Chapter 51: The Warmth She Stole
There was another person's warmth under his blanket.
It was faint at first, just the quiet heat of someone curled close and the soft sound of breathing in the dark, but once Julian noticed it, he could not stop noticing it. Margaret was looking at him. Her eyes were open, fixed on his face without once drifting away, and whatever was moving inside them was too muddied for him to read clearly.
Helping her had happened before he even thought it through.
She had said she was cold, and the moment those words left her mouth, everything in him had tilted toward one simple instinct. If she was cold, he wanted to warm her. If she was trembling, he wanted to stop it. The rest of it, the questions, the awkwardness, the danger of what this looked like, all of that had dropped away in that first rush of concern.
There was something about a girl looking frail that made his reason fail him. His body moved before his mind could catch up, as though protecting that kind of softness had been wired into him somewhere deeper than judgment.
"Are you still cold?"
"A little."
Her face looked wrong in a way that unsettled him. She was pale, but there was color burning across her cheeks too, and strands of hair had stuck to the sides of her face. Margaret was usually put together down to the smallest detail. Even when she was tired, even after a shift at the diner, there was something neat and controlled about her. Right now she looked disordered, flushed, off balance, as if the night had shaken her loose from herself.
She slowly lifted her arms.
"Can you hold me?"
Her voice was so soft that it almost sounded like she was asking permission for something much bigger than that.
Julian hesitated for a heartbeat, then nodded. "Yeah."
He moved closer, closing the distance he had still been trying to keep between them, and drew her into his arms. Her body was slim and light against him, and when he touched her properly, he realized the cold in her hadn't been an exaggeration. She really was chilled through. Not the kind of cold that disappeared the second someone tucked in under a blanket, but the kind that clung stubbornly to skin and muscle and slowly gave way only because another person kept sharing heat.
He held her carefully and waited.
The room had gone quiet again. The first rush of confusion had settled into something heavier and more intimate, and once he felt some of the cold leaving her body, once her breathing no longer sounded so tight, the questions he had been holding back started pressing harder at him.
He lowered his voice so he would not break whatever fragile calm had formed between them.
"Did something happen?"
Margaret's lips parted. "I'm cold. So cold, Julian." Her voice slipped thinner, softer. "I think I might be sick."
He pulled back enough to look at her. "Sick? What do you mean? Is it serious?"
She did not answer.
Instead, she looked straight at him, taking in the concern on his face as though that mattered more than the question itself. Then her hands lifted and slid up around his neck, one arm winding behind him, then the other, until her fingers had settled at the back of his head.
A second later, she kissed him again.
She did it with the same reckless stubbornness as before, only now there was less panic in it and more hunger. She did not seem to care what this meant, what would happen tomorrow, whether she should stop. She kissed him as if his warmth was something she had decided to take and would keep taking until it reached the place inside her that was coldest.
Julian barely resisted. He did not know if he even could.
Her lips were sweet and warm now, and the longer she kissed him, the more the room seemed to blur around the edges. It felt dizzying in a way that made his thoughts soften and slip. Margaret usually looked so composed, so polished, but there was nothing measured about the way she kissed him tonight. There was a desperate greed to it, something bone-deep and almost frightening in how completely she abandoned restraint once she had decided she wanted more.
He let her.
By the time she finally pulled back, his head felt light.
Margaret stayed close for another second, breathing against him, then gave him a small smile. It was not one of her pretty practiced smiles, the kind that lit up her whole face and made everyone else in the room feel clumsy. This one looked tired and uneven.
"Better," she whispered.
Julian stared at her, still struggling to steady himself. "Why…" His throat felt dry. "When you came here, you kissed me then too. Margaret, you…"
"Can I sleep first?" she asked quietly. "I'm really tired."
The question in her voice killed the rest of his.
He swallowed and nodded. "Okay. I won't ask."
Margaret shut her eyes almost immediately. The tension left her face in slow pieces, and her lashes stopped trembling. A few minutes later, with her body tucked against his and her breathing finally deep and even, she fell asleep in his arms as if she had dropped her last bit of strength the moment she knew he would hold her.
Julian did not sleep.
He tried. He really did. He closed his eyes, forced himself to breathe slowly, tried to think about nothing at all, but Margaret was right there in his arms, all softness and warmth and the faint clean scent of her. Her clothes were thin, not enough for the cold she had come through, and the skin that showed above the blanket looked pale in the dark. At his age, with his heart already a mess around her, it was almost impossible to stay calm.
He kept reminding himself to stay still.
It was Margaret.
That mattered. That had to matter more than anything else.
He clung to that thought and slowly got his breathing under control.
Something had happened at her house. He was almost sure of it now. Margaret never really talked about her family. She never complained, never hinted at money problems, never let anything ugly spill out in public, but there had always been a sense that some part of her life stayed deliberately hidden. Julian had noticed it before without being able to name it. Tonight it felt heavier. Familiar, too. The feeling of something being wrong at home without wanting to say it aloud was one he knew too well.
The whole night had come at him so suddenly that he still felt behind it.
Before going to sleep, he had only been thinking about her. That was all. He had wanted to message her, maybe talk for a little while before bed, because she had been on his mind again and he missed hearing from her. Then she had shown up at his place in the middle of that brutal cold, climbed into his bed, kissed him, pulled at him, and almost seemed to be trying to set herself on fire from the inside out.
The way she had done it had not been smooth. It had been clumsy, almost rough, like she had stopped caring what she looked like and was acting on pure impulse. He had somehow managed to keep enough of his head to stop things from going farther than they should. At the last moment, when his blood was running too hot and Margaret was pressed against him in the dark, he had still made the choice to slow down, hold her, and let warmth do what desire could not.
Now she was sleeping peacefully.
He still had no idea what he was supposed to do when morning came.
Julian lay awake beside her until the dark outside the window thinned and the first pale wash of early light crept into the room.
He woke before Margaret.
The white light of early morning pulled him up slowly, and for a few seconds he forgot where he was in that foggy, half-conscious way people sometimes do. Then he looked down, saw Margaret sleeping beside him, and everything came back at once.
She looked very different in daylight.
The frenzy from last night was gone. So was that helpless, trembling vulnerability. Sleeping, she looked quiet and almost painfully beautiful, the kind of beautiful that made a person instinctively lower their voice. Morning light rested along the line of her face, and for one stupid second Julian found himself thinking that the room had never held anything this lovely before.
He carefully pulled the blanket higher over her shoulder so she would stay warm, then slipped out of bed as gently as he could.
He put on his shoes and headed out to buy breakfast.
The streets were still waking up. Steam and cooking smoke drifted through the narrow row of storefronts and apartment entries, turning the air white in places. A few people were already out, carrying coffee, unlocking gates, dragging trash bins toward the curb. Julian kept walking with his hands tucked in his pockets, thinking about what to bring back.
He could not just grab anything.
Margaret was here. That changed things. She was the person he felt closest to now, whether that fact was smart or not, and if she was staying in his apartment after a night like that, the least he could do was make sure she had something decent to eat.
He bought a small breakfast and headed back.
By the time he came up the apartment stairs and turned into the hallway near his door, he almost dropped the bag.
Isabella was standing there with the spare key he had given her, just about to open the door.
She turned at the sound of his steps and smiled the second she saw him. "Jules? You were up this early, and you even went out for breakfast?"
Julian froze for the briefest second, then forced himself to walk normally.
That was right. Isabella still came by some mornings to make him breakfast. He had been so thrown off by the night that he had forgotten completely.
"I, uh…" He tightened his grip on the paper bag. "I set my alarm wrong and woke up early. Since I was already up, I just went out and grabbed something. I didn't want to make you do extra work."
Isabella watched him with that gentle, knowing expression that always made lying feel harder than it should. "Really? Is my little brother hiding something from me?"
"No." The answer came too fast. He tried again, softer this time. "No, really. I just got up early. That's all. You can go back and sleep a little longer."
She tilted her head, studying his face for another second, and Julian had the awful feeling she could hear his heartbeat through the hallway walls.
Then she smiled again. "All right. I'll head back, then."
"Okay."
He waited just long enough to see her turn and walk toward her apartment before he hurriedly unlocked the door and slipped inside.
If Isabella saw Margaret asleep in his room, there was no way to explain it cleanly. Even if Isabella would never gossip, even if she would never say a word to anyone else, Julian still hated the thought of Margaret being seen like that, after a night like this, in his bed. It would feel wrong. It would make the whole thing more real than he was ready for.
He set the breakfast on the table, kicked off his shoes, and went back to his room.
He did not have to wake her.
Margaret was already up.
She had fixed her hair and was sitting on the edge of the bed, looking out the window at the pale morning outside. The sunlight softened the lines of her face and laid a quiet warmth over her skin. If Julian had not lived through the night with her, he would have thought he had imagined all of it. The wildness was gone. So was the fragile look she had worn when she first came to him. She looked like herself again. Beautiful, bright, impossible to connect with the girl who had clung to him like she was freezing apart.
"You're awake," he said. "You must be hungry. Come eat. I just got back."
Margaret turned and gave him a small nod. "Thank you."
She slipped her feet into the house slippers he had left by the bed when he got up and joined him at the table. She picked up one of the sausage biscuits and ate in small bites, quiet and neat again, but every so often her eyes lifted and landed on him. Each time he looked up, she was already looking back.
Finally she said, "You have a lot of questions for me, don't you?"
Julian did not bother pretending. "Yeah. About last night."
Margaret lowered her eyes. Her hand stilled around the food she was holding, and the lashes casting shadows over her face made her look younger for a moment, almost tired in a way he was not used to seeing.
"My head was a mess last night," she said. "I'm sorry. I lost control a little."
Julian stayed quiet and let her continue.
"There are things I can't tell you. Not everything." She gave the faintest shake of her head. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have shown up like that."
"It's okay," he said quickly. "You don't have to tell me if you don't want to. I won't push."
Margaret looked at him.
Julian rubbed the back of his neck and tried to put what he meant into words without sounding strange. "If you're cold again, though, or if something's wrong, you can tell me. I'll help."
A soft expression touched her face, and this time it looked real. "Julian, you really are gentle."
He gave a small, embarrassed laugh. "You're my best friend. My circle's tiny. I kind of have to take care of the people in it."
It was the truth. Even if the crush he had on Margaret did not lead anywhere, even if he never got to hear the answer he wanted in a clear enough way to believe it, that would still be true. He cared about her. He cared about Hannah. He cared about Isabella too. If any of them needed help, he knew he would still step in.
Still, one question had been stuck in his chest since the night before, and he could not let it go.
"At least tell me one thing," he said. "Why did you kiss me?"
Margaret looked at him without speaking.
Julian's pulse picked up. "That's the one thing I really want to know."
If she liked him, even a little, he wanted to know. Even if they never got together, even if this all ended badly, knowing that the person he had quietly liked for so long had once liked him back would still matter. It would mean something.
Margaret's eyes softened in a way that made it hard to breathe.
"Because it was you," she said. "You're the most special person to me." A faint curve touched her mouth. "And I've never seen you get mad at me. I wanted warmth, so I stole it from you. That makes me kind of bad, doesn't it?"
Julian's heart almost gave out on the spot.
The words most special person looped in his head until they stopped sounding real. There was too much in them to ignore and still not enough to call a confession. That was the worst part. He could hear what he wanted in her answer so clearly that it hurt, but she had still left herself a way out.
He wanted to believe Margaret liked him.
He just could not get her to say it outright.
"No," he said, a little too quickly. "You're not bad. If you need it, you can… take it."
Margaret looked at him for another second, then smiled properly this time, color returning to her face.
"I still feel bad about bothering you last night," she said. "Do you want me to make it up to you?"
Julian tried to steady his heartbeat. "Then… can you ask the boss for a day off? I kind of want to go walk around for a while. Will you come with me?"
Her answer came without hesitation.
"Of course."