Free Sleeping in Eden by Nicole Baart Page A

house was silent. So far this fall, Lucas hadn’t turned on the furnace, but it was just about time to do so. The air around his face was cool, but underneath the down comforter, Lucas was bathed in humid heat. Too hot inside but too cool outside—he could feel the frostiness of the air nip at his face even as his body radiated an almost sticky warmth. Not time to get up just yet.
    Lucas could almost imagine that Jenna was breathing beside him. She moaned in her sleep—a soft, unconscious sigh that he had fallen in love with long ago. He missed listening to the gentle protest in each exhale, the sweet familiarity of her night sounds, and even the way she curled away from him, her backbone pressing lightly against his arm as he lay facing the ceiling.
    But his bed was cold and empty. Silent as a tomb.
    When Jenna had told him that she was moving out, he begged her to stay. She said she needed time and space, a place where she could untangle the mess that her life had become.
    â€œWe can do that together,” Lucas said, his voice low and husky, desperate.
    â€œNo, Lucas, we can’t. I think the last several years have proven that.”
    â€œWhy don’t we try counseling again?”
    Jenna suppressed a little shudder.
    â€œIt wasn’t that bad.”
    â€œLook, I don’t want to go there. I don’t want to dredge up everything that happened and try to come to terms with it all. I just want to move on.”
    Without me, Lucas thought. But he said, “Stay. Please. I’ll move into the attic room. You’ll hardly know I’m here. Just please don’t go.”
    Jenna had shrugged, and the conversation was over. For an entire week Lucas hoped that she had abandoned her plan entirely, that somehow in a stunted, brittle conversation he had managed to convince her that their marriage was worth fighting for. But when he replayed their dialogue again and again, he realized that there were no fighting words contained in their exchange at all. He hadn’t shouted a battle cry, a bold declaration of the war he was willing to wage in the campaign for his wife. He had whimpered a plea.
    It had unnerved Lucas not to know what to do. He was the sensible one, strong and levelheaded and dependable. At work and at home, he specialized in doling out solutions, answers to problems both simple and sophisticated. But losing Jenna had crept up on him in the night. Her gradual disentanglement from their relationship, from their life together, had come on so slowly and stealthily, he didn’t realize it was happening until the day she walked into the attic and became little more than the woman who shared a house with him.
    One night almost exactly a week after she told him she was going to move out, Jenna brushed her teeth in thebathroom like normal, but instead of crossing the hall into the bedroom they shared, she mounted the steps to the attic. Lucas hadn’t even noticed that she had moved her clothes out of the closet and taken her favorite pillow. Or that the wall between them had been mortared with an extra layer of bricks. He couldn’t even form a single coherent thought as he watched her walk straight-backed up the stairs and out of sight, and when the slim curve of her ankle finally disappeared, he stood in the hallway, watching the spot where it had been, heartbroken and longing. He was bereft, holding all the frayed edges of the ties that bound them to the house, to each other, to all that they had shared and known, and hoping he could somehow weave them back together. He didn’t know how to begin.
    Lucas knew that he should have called after her. He should have at least tried to make her take the master bedroom. Better yet, he should have marched up those stairs and carried her back down like a child. Laid her on their bed. Made love to her.
    Or just held her.
    He did none of those things.
    And in the murky light of a fall morning, he wished for nothing more than that