Chapter 11
Chapter
Eleven
BLAIRE
For once, I could tell this was a dream.
The edges were fuzzy, like an instant photo that hadn’t quite developed fully. Even so, I didn’t think I could wake myself up.
A dream.
It was only a dream.
I wasn’t in control. I looked down at my hands, dripping with blood.
It was only a dream.
Was it mine or someone else’s? I found myself taking inventory, distancing myself from the situation.
The blood spread across the trashed living room.
A breeze blew in through a broken window, rustling thin curtains in the night air.
My knees hurt, but I was trapped inside my body, unable to look down to examine them.
The dream was in control, steering me to where it wanted me to go.
A gun sat a few feet away from me, and the front door opened to the empty street. My heart sank. It looks like another break in.
Death was in the air, or maybe it was just the smell of the gun. Weren’t the two interchangeable? It was like watching a movie play out in front of me as I dragged my eyes up, up, up.
My breath caught. Slumped across the worn wooden floors was a body, dressed more casually than the men normally in my dream.
His pale sweatpants were soaked in red, too much to be possible.
I was fairly certain he was dead, or if he wasn’t, he was pretty damn close to it.
I crawled across the splintered floorboards toward him.
A bloody handprint covered the naked skin above his heart, surrounding the bullet wound. Lifting my shaking hand, I carefully rested it on top of the handprint. A perfect match, minus the smeared edges. Close enough I was willing to put money on the fact it was my hand.
The fact gave me pause, just for a moment.
I had been trying to stop the bleeding, which meant I hadn’t been doing the killing. I had been trying to save him.
The man twitched, the wound spurting blood once more, and I jumped back. He was still alive.
I pressed my hand against the bloody handprint again, trying to stop the bleeding. “Help!” I screamed. “Someone help me! Please!”
I looked toward the open door. Maybe I could run and get help before it was too late, if only my body would move, my feet would cooperate.
Before I could even try, the man grabbed my wrist, squeezing tightly.
I met his dying gaze, using the last of his strength to try and say something.
He was too close to death, and the words couldn’t leave his lips.
His mouth rounded around a single word, over and over, a knife to my heart every time.
Sorry.
Sorry.
Sorry.
“Blaire!”
Someone grabbed my shoulder, and I jumped, pulling back my arm ready to strike.
“Blaire.” Calmer this time. Quieter. Soothing, like I was a rabid animal. I blinked, letting my vision settle back into reality. I was back in control.
Winder looked at me, eyes nearly black in the dark room. I could just about make out the slouch of his sweatpants around the toned lines of his body, and the darker ink that decorated it.
I sniffed, the smell of weed thick around me. Something wasn’t right.
“Where am I?” I asked.
“In my living room,” he murmured. “I caught you right before you walked outside. You were sleepwalking.”
He nodded his head toward the now closed door. I was going to get help.
It wasn’t even the same door as in my dream. Shit.
I closed my eyes again, nodding. I would’ve walked out that goddamn door into the streets with no idea of what I was doing. Because that would’ve ended great. Awesome. Just add sleepwalking to the list of things that were fucked up about me lately.
Couldn’t remember getting high at parties? Check.
Constant dreams about killing people? Double check.
Breaking and entering, or rather, breaking and leaving? Triple check.
I should buy a lottery ticket. Maybe even two. As of this moment, I had to be the luckiest person alive. Shit. Shit. Shit.
“Are you okay?” Winder repeated, his voice firmer this time.
“Yes.” I opened my eyes. “I mean. As okay as I can be, given the fact I was just about to sleepwalk out into the streets in the middle of the night.”
Winder was quiet for a moment. “Come on. We don’t want to wake anyone.” He slid his hand from my shoulder to my wrist, taking me back deeper into the house.
The living room was quiet, strewn with sleeping bodies in awkward positions. Winder grabbed a pillow off the couch as we passed, tiptoeing around the passed-out house guests. He tugged me inside his room, closing the door, and locking it behind both of us.
I glanced back at him. There was only one bed in here, and not a very big one at that. Where was he planning on sleeping?
He smirked, apparently reading my mind. “Don’t worry. I’ll sleep on the floor. I just don’t trust you not to try and sneak out the door again. This way, if you want to escape, you’ll have to step on me first.”
“If you don’t want me to leave, just say so.
” I climbed back into the bed, listening to Winder settling on the floor next to me.
The sheets he had swapped the garbage-covered ones for were less scratchy, but not by much.
I wasn’t about to complain. I could be home alone, listening out for every little creak, every scratch or whisper of a breeze.
All things considered, it could be a lot worse than Winder’s bed.
“You’d like that too much.”
Silence filled the room, the earliest hours of the morning beginning to fight the night sky. The sun would be up in a few short hours, and the last two days would be behind me. Somehow, it felt like I had known Winder for a lot longer than that.
Although, if I was to believe him, I had. I just didn’t remember.
I wasn’t sure which was harder to digest.
“Blaire.”
I smiled to myself. My name was always a demand in his mouth, never a question. It was expected I would respond. One day I wouldn’t respond, just to see if it would bother him. “Yeah.”
“Did you have the nightmare again?”
“Kind of.” The dream was already disappearing the longer I was awake, and I grasped at the edges of the sensations that had woken me up. Sadness. Desperation. Longing. Anger. Fear.
He hummed. “What do you mean, kind of?”
“I mean, yes, I had the dream. But it was different. There was blood, and someone dying, but I don’t think I killed him. I think I was trying to save him. And the other weird thing was that I knew it was a dream…” This was what my life had come to, trying to decipher reality from delusion.
“Would talking about it help?”
I laughed, even as my heart squeezed. He was kind of sweet when he wanted to be. “Are you offering to talk out a dream with me?”
“I asked if it would help,” Winder snapped.
Never mind. “Yes. But don’t feel like you have to. I don’t want to put you out.”
Quiet stretched between us again, the understanding of two people who knew things that bound them together, the fool and the fooled.
“You’re already in my bed, Blaire. We might as well talk.” Winder’s voice finally drifted up from the floor. “What did he look like? The man in your dream.”
I frowned, scraping the back of my memory. “All I can remember is that his chest was stained with his blood.” I wanted to remember more. I didn’t want it to disappear before I had a chance to dissect it, especially now that I knew there could be clues to the truth hidden inside. “Sorry.”
“There’s nothing to be sorry for.”
“No. Well, yeah, I am sorry for sticking you in this situation. But that’s what he said to me.
Right before I woke up, he grabbed my wrist and said sorry.
” Those same feelings drifted over me again, in reverse this time.
Fear. Anger. Longing. Desperation. Sadness.
I touched my cheek to find it wet. A tear.
The sadness was so overwhelming I was sitting here crying over a dream.
“Sorry.” Winder rolled the word around in his mouth, and for some reason I couldn’t get the image of his mouth out of my mind, and the way his full lips would round around the word.
Everything was so deliberate with him. Purposeful.
He was used to getting what he wanted in a world that wanted nothing more than to chew you up and spit you out. “Why do you think he said that?”
“I wish I knew,” I whispered. I wasn’t even sure if he’d be able to hear me, but the words needed to be said all the same. The gray light behind Winder’s thin curtains was growing brighter, the only sound his quiet breathing coming from the floor. “Are you still awake?”
“Yeah,” he replied. “I don’t sleep much anymore.”
I wasn’t sure what he meant by that. Maybe he had nightmares, too.
“Are you okay?” he asked. He shuffled on the floor, and I felt bad for making him sleep down there. He wasn’t exactly young, and the floor couldn’t have been that comfortable.
“Besides trying to make sense of everything I thought was true? I’m good.
” I rolled onto my side toward the sound of his voice, my hand flopping off the edge of the bed.
Normally, I’d be afraid of something grabbing me and dragging me to my doom, but I wasn’t sure a monster under the bed could be any worse than my current life. Hell, it might even be an improvement.
A whisper-light touch stroked my hand, and I wanted to pull back. Winder wasn’t a monster under the bed. Right now, he might be the only person standing between them and me. But a touch this gentle from him was…unexpected.
I needed a distraction, from both the situation at hand, and the feelings beginning to swirl in my core. “Where does your name come from?”
“My name?” His hand stopped stroking, like he realized what he was doing, who he was touching, but it didn’t move away.
For that, I was grateful. His hand on mine might be the only thing keeping me from spiraling at the moment. “Yeah. Winder. It’s pretty unusual.”
“Oh.” I couldn’t be certain, but I would’ve sworn there was a touch of relief in his voice. “It’s a nickname, more than anything. But I’ve had it for so long, I don’t know any different.”
“Even for a nickname, it’s unique.” Winder. I mouthed the word, letting it sit. “Who came up with that?”
“Are you sure you want to know? It’s not exactly a nice story.” He pulled his hand away entirely.
Maybe I said the wrong thing.
Just like that, his hand was back, this time gripping mine lightly, like he wasn’t sure how to touch.
“I got in with the wrong people when I was younger. Stupid. Impressionable. My family tried to pull me back more than once, but I was too far gone. They tried to tell me what a mess I was in, offered me help and everything, but I just couldn’t hear it. ”
“What kind of people?” I asked.
“Distributors. People at the top of the food chain. They’re the dealer’s dealers. And when a sale went wrong, I was left to take the blame.” He sucked in a breath. “Do you ever wish you had a time machine? To go back in time with 20/20 vision?”
“All the time.” I laughed. If only he knew how much I wished for that. “What happened?”
“My loyalty was in the wrong place. I thought I was proving something to someone, who really didn’t care.
They sentenced me to ten years, but I got out on good behavior.
Really, it was me learning how to work the system.
I got what I wanted out of people. I started making a bit of a name for myself, of talking my way out of things, you know? ”
“I can see that.” He had an air about him. An aura that drew people in, even as he pushed them back.
“Winder, they called me.” His laugh was soft, but there was no humor in it.
“After I got out, I looked it up. It’s a kind of snake.
A sidewinder. Instead of forward, they move sideways through the sand.
Zig-zagging. It draws their prey in, but also makes them harder to catch.
At the time, it felt like it fit. Now, I wouldn’t know anything else. ”
I thought of the snake tattooed on his body, covering so much of his skin. “Why do you do it now, then? Sell drugs, I mean, since you’ve already been caught.”
“What else was I supposed to do? I had a record. A reputation. At least in this world, my reputation served me well. Out there…it would be a black mark. Here, it gives me control. Power.”
A knot tangled in my stomach, emotions for a boy I didn’t know, and the hopeless decision he felt he had to make. No wonder he wanted a time machine.
“I’ve wished I could turn the clock back more times than I could count,” I said softly. “Start over. Especially now. Maybe I’d remember everything I’ve forgotten.” Another tear slipped down my cheek, unbidden.
“But you can’t,” he murmured. A quick squeeze of my hand, a reminder he was there, and like it or not, there was a similarity between us neither of us wanted to acknowledge.
“No. I can’t.”
It was a strange feeling. Everything I thought I knew had been thrown out the window, leaving me picking up tiny shards of glass that cut me when I tried to put them back together.
But Winder grasping my hand, giving me pieces of himself seemed to fill in the gaps.
My anxieties were quiet, recognizing the safety we had been offered.
I might have been broken, but I hadn’t felt this kind of peace in the longest time.
“How did you know I was sleepwalking?” I mumbled, my body’s need for rest taking over everything.
His answer was immediate, and his voice was matter of fact. “You called for help. I thought you had gotten yourself into trouble.”
“You came just because I asked for help,” I mused, sleep beginning to blur the edges between dream and reality. “You do a lot for a girl you barely know.”
Winder sighed, a quiet, mournful sound. A sound filled with regret and a sadness that would’ve broken my heart if it had been whole. When he spoke, his words were so quiet they nearly blended in with the wind brushing against the windows. “I’m just paying a debt I’ve owed for a long time.”
I didn’t have the energy to respond, and besides, I wasn’t even sure if I heard him correctly. My eyes stayed closed, Winder’s words cycling through my brain. I wasn’t sure if I was asleep, but I definitely wasn’t awake. The images came one after the next, a slideshow I couldn’t stop.
Winder’s face, filled with concern.
A gun, still smoking.
Blood.
Sorry.
Sorry.
Sorry.