The sheets were warm, but they were only pulled halfway up. I was wide awake. Suki wasn’t. I kind of wanted to go back to sleep, but it was two a.m. and I’d slept half the day before that. But I was comfy. Suki was nestled up against me with an arm around my waist. She was warm, too, and the even rhythm of her breath sounded like music.
I lay there for a few minutes, thinking. I’d had bad writer’s block for the past day or so, and I was going in circles around the plot. I had too many ideas chasing each other through my brain. There was no way I’d ever fit them all into the story, but I couldn’t bear to get rid of any of them. They all had to fit together somehow, they had to. Even that one character I couldn’t quite figure out. Somehow there was a way to resolve him.
Huh.
I blinked. That might just work.
Careful not to bother Suki, I slipped out from under her arm and padded across the room to my desk. My notebook lay open to where I’d given up the night before. Half the page was covered in a tall, loopy scrawl, dotted with thick pencil marks where I’d decided I didn’t like my words.
I pulled out the chair and sat down, bouncing the end of the pencil on my thumb. “Hm.”
I scanned the last few paragraphs I’d managed to write. The end of the pencil bounced a few more times. Then I set it to paper and started to write.
After three days of writer’s block, the sound of my pencil scratching on paper was the sweetest sound I could have ever imagined. The words didn’t flow smoothly, but they were coming bit by bit, and that was enough. The dam had broken, and now all the pressure could flow out.
I went on like that for about a half-hour – scritch scritch pause, scritch pause, flip back a couple pages to check details, scritch scritch scritch. The story absorbed me to the point where I didn’t notice that Suki had woken up until she touched my shoulder.
“Hey,” I said. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you –”
“You didn’t,” she said. “I woke up on my own.”
I peered up at her. “You okay?”
“Fine,” she said. “Just thinking.”
I turned in my chair so I could see her straight on. “What about?”
She shook her head. “Nothing important. I just got up to see if you were feeling better.” She nodded at the graphite stain on the side of my hand – the leftie’s curse. “I guess you are.”
“I’d feel even better if you’d tell me what’s on your mind,” I said. “Sit down. I’m not scared of a two a.m. heart-to-heart.”
Suki smiled softly. “It’s really nothing,’ she told me, but she said down on the edge of the bed anyway. “Just…Dean.”
I frowned. “He’s okay,” I reminded her. “You and Maria patched him up.”
“Yeah,” she said, “I know. It’s more…he made me think. Not about him, exactly, about Hunters in general.”
“Okay.”
She looked towards the window. “It’s just… I mean, I’m in premed; blood and people getting hurt don’t freak me out. And I’m used to the idea that Hunters get hurt; God knows I’ve seen you bruised and bandaged enough times.” She smiled, but I only knew that because for a brief instant, the moonlight had flashed like a lighthouse off her teeth. Then the light vanished.
“But I’m used to the idea of you getting hurt fighting.” She shook her head. “The normal ways people get hurt – the way Dean got hurt – it’s never even crossed my mind that it happens to Hunters, too. It just seems bizarre.”
I had to stare for a few seconds, trying as hard as I could to push down the bubble of laughter that was trying to pop out of my mouth. In the end it was useless, and Suki blinked.
“What’s so funny?”
I shook my head and tried to stop laughing. “Suki, do you remember how often I got hurt before I started training?”
She nodded, watching me with a distinct air of concern.
I took a deep breath and managed to get control over the laughter. “I am still every inch as klutzy as I was then,” I told her. “Did you think all those bruises and Band-Aids came from fights?  I still trip over my boots and fall up the stairs and burn myself on pots and pans! I got my last big cut from a knife Nat left on the counter while she was cooking the other day. I tripped and landed palms-first. It was the middle of the day; there were no vampires within three miles. Half the base was around.” I shrugged. “It happens.”
Suki managed to smile a little bit. “Especially to you.”
“Oh, yeah,” I agreed. “So are you okay?”
“Fine.” She glanced at the clock on my desk. “Two forty. Do you need to start getting ready?”
I glanced at the clock, too. “In about twenty minutes. “Here, Suki, just go back to sleep; I’ll slip out. I don’t want to keep you up.”
She smiled. “Okay,” she said. “Be careful out there.” She kissed me.
“I’m always careful.”
I saw her shoulders shake a little, and she was still chuckling when she crawled back under the covers.
“Thank you for your support,” I muttered.
I had all my things together and was slipping out the door when Suki spoke again. “I love you, Myra.”
She was nothing but a dark lump under the covers in the dark, but at that moment she was the most beautiful lump I’d ever seen. My face softened into a smile.
“I love you too.”