Chapter 3 #3
Garraway just laughed. “There’s nothing left,” he told me in a sing-song tone that I didn’t remember him ever using. “Nothing left! Nothing left!”
The man was clearly mad.
A cackle came from near one of my hands, and I struggled to see who it was, but my head was strapped down, too, a bite guard shoved between my teeth, cutting off my airway as I tried to cry out and choked on my own saliva.
“Rayn!”
I knew that voice.
But that was impossible. He hadn’t been there.
Either there.
Not in the abandoned house and not at Tranquil Brook.
“Rayn!”
Again, my name in that achingly familiar voice, low and resonant. Worried.
Panic hit me.
Why was he here? Had he been there, at Tranquil Brook, and I’d somehow forgotten? Had he been the reason Garraway had found me?
“RAYN!”
I sat up, hands over my face, my heart still pounding. I groaned between clenched teeth, realizing, as wakefulness pushed away the thick horror, that of course Raj hadn’t been at Tranquil Brook or with Garraway.
Beside me, on the wooden box that served as my nightstand, my phone started buzzing, the screen lighting up.
I sighed, feeling even guiltier as I realized that I must have pulled him into my nightmare, then picked up the phone. “I’m sorry,” I told Raj immediately. “I didn’t mean to.”
“Are you okay?” he asked, and his voice sounded gravelly and rough. Tired. Worried. Not angry, though. Even though I’d yet again invaded his sleeping mind, this time dragging him forcibly into my own awful subconscious.
“Fine,” I mumbled. “Just a bad dream.”
“Jesus,” he rasped. “And I thought the one you pulled me out of was bad.”
It definitely hadn’t been fun—he’d been trapped by strangling roses somewhere in a garden. Except I’d been able to find him and free him. And he’d—
He’d pushed me out of mine, too.
It had been his voice. But his actual voice, yelling at me in order to wake me up.
“Sorry,” I mumbled again.
“Did you mean to have a nightmare?” he asked me.
I couldn’t tell if he was making a point or actually asking the question, so I answered. “No.”
“Then there’s nothing to be sorry for.”
“You were sleeping,” I pointed out, guilt heavy in my stomach. “I woke you.”
“Technically,” he said, and now his voice sounded almost affectionate. “I woke you.”
It was true. “Yes,” I agreed. “Thank you.”
“Rayn—”
“I should let you sleep,” I said, shame making me want to end this conversation.
“Rayn,” he said again, his voice more forceful.
“I’m sorry,” I repeated.
“Let me come over?” he said, then.
I pulled the phone away from my cheek and looked at it, surprised to note it was barely past midnight.
I’d only been asleep for an hour or so—much sooner than I usually managed to fall asleep and into dreams. “You need your rest,” I half-protested, although now that he’d offered, I did very much want him to come over.
“And I’m not going to get any if I’m worried about you,” he replied, and I could hear the rustling sound of him moving around as he spoke. “So if you want me to get any sleep, you should let me come over.”
I swallowed around the emotion that caught in my throat, but he must have taken my silence as unwillingness.
“Unless you don’t want me to…” He’d stopped moving around.
“I do,” I answered quickly. “I just… feel bad.”
“Well, don’t,” he replied, the sounds of activity resuming. “I always sleep better with you than without you.”
I couldn’t help a small smile—not that he could see it—even though I still felt guilty that he was about to get in his car and drive all the way to my apartment just because I’d had a bad dream. “Okay,” I said, since it seemed like I was supposed to say something and I had no idea what.
“I’ll be there soon,” he told me, then hung up.
I pushed myself up off the mattress and shuffled to the bathroom, then, when I finished, out into the main room to wait for Raj’s text telling me he’d arrived.
I was tired, worried about Garraway, and just generally unsettled by the dream, and I kept shivering as I waited, even though it wasn’t particularly cold.
When my phone buzzed, telling me he was downstairs, I let him in, then waited next to the cracked apartment door for him to appear.
He immediately pulled me against him as soon as the door was closed and he’d dropped the small duffel bag he sometimes brought with him.
A toothbrush and a change of clothes. He was wearing a t-shirt and a pair of sweatpants—clothes I knew he never wore outside.
I wondered if that’s what he wore to bed in his own house, or if he’d put them on because that’s what he’d worn here the last time he’d stayed the night, although then the sweatpants had been mine.
I relaxed into the warmth of his big body, although a shiver ran through me even with his arms around me.
“You should have put on a sweatshirt,” he said softly.
“It’s not that kind of cold,” I said.
Even though I couldn’t see his face, I knew he was probably frowning. “What do you mean, not that kind of cold?”
I leaned even more heavily into him, not that it mattered. He had several inches and a good forty or more pounds on me, all of it muscle. “I don’t know,” I admitted. “Psychically cold? Psychologically cold?”
His arms tightened. “Was that—” He hesitated.
“Was it what?” I asked.
He drew in a long, slow breath. “Was that what it was like?” he asked softly. “At Tranquil Brook?”
“Garraway wasn’t there,” I replied.
“But the straps and the bed?” he asked, and there was a current of something in his voice I didn’t recognize.
“Yes,” I answered honestly. I know that sometimes you aren’t supposed to answer people honestly, but I often can’t tell when those times are.
I also figured that lying to the man I was dating probably wasn’t a good foundation for a relationship.
There were things I knew he didn’t tell me—and there were probably things I didn’t know that I should have been telling him.
But that felt different than actually lying, even if social propriety thought that I should have.
His arms tightened around me. “Jesus,” he breathed. “How do you get over something like that?”
I sighed into the warmth of his shoulder. “According to my psychiatrist, you don’t,” I replied. “But you learn to live with it.”
“This is Dr. Nowse?”
“Yes.” I was supposed to see him at least once a month.
I usually did. He’d been extremely concerned about how my kidnapping would impact what he called my long-term recovery.
I wasn’t. Maybe I should have been, but, to me, it felt like just more of the same.
The same derision of what I was, the same dismissal of my worth, the same painful theft of my magic for his own purposes.
It didn’t really matter to me that he wasn’t one of the doctors—it was all functionally the same thing.
I’d said as much to Dr. Nowse, who had clearly disagreed. He’d argued that what Garraway had done must have upset my newfound sense of safety.
I’d looked him right in his brown eyes and told him that I had no sense of safety.
He’d seemed offended and horrified by that.
So I’d explained that when every time you looked at the news, whether on television or social media, and saw people protesting your existence, whether the one you’d been born with or the one you’d acquired from a disease, it was hard to actually feel safe anywhere.
His mouth had made a tiny little oh of surprise, and he’d looked at me as though I’d just destroyed some lingering fragment of childhood innocence. And then he’d conceded the point.
I’d been wrong, though. I did have a sense of safety—with Raj. When he was with me, I felt as though I could let my guard down. I knew he would protect me.
He wanted to protect me from things I didn’t need or want him to protect me from.
But he’d saved me from Garraway. My time down the well was mostly delirium from pain and hypothermia, but I definitely remembered the warmth of his big tiger body wrapped around me, sheltering me. Keeping me warm so that I wouldn’t shiver myself to death in the cold mud.
“You okay?” Raj murmured softly against my hair.
I nodded, then stepped back.
“You sure?”
I nodded again. “We should go to bed,” I said, turning toward my bedroom and its mattress. “You need the rest.”
“And you don’t?” He kicked off his shoes, picked up the bag, and followed me, setting the duffel down beside the mattress when we got to the bedroom.
I shrugged. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to go back to sleep,” I admitted, although I could feel exhaustion in my muscles and joints.
“Rayn—”
“I’m going to try,” I said, not wanting to argue with him. “I just…” I shrugged again.
He sat on the mattress, his knees bent, and looked up at me. “Come on,” he said softly, tugging me down.
I let him, just as I let him pull me into his arms under the covers, my cheek resting on the soft cotton of his t-shirt, warmed by the heat of his body.
I didn’t think I was going to sleep.
But I felt safe with Raj.
So I did.