Chapter 30
CHAPTER THIRTY
Paul
The room is mirrors.
Floor to ceiling, wall to wall, every surface reflecting the same image from a different angle. Me, standing in the center of it, and her, everywhere.
Every mirror holds her, and for a moment, that’s all it is.
Her face, her eyes, that light blue I could pick out of any crowd, looking back at me from a dozen different angles, and my chest does what it always does when I see her, that settling, that there you are, the feeling of a problem resolving itself.
But she’s not standing next to me. She’s only in the mirrors, and when I really look at her, I find the panic in her eyes.
She’s trapped behind the glass. In all of them, every reflection, her palms flat against the surface, and she’s saying something I can’t hear.
I move toward the nearest mirror and press my hand to hers through the glass.
She shakes her head while screaming at me, but still, I can’t hear what she’s saying.
Her eyes go past me, and I turn to find someone else in the mirrors too.
I can’t see his face, only his shape, tall and broad-shouldered. He’s in shadow behind her in every reflection, and his hand closes around her arm. Her mouth forms my name, just when I watch him pull her back.
Mirror by mirror, reflection by reflection, she gets smaller.
I move from glass to glass, pressing my hands against each one, and none of them break.
None of them gives, and she keeps getting smaller.
The mirrors keep multiplying, and the room keeps expanding, and I can’t find the one she’s actually in.
I slam my hand against the one mirror in front of me, again and again, wanting to break it, needing to break it—
I slam back into my body, but know the second I do, I can’t move.
The paralysis lands, the full weight of it, arms pinned, upper body compressed, and legs locked.
You are awake, you are safe, it will pass
I force my eyes open and fix them on the brightly lit ceiling and breathe.
In through my nose.
Out through my mouth.
The crawling begins at my wrists, and I close my eyes, breathing through the feeling. When I open them again, I see her mouth.
I’ve spent more time studying it than I’ve allowed myself to examine, the fullness of her lower lip, how it parts when she’s about to say something she’s been holding back. I know it, and it’s there, above me, moving.
“Paul.”
My breath stops.
“Paul, please.”
You are awake. You are safe. She is not real.
“Help me.” The words come out desperate. “Please, I can’t… I can’t find… Paul…”
I try to move, but the paralysis holds me in place.
I move my pinky finger, one millimeter, then try again, and the crawling reaches my throat.
Her voice keeps coming, broken and pleading.
I am lying here listening to her beg for help with my body locked and my hands useless, while shadows start eating the corners of the room.
“Help me, please!”
Finally, my whole hand moves. I drag air into my lungs and wait. I exhale, and her voice fades like a signal losing frequency, and then the weight lifts all at once.
I sit up and press both hands to my face. “I’m awake,” I say out loud, because saying it makes it real. “I’m fine.”
“Are you?”
I drop my hands.
He’s standing at the foot of my bed.
Not in shadow this time. Not half formed. Just there, in the lit room, looking at me with his green eyes, and my body understands before my brain does. The cold that moves through me has nothing to do with the room’s temperature.
My hands find the mattress, gripping the sheets.
“Are you sure…” This Man asks quietly, a grin tugging at his lips, “… that you woke up?”
I gasp for air—
And open my eyes.
I’m lying on my back, with my hands on my sides. My legs are unlocked, but still, I lie there for a moment and simply breathe.
A false awakening.
Holy shit.
I’ve had patients describe them. The dream builds a perfect replica of you waking up, then it hands it to you so convincingly that you step right in.
I’ve sat across from people trying to explain the horror of believing you’re conscious in the waking world, while you just woke up inside your mind.
I’ve nodded, taken notes, and understood it clinically.
Now I understand it the other way.
This shit is terrifying, and This Man knows it.
He’s escalating.
But why?
I reach for my glasses, push them on, and check my watch.
4:44 a.m.
Flexing both hands, I feel the pins and needles of circulation returning to fingers that have been locked for too long, then check again.
4:44 a.m.
“Now I’m sure,” I mutter when I sit up slowly, put my feet on the floor, and let the cold of it come through my soles.
Then I get up because the alternative is lying back down, and lying back down is not something I’m willing to do after that mindfuck.
I change simply by muscle memory, running clothes, a headlamp, and shoes laced tight.
The cold hits my face the moment I’m outside, and I click my headlamp on.
This is the second morning This Man is back in my dreams.
The thought keeps pace with my footfall.
You lost your peace because you ran too fast, idiot.
I knew Lennon was skittish about what things meant, and I confirmed the date in her doorway.
Then I kissed her in my kitchen to stop her from leaving, which was not in any plan I’d made for the afternoon, and then I put her on my lap, which was also not in the plan.
Then I said, “Good girl,” and tore her stockings open, which was…
The path turns, and I turn with it.
She said casual. She said to take it slow, and I agreed.
Then I sent one text two days ago asking if she wanted a ride home, and she said, “No, thank you.” I have not contacted her since because she needed space, because the correct, measured, professional response to someone asking for slow was to give them room rather than crowding them.
But the two days of silence have felt like pain, and I’m not saying metaphorically.
My heart has been doing something since she texted back with, I have my own car that can only be described as physical, a persistent pressure slightly left of center, that makes you check your own pulse at odd moments to confirm the machinery is still running correctly.
It is. I’ve checked.
I don’t know what to do with a body that is apparently staging a protest over a text message.
The path runs alongside the park, and the streetlights are still on. My breath comes in even clouds in the cold air, and I run, thinking about mirrors, her voice, and the hand I couldn’t see pulling her backward.
At least I spent the two days reading every peer-reviewed paper on PCOS I could find, which means I am now, conservatively, more informed on the subject than most general practitioners.
I know the hormonal cascade, the insulin resistance, the chronic inflammation, the cruelty of a condition that is both common and routinely dismissed.
I know what it does to the body over the years and what it does to a person’s relationship with that body over the same years.
I did this because it felt productive.
It was not, in any measurable way, productive.
She still hasn’t texted.
“I can’t find—”
“Help me.”
I run faster.
She asked for slow, so that’s what I will give her. I will give her whatever she needs, in whatever increments she can accept. I can do that.
What I cannot do is lose her.
For five years, I dreamed I would kill her, and then I found her, and hit her with my car—my nightmare made real, except she survived, which leaves the question of what this new nightmare means I’ve had for two nights now.
She’s trapped.
Someone takes her from me.
I don’t know if it’s fear dressed up as vision or a vision dressed up as fear.
I don’t know which answer I’m more afraid of.
I run another half mile before I let myself think about what I’m going to say when I text her. By the time I’m home, showered, and dressed, I’ve mostly stopped hearing her voice. That’s the best I can reasonably hope for at seven in the morning.
I stand at the kitchen window with my coffee, look at the garden, which needs tending, and spend a couple of minutes thinking about nothing before I pick up my phone. Then I text Renée, because texting her is easier than texting Lennon, and I still don’t know what I want to say to Lennon.
Won’t make breakfast this morning. Sorry.
Her response comes back within two minutes.
Renée
Are you not feeling well? Do you need anything?
All fine. Just an early start today. But thanks.
I set the phone face down on the counter.
Nothing is fine. My hands are not entirely steady, and I lied to my sister-in-law over a text, which is a new low, even by the standards of the last two days. But Renée will hear it in my voice if I call, and I don’t have the bandwidth to be managed right now. I just need to work.
I pick up my bag and keys, and then reach for my phone, putting it in my bag without opening the thread with Lennon, and go out to my bike.
The Vaughn house is quiet when I arrive. I lock my bike at the gate and come up the path. The front door opens before I’ve reached it.
Nora Vaughn looks at me with the sharpness she always has, that assessing quality that I’ve come to understand is not unfriendliness but simply the expression of a woman who has spent twelve years watching for changes in things that mostly don’t change.
Then she looks at me more carefully. “Paul,” she says. Not Dr. Bennett. Just Paul for the first time in six years of this arrangement. The shift is small enough that someone else might not notice it.
I notice it.
“You’re early today. Are you all right?”
“I’m trying to be.”
Her face settles, shifting from assessing to smiling softly as she steps back to let me in. “Aren’t we all.”
I step inside, and she closes the door behind me. From somewhere above us comes the quiet sound of movement.
“We just finished getting Tessa ready for the day.” Nora looks up toward the ceiling. “She’s still in her room. I was going to have her moved to the sunroom if you—”