Chapter 15 #2
Someone who didn’t keep his distance because getting close was a risk he’d learned never to take.
She deserved someone who wasn’t me.
That thought should’ve stopped whatever was building in my chest. It didn’t. If anything, it made it worse, because the surest way to end something was to tell yourself you couldn’t have it, and I’d been telling myself that about Miley Torres for weeks now, but the wanting just kept getting louder.
No one had made me feel like this since Seraphina.
The name arrived uninvited and unwelcome, the way it always did when I let my guard down. Seraphina. The last woman who’d gotten past the wall. The woman I’d been ready to build something with, the only woman who’d ever made me consider that maybe the unwanted boy could become a desired man.
And then I’d come home early from a shoot. Key in the lock. Door swinging open. The apartment smelled like her perfume and someone's presence that didn’t belong.
Dominic’s jacket was on the floor by the couch and his shoes were by the door and I knew. I knew before I reached the bedroom. I knew by the silence, the particular quality of silence that exists in a space where two people have stopped moving because they heard the front door open.
I stood in the bedroom doorway, looked at them, and felt every good thing I’d ever let myself believe collapse like a building with its foundations removed.
One second I was a man in love. The next I was the boy at the end of the hall, learning again that love was a trap that other people set and he walked into.
The wall went back up that night. Higher than before. Reinforced. And it hadn’t come down since.
Until a woman with flour on her collar and the handprint she’d left on my face started leaving angry-face sticky notes on my door.
Shit.
The house was quiet when I got home that night. The kitchen was clean, a covered plate on the island with a sticky note that read: This one has extra garlic because I’m feeling spiteful.
I ate standing up. It was incredible, like everything else she made. I washed the plate, put it back, and peeled off the sticky note to add to the drawer with the others.
Miley’s door had light under it. I could hear music, something low and Spanish, and the faint sound of her voice singing along.
She had a good voice. I’d heard her in the kitchen twice now, belting out songs while she cooked, and she was objectively, indisputably talented, and both times I’d stopped in the hallway to listen because the sound was the most alive thing in this house.
I walked to my room and changed. Then I stood in the shower with the water running hot and my hands braced against the tile.
The water ran over my shoulders, down my back, pooling at my feet. I stood there until it went lukewarm and then cold, but my body was still restless. Still wired.
I turned off the water, dried off, and pulled on a t-shirt and sweatpants. I sat on the edge of my bed and looked at it the way I always did. The mattress. The pillows. The sheets I changed every few days even though they didn’t need changing because I rarely slept in them.
I tried. I lay down, pulled the covers up, and closed my eyes.
Twenty minutes. That’s how long I lasted before the darkness behind my eyelids started to shift.
The shapes came first—then the room at the end of the hall.
The one my father assigned me. Away from the family bedrooms, because I wasn’t family, not really, not in the way that counted.
Then the memory changed again. The shadows became the basement door.
The lock turned from the outside. Light slipped out from under the gap. And then, silence.
I opened my eyes, heart hammering, hands gripping the sheets.
Not tonight. Please. Not tonight.
But the nightmare was already there, sitting on the edge of consciousness like something patient that had been waiting for me to try.
I got up, walked to the closet, and opened the door.
The closet was large. Walk-in. Expensive, like everything in this house. But I didn’t use the whole space. I used the corner. The far right corner, where the walls met at a ninety-degree angle and the space narrowed to something that felt enclosed, contained, and safe.
I pulled a blanket from the shelf and folded it on the floor. Then I closed the door, laid down on my side with my back against the wall, and my knees drawn up. The darkness wrapped around me like a familiar feeling.
This is the thing I’m most ashamed of.
A thirty-year-old man, wealthy, successful, decorated, lying on the floor of a closet because he can’t sleep in a bed when the nightmares come.
It started when I was six. The nannies would put me to bed in the room Patrick assigned me.
The door to the family wing was always closed, and some nights I could hear the other children laughing on the other side, Dominic and his friends, the sounds of a family that existed twenty feet away and didn’t include me.
My room felt too open. Too much space. Too many shadows that could become anything, and in a house where the man who was supposed to be my father locked me in basements and the woman who was supposed to be my mother called me the other child, anything could become a threat.
The bed was too exposed. If someone opened the door to harm me, they’d see me immediately. If the shadows moved, there was nowhere to go. I was visible, alone, and those two things together made a six-year-old’s nervous system scream.
I’d crawl into the closet, pull a blanket in, and close the door.
The enclosed space made me feel safe. The walls were close enough to touch on both sides, the ceiling was low, and nobody could find me here.
Nobody could hurt me here because the darkness was mine, not Patrick’s, not the basement’s, but mine.
I could press my back against one wall, my feet against the other, and know exactly where I was. Exactly how much space existed around me and the knowing was the opposite of the basement where the space was unknown, dark, and full of punishment.
I did it through childhood. In England when Grandma took me for vacation sometimes.
Through adolescence. Through the years in LA when I was landing roles and sleeping on closet floors in rented apartments.
Because the beds were too open, the rooms too big, and the boy inside the man couldn’t stop hiding.
My first big apartment had a walk-in closet the size of most people’s bedrooms, and I’d told myself I bought it for the wardrobe space. I hadn’t. I’d bought it because the floor was big enough to lie down on and the door locked from the inside.
I stopped for a while. Years, even. The therapy helped. The success helped. The distance from Miami helped. I thought I was past it. I thought the man had finally outgrown the boy’s hiding, the way you outgrow nightlights and training wheels and the belief that small spaces can keep you safe.
Then I came back to Miami. Back to the company. Back to the house where my father’s ghost sat in every chair.
The closet came back, just for the bad nights—the ones when the dreams found me.
Some weeks I slept in the bed without trouble.
Other weeks I woke at two in the morning with my heart hammering and my skin cold.
I’d lie there for twenty minutes fighting it before I gave in, walked to the closet, and laid down on the floor.
I felt the walls close around me and finally, finally, breathed.
Tonight was one of those nights.
I lay on the blanket and listened to my own breathing.
My breathing slowed. My pulse settled. The nightmare retreated, not gone, never gone, but back to the edge where it watched and waited.
I was on the edge of sleep, that thin border between consciousness and wherever my mind went when I finally let it rest, when the sound came.
Footsteps in the hallway. Light, barefoot, moving past my bedroom door.
Then stopping.
Then the handle of my bedroom door turning.
My eyes opened in the dark of the closet. I held my breath and listened to Miley Torres walk into my room.