Chapter 10 Johnny
JOHNNY
The images hit like a strobe in a dark room. Each flash burns a different scene into my retinas before ripping it away.
Red. So much red. Walls, hands, the front of my shirt. Fluorescent light bouncing off something metallic. Slot machines. Rows and rows of them, shrieking their idiot jingles while something terrible happens twenty feet away.
The disconnect between those sounds and the violence is so sharp my stomach folds in on itself.
A gun. Heavy in my grip. Familiar the way a toothbrush is familiar, the way you don’t think about it, you just reach for it and your hand already knows the weight.
Figures beside me. Men I trust. I can feel that certainty in my bones even though their faces won’t hold still, blurring every time I try to focus.
One of them is built like a wall. Another wipes blood off his knuckles without breaking stride, already looking for the next problem.
And behind us both, a man whose face I can’t pin down but whose presence straightens my spine on reflex.
Dark suit. Silver at the temples. The faint bite of cigar smoke clinging to expensive wool.
When he speaks, every man in the room stops what they’re doing and listens.
I can’t make out the words, but my body already knows the voice.
Knows to stand straighter when I hear it.
My fists clench, and something behind my ribs pulls tight enough to ache.
Then a hallway. Industrial carpet. The copper smell of blood so thick it coats the back of my throat. My knuckles split and aching.
Then a shower, scalding water, and the pink swirl circling the drain as someone else’s blood washes off my skin.
Vegas.
The word pounds through me like a second heartbeat. I live there. I work there. I do things there that require showers like that one, and I do them alongside men whose faces I can’t see but whose presence I trust the way you trust gravity.
Then it’s gone.
All of it, snuffed out like someone yanked the plug from the projector. Hardwood under my knees. The surf outside. Natalia’s hand on my shoulder.
“Johnny! Talk to me, please.”
Her voice cuts through the last of the static. I blink up at her, and the worry on her face is almost worse than what’s in my head.
“Hey. Stay with me. What happened?”
I open my mouth to tell her what I saw. The gun. The blood. Vegas—
And something in me slams a door shut.
Not a conscious decision. Something deeper, hardcoded. Even without my memories, this instinct stayed intact. A reflex so strong it bypasses thought entirely: Do not tell her this. The certainty is absolute.
Whatever I was, I was the kind of man who kept secrets. That impulse survived when everything else didn’t.
I have maybe two seconds to decide what comes out of my mouth, and in those two seconds, I look up at the woman who pulled me off a beach, cleaned my blood, checked my pupils every morning with steady hands and worried eyes.
The woman who just trusted me with the ugly truth of her life because I pushed her to.
And I lie to her.
“It’s fading.” My voice sounds like it’s been through a shredder. “I got flashes, but they’re already breaking apart. Nothing solid.”
The words taste wrong. Physically wrong, like biting tinfoil. Her eyes search my face and I hold steady because apparently I’m good at this. Apparently whatever I was before I washed up here included being a man who could look someone in the eye and feed them bullshit without blinking.
“That’s okay.” She squeezes my arm. “Your brain is working overtime. It makes sense that the memories wouldn’t stick yet.”
She’s so gentle about it. So understanding. And every word she says packs the lie heavier, like wet sand filling up my chest.
“My head is splitting.” That part, at least, is true. My skull feels like it’s been used as a kickball. “I just need to lie down.”
“Come on.” She helps me up and ducks under my arm without hesitating, taking my weight against her side. She’s stronger than she looks. I noticed that the first morning, the way she hauled me off the beach on her own.
We make it to the guest room. She flicks the light on with her elbow, but the overhead is weak and the room stays mostly shadow. The bed is unmade from this morning, sheets tangled the way I left them, and I drop onto the mattress like my strings got cut.
“Stay there.” She disappears and comes back in under a minute with pain relievers, a glass of water, and a damp cloth. She presses two fingers to my wrist before handing me the pills, counting silently.
I knock back the pills and lie flat. She folds the cloth and lays it across my forehead, cool and damp against my skin. Her fingers brush my hairline as she adjusts it.
“Thanks, Nat.”
“Don’t thank me. Just rest.”
She settles onto the edge of the mattress, and the quiet stretches out between us.
The surf keeps its rhythm outside. Her hand finds my forearm and starts a slow, absent stroke, fingertips trailing from my wrist to my elbow and back.
It’s the kind of touch that says I’m here, I’m not going anywhere, and after the nightmare inside my own head, it’s the only thing that feels real.
I shut my eyes because keeping them open means looking at her, and looking at her right now means confronting the fact that I chose to protect myself instead of trusting the only person who’s given a damn about me since I crawled out of the ocean.
The lie sits in my gut like a stone. Cold and solid and wrong.
I could still fix it. I could open my mouth right now and say, I saw myself holding a gun and I wasn’t scared of it. I saw blood and I didn’t flinch. I live in Las Vegas and I do things there that require washing evidence off my body. Tell me what that makes me, Natalia.
But if I say that, she looks at me differently. The way she should have looked at me from the start. The way anyone should look at a man who washes up on their beach with scarred knuckles and violence living in his muscle memory.
She’d be right to throw me out. And I’d deserve it.
So I keep my mouth shut and let her fingers trace their path along my arm, and I hate myself a little more with every pass.
“You’ll remember everything eventually.” Her voice goes quiet. “Your brain just needs time to sort through it all.”
I don’t think I want it to.
For the first time since I woke up with nothing, I’m not desperate to fill the blank spaces. Whatever’s waiting in them, my gut already knows it’s nothing I want back.
She gives my arm one last pass before finding her way to her feet. “I’ll let you get some rest. If your head gets worse, come get me.”
She’s halfway to the door when I say it.
“Stay.” It comes out stripped bare, no swagger left to dress it up. “Just to sleep. I just want you here.”
She doesn’t answer right away. Her eyes flick toward the hallway and back to me, and I can see her running through every reason she should walk out of this room.
Eventually she lets out a long breath and reaches for the light switch. The room goes dark, just the faint glow from the hallway, and then the mattress dips.
She lies down beside me, leaving a careful strip of space between us.
Near enough that I can feel the warmth radiating off her skin but not quite touching.
I lift my arm. An invitation, not a demand.
She hesitates for one more breath, and then she’s there, fitting herself against my side, her cheek settling into the dip below my shoulder.
Her hair spills across my arm, and a few strands catch against the stubble on my chin when I turn my head. It’s such a small, stupid thing. It shouldn’t make my chest hurt.
Her breathing is shallow at first, self-conscious.
One of her hands rests flat against my chest, right over my sternum.
Her hip presses into mine and even now, even gutted and lying through my teeth, my body clocks every inch of where she’s touching me.
The heat of her palm through my shirt. The weight of her thigh against my leg.
The way her exhale lands on my collarbone and my skin tightens in response.
I press my lips to the top of her head and keep them there a beat too long because I’m a selfish bastard and she’s letting me.
The white noise in my head doesn’t stop. But with her body nestled against mine, it dims to something I can almost bear.
Her breathing evens out. Slows. She’s asleep, or close to it, her weight going soft and heavy against my side. I stare at the ceiling and listen to the ocean against the shore.
Her fingers curl into my shirt, a small unconscious fist, holding on to something even in sleep. I cover her hand with mine and shut my eyes.
She told me the truth tonight. Ripped it out of herself, handed me the ugliest pieces of her life, and trusted me to hold them without flinching. She gave me the real version.
I gave her the safe one.
I pull her closer and try very hard not to think about what happens when she finds out what I am.