, probably. But all of those feelings were just a buzzing in the back of my mind. All I really felt—all I could really focus on— was warmth.
     
    And that night, knowing Eli was just next door, I slept better than I’d slept in a really long time.
     

     

     

     

CHAPTER 6
     
     
    When I woke up the next morning, he was there. At first I thought I was still dreaming, maybe still drifting through that malleable world in between waking and sleeping; everything seemed so surreal. My bedroom was drenched in golden sunlight, and Eli was sitting in the window, his shape a dark silhouette against the pane. He was staring out into the morning, and his concentration didn’t break as I sat up, even when the creaking of bedsprings disrupted the quiet. I watched him for a minute, not speaking, not wanting to shatter the peace of the moment.
     
    He eventually spoke first, without looking away from the window and in a voice soft as the sunrise itself— like he was afraid I was really still sleeping and he didn’t want to wake me up.
     
    “I’m sorry for intruding like this,” he said. “But your mother came—”
     
    “Step-mother,” I corrected automatically.
     
    “Yes. Her.” He glanced over at me. “Anyway, she came into the guest room this morning, started to clean…”
     
    I couldn’t help but roll my eyes, not at Eli but at Helen; nobody had stayed in that guest room in at least a year, but she was always cleaning it. She was always cleaning everything. And she was always trying to get Dad and me to join in because, as she reminded us as often as possible: a clean house was a happy house. Or, at least, it looked like one.
     
    “But it’s not like she could see you, right?”
     
    “No, but