Wade
After successfully fucking Ray on nearly every flat surface in her room, the bathroom counter, and against the tiled wall of her shower, we both crawled into bed, wrung out and exhausted.
With the lights out and the curtains drawn, I relished the feel of her body pressed against mine. She wore my T-shirt and nothing else, leaving me in just my black boxer briefs.
Ray’s warm breath coasted across my chest, where she had her head resting in the divot of my shoulder, her leg slung over my thigh as she softly snored beside me.
She looked so serene, her eyelashes fluttering against her tan cheeks. She had pulled her hair up into a messy bun, and I brushed a tendril that had fallen out, tucking it behind her ear. Stirring softly, she hummed a contented sigh as she snuggled in closer to my side.
Knowing that Ray and I had watched each other grow up, side by side and hand in hand, made this moment even sweeter. Life had a way of bringing things around full circle, and I softly chuckled to myself, thinking about what eighteen-year-old me would have thought about this moment.
So many fond memories with the beautiful woman tucked in close to my side floated through the highlight reel of my mind.
Eighteen-year-old me, a senior in high school, on the precipice of real life beginning, kissing Ray in the front seat of my truck on prom night.
In my early twenties, during countless nights on the rodeo circuit, ending up balls deep in some no-name buckle bunny, always wishing it was Ray.
When she pretended to be my fiancée one time to kick a buckle bunny out of my hotel room when she overstayed her welcome.
So many stolen glances where I took in the sight of her, uninhibited and free, basking in the sunny days at the ranch.
Even in the hard moments, there was comfort between us, as we held each other from falling apart when life felt too heavy to carry alone.
Ray was my rock, my savior, my guiding light.
As my eyes drifted shut and sleep threatened to take me under, I vowed that I would do whatever it took to become the best man I could be for the woman beside me, who deserved the world.
She could do better than me by a long shot, but for some ungodly reason, she believed there was good inside me, and I was determined to find it for her.
“Bro, we need to get out of here,” I called toward my brother and his girlfriend, Stella, as I stood in the warehouse opening.
I didn’t want to linger inside this hellhole any longer than need be, but for some fucking reason, Max chose now, in the middle of a crime scene, to hold and console his woman after she shot a man and he rescued her daughter.
I wanted to get out of here, get back to my bed, and pretend the last twenty-four hours never happened.
Hearing that Charlie, my soon-to-be niece, had been kidnapped had gutted me.
She and Stella hadn’t been in our lives long, but they had cemented a place in each of our hearts.
They were family, no matter if they didn’t carry the Daniels name yet.
This whole building smelled of mold and something pungently vile. It had clearly been sitting vacant for a long time before the crazy fuckers who kidnapped Charlie, and subsequently Stella, started using it to stash their drugs.
POP
What the fuck?!
Fuck, why am I on the ground? Why can’t I move my legs? Why does everything feel like it’s on fire?
POP POP POP
Turning my head to the side, still stunned and confused as to why I couldn’t fucking stand up, I saw Emmanuel, Ray’s dad, standing off to the side with his pistol pointed at something or someone behind me.
Everything had happened so fast, and I was trying to put the pieces together as everything unfolded around me.
Max knelt down next to me, taking my hand. Why did he look so frantic?
“Shh, it’s okay. We’ve got paramedics on the way. Don’t move,” he scolded.
Excuse me, I was the older twin here; I would do the bossing around.
I tried to move, but nothing seemed to work as it was supposed to.
I pushed off the ground with my hands but immediately fell back down as agonizing pain shot through every single fiber of my core, radiating down my legs.
How could I feel the pain coursing through my limbs but not lift the lifeless appendages to move?
“Max…” I started, but even my lungs hurt. Every breath felt like it was tearing my chest in two. There was no other way to describe it than a searing and scorching pain that felt like fire was consuming every piece of me and burning me from the inside out.
“No. No, you’re not giving me some lame-ass speech that I need to take care of things if you die.” Die? I was just going to ask him to help me up. “You’re not going to fucking die, do you hear me?”
“Fuck…you…” I gritted out, ready to lay into him for bossing me around but losing the steam to argue.
“It’s gonna be okay.” His promises hung heavily in the air as reality dawned on me. The pop, a gunshot, my legs… Fuck, my legs. I couldn’t move my fucking legs. What was happening?
Tears welled in my eyes, blurring my vision, as the pain—physical and emotional—gripped hold of me. A choked sob crested my lips, and it felt as if it stole every ounce of breath I had left.
“Max…” I sobbed, not caring if I looked like a whiny ass bitch. Suddenly, I was terrified, point-blank. “I can’t feel my legs.”
Fear like I’d never experienced before flooded my veins. I fought for every ragged intake of breath as my heart beat wildly in my chest. I’d been shot, and I couldn’t feel my fucking legs.
“Wade.”
The sweetest voice called to me in the haze of my dream, a frantic lilt to the words.
Was I dreaming? The nightmares had become so vivid and frequent that I sometimes had trouble deciphering whether I was actually lying on the musty floor of that warehouse or if I was snug at home in my bed.
“Wade, baby, wake up.” I could feel someone shaking me, but the pain was overwhelming. Sweat dotted my brow, and I struggled to catch my breath.
My chest was on fire, my back felt like someone had poked a cattle brand directly on it, and the screaming… Fuck, why was someone screaming?
“WADE!”
At the terrified sound of her voice, I felt my senses snap back to reality. Ray stood beside the bed, tears streaming down her face, and her arms clutched tightly around her body, my shirt dwarfing her small frame.
She looked terrified, and the idea that I’d done something to cause that look gutted me.
Blinking away the haze of the nightmare, I took in my surroundings. The bedside lamp lay shattered on the floor, shards of porcelain scattered across the rug.
Sheets were strewn about as if they’d been balled up and tossed haphazardly back on the bed, tangled around my waist.
The spot where I had been lying was damp with the sweat that I could feel beading down my neck and soaking the hair at the nape.
Ray stood on the opposite side of the room now, her hands now by her sides. I didn’t miss the subtle shake in them as she warred with how to approach, and it hit me. I was the one scaring her. The screaming had been me.
“Sunshine…” I whispered, afraid to scare her further.
“How long?” Her words came out breathless, and the shake clearly wasn’t only in her hands as I heard the tremor radiate through her voice.
I hung my head, ashamed to admit how long I’d been fighting these demons alone. I didn’t want her pity. I finally had the woman of my dreams, and I didn’t need her realizing how truly broken a man I was.
“How long, Wade?” she repeated, anger replacing terror as she took a fortified step forward, her shoulders back and chin lifted as she fought to put her mask of bravery in place.
“Since a month or so after coming home from the hospital.” The words felt like acid on my tongue as I shared the darkest parts of me with the only thing that brought me light.
“They started out mild, but lately they’ve gotten worse.
They’ve gotten harder to snap out of and more vivid.
Sometimes I can’t tell the difference between a dream and reality.
” Seeing her flinch, I backpedaled, scared that things had gone too far and I’d done something I couldn’t take back.
“I promise I won’t hurt you.”
“Hurt me?” she scoffed, tears pouring down her cheeks, leaving damp rivers of betrayal in their wake. She brushed them away with the back of her hand and turned her head away to speak softly. “I’m not scared of you. I’m scared for you.”
“I’m fine. It’s just nightmares. Anyone who’d been through the hell I have would have nightmares.”
“Just nightmares?!” she screeched, her voice rising and breaking with a sob at the tail end of her words. Her carefully placed armor was cracking, and I could see the scared and hurt woman beneath. “You call that just a nightmare?”
She took another step closer, and I threw back the covers, turning so my legs dangled off the edge of the bed. She stepped between my knees and pressed her hand to my cheek. I leaned into her caress as I felt the hot tears drip off her chin onto my sweat-slicked skin.
“Wade, just nightmares would be seeing yourself in a classroom full of your friends while you gave a presentation in your underwear. Just nightmares would be missing a deadline, your teeth falling out, being chased by snakes. This was not just a nightmare. That empty look of pure terror in your eyes will haunt me.” Her touch was a brand against my clammy skin as she tilted my chin up to look at her.
“I think you’re having flashbacks.”
Her soft words hit like daggers to my chest as I fought for each ragged breath, the weight of anxiety threatening to close my throat. Flashbacks meant PTSD. Flashbacks meant I was broken. Flashbacks meant I needed help.
Fuck.
For so long, I’d been fighting this battle alone, not realizing how it was affecting everyone around me, even when I tried my hardest to keep them away from it.
Seeing the hurt in Ray’s eyes as I fought to control my breathing, soaking in the warm comfort of her touch, I realized I couldn’t do this anymore. I couldn’t stand back and push this to the side, letting it eat away at the goodness left inside of me.
The nightmares were getting worse; I was angry all the damn time, and before long, I was going to burn bridges with the people most important to me that wouldn’t be able to be repaired.
“I think I need help, Sunshine,” I whispered into the darkness, leaning forward and pressing my forehead to her belly.
She hugged me to her and rubbed my back as I let the tears I’d been holding fall, soaking her shirt with all the pain and anger I’d been trying to hide.
“It’s okay. We will do this together.”
I didn’t deserve this woman, but I was damn sure determined to prove that I could be a better man. She deserved to be loved by the man I was before the incident. She deserved to be loved wholly and without reservations.
As she held me softly under the glow of moonlight, I vowed within myself that I would do what it took to be a better man for her, even if it meant facing the demons I didn’t want to acknowledge.