Chapter 12
CASSIE
I held on to Jagger’s arm on the way into the house. It made me slightly motion sick, moving through the dark, trusting Jagger’s guidance, like I was floating on a piece of driftwood in a dark and endless sea.
“You’re okay,” he said. “I’ve got you.”
“I’ll order food,” Vigo said. “Our mouse needs lots of good food after all that hospital crap.”
“Maybe we should move you downstairs,” Hawk said, somewhere in front of us with the bag they‘d brought to the hospital with a few of my things.
He’d been mostly silent on the way home from the hospital, and I couldn’t help wondering if he was having second thoughts about bringing me back to the house.
The Hunt — and what came after — was supposed to be nothing but fun for the Hawks.
Now they were stuck taking care of someone who needed help climbing the stairs.
It wasn’t fair to do this to them.
It wasn’t the first time I’d second-guessed my decision to come home with the Hawks, but I’d made the decision and I needed to see it through, at least for a while.
“I want to be back in my old room.”
If someone had told me a month ago that I’d pine for my early days in the Hawks’ house — the days when I’d been scared and unsure about what the next three months held — I wouldn’t have believed them.
Now I looked back on them with a kind of longing. I’d been scared and disoriented, but I’d been whole. I felt like a fraction of myself now, like the cliff over which I’d flown had shaved off pieces of who I’d been.
“Stairs,” Jagger said. “There are ten of them.”
I clung to his arm as we climbed, slowly, and tried not to think about how easily I’d managed the stairs before. How I’d gone up and down them without even thinking, my vision as certain and reliable as the sky overhead.
“Made it,” Jagger said when we reached the second-floor landing.
I tried to see the layout of the space: the first hall and the doors to the toy room and the workroom where the Hawks had fucked me together for the first time the night before my accident.
The small sitting room, the second hall leading to my room, to the Hawks’ rooms.
“Here we are,” Jagger said.
I hesitated, wishing my other arm wasn’t in a cast so I could feel the door, the door frame, anything at all.
He guided me through the door and over to the bed.
I sat on the mattress and stared into the nothingness in my own mind, waiting for some kind of verbal cue to orient myself to where Jagger and Hawk were in the room.
“Want to shower?” Jagger asked.
“Not yet.” I was desperate for a shower, but I wasn’t quite ready to accept the depth of my helplessness.
I was more than sure that blind people showered alone, that they did all kinds of things alone. But I’d only been blind for five days and I was still figuring the whole thing out.
“Your bag is on the dresser,” Hawk said. “I could unpack it for you or— ”
“I think I just want to rest.” I didn’t know how to do this with them.
Didn’t know how to be their patient instead of an object of their desire.
“You got it.” Jagger kissed the top of my head.
Hawk’s voice came near my ear. “I’m glad you’re home, Cass.” He kissed my forehead and pressed my phone into my hand. “Text if you need anything.”
I listened for the sounds of them leaving and was glad when they closed my door. It was hard living in two worlds, the one everyone else was seeing and the empty one behind my eyelids.
I just wanted to be left alone.
It was why I hadn’t told them my secret: I’d started remembering.
Not everything, but flashes of a black SUV in the rearview mirror, the sound of its engine roaring as it drove alongside me on the mountain road, the sickening shriek of metal on metal when it slammed into my car.
My heart raced at the thought of it, sweat slicking my forehead as adrenaline flooded my body. I wanted to run, to cower from what had happened to me and the memory of how it had happened.
But there was nowhere to go. Nowhere to hide.
I shut it down instead, locking it inside the dark box of that day on the mountain with the rest of my life from before, a life so unreachable it might as well have been on the moon.