Chapter 5 #6
“Nah, turns out my room has an en suite.” I brazen it out. “So you’ll have the main bathroom all to yourself.”
He laughs. “What an amazing coincidence.”
“Completely shocked me,” I reply, deadpan. “Still, I suppose there had to be some trade-off for you getting the queen-size bed.”
This time he laughs so hard that he almost chokes. It feels good.
Not because I have feelings . It’s just nice when people find me amusing.
Shut up.
I head toward the stairs, then hesitate and turn back. “Hey, Aidan?”
He sucks in a breath and swipes tears from his eyes. “Yeah?”
“If your boyfriend called you a monster and then set your house on fire while you were sleeping in it, that’s not something you’d be able to just put behind you, right?”
His jaw drops open, and he blinks at me a few times. “Ah… no. No, that’s the kind of thing that sticks with you.”
There. See? Sam’s just suffering from in-love-itis, a condition whereby people who are in love believe everyone else in the world should be too. My desire to avoid feelings is perfectly rational.
“That’s what I thought,” I say with a nod. “Goodnight.”
I’ve made it up only two steps before he adds, “I’d be thanking the universe every day for that wake-up call.”
Wait… what?
I turn around. “What do you mean?”
He shrugs, his attention mostly back on his laptop.
“Well, once the initial pain of having someone you love reject you and try to kill you began to fade, you’d realize it could have been worse.
You could have continued thinking you were in a happy relationship with someone who has the emotional capacity to set you on fire in your sleep.
Who knows what might have eventually happened?
A knife through the heart? We have more chance of survival against fire. ”
He’s right, but… what?
I retrace my steps back to the ground floor. “Are you saying you’d be relieved?”
“Not at first, of course. I’d be devastated. But eventually, yeah. Relieved seems about right. Angry, too, but that would probably fade with the pain. Is this a case you worked on?”
There are so many thoughts screaming for attention, I barely hear the question. “Uh, yeah. Something like that.”
“Was the victim badly wounded?”
I shake my head, partly in answer and partly to clear it. “No. Very minor smoke inhalation is all. But he, uh, he’s been put off relationships.”
Aidan tears his gaze away from the screen.
“Well, yeah. I can see why that would happen. And he’s allowed to, I don’t know, wallow in his pain for a while.
But when that starts to fade, he’ll probably forget he took a vow of chastity or whatever and get back to life. Wiser for the experience, definitely.”
I try not to wince at his use of “wallow,” supremely conscious of the box of Pop-Tarts in my hand. “So you don’t think he’d be justified to hold on to his… reluctance to get involved again? Romantically, I mean.”
He sighs and tips his head back, staring at the ceiling for a minute.
“I don’t know,” he says finally. “It’s a tough call without knowing anything else about the relationship.
Maybe the fire was just the last in a long line of abuse.
Maybe your victim is deeply damaged by what happened.
But our brains are pretty good at dealing with trauma overall, and I think giving up on the idea of a romantic relationship forever because of one bad—admittedly, horrific—experience is a pretty drastic step to take.
It would be like… well, okay, Sam’s first shift was compelled, right?
That’s awful. If we’d had another safe option, there’s no way in existence I would have suggested a compelled first shift.
Sam’s first experience of his shifter side was painful and left him paranoid after.
How easy would it have been for Sam to decide that shifting is just not worth the potential risks? ”
“But those risks only exist for a compelled shift, not a natural one,” I point out.
“Yeah,” he says, smiling, “and the risk of your boyfriend setting fire to your house doesn’t exist in every relationship. In fact, my guess is that it’s a pretty low statistic.”
I huff a laugh. “Probably. Anyway… I don’t know why I was even thinking about it.”
“Like we said, stuff like that sticks with you, even if it doesn’t affect you directly. I’ll probably be thinking about it on and off now that I know. And I bet that’s even more the case for someone like you.”
Uhhhh….
“Someone like me?”
He closes his laptop and gets up off the stool. “Sure. You said before that you like to sulk. If this isn’t something to sulk over, what is? Even if it did happen to someone else, your brain likely just can’t let it go.”
I look down at my body to make sure there isn’t actually a giant boulder caving in my chest.
“Uh… yeah,” I manage. “I’ve… uh, I guess I am kind of obsessing over it.” I turn and race up the stairs before he can say anything else, leaving him to turn off the lights before he comes up. I need to be safely behind my bedroom door when he does.
Fucking fuck fuck fuck.
I close the door to the bedroom, then for good measure cross the room and go into the bathroom and close that door too. Then I toss the box of Pop-Tarts on the counter and stare at myself in the mirror.
Is that really it? Am I such a… Am I the kind of person who decides to cut a whole element of my life out for a hundred and fifty years because I’m sulking ? Am I wallowing and vowing to be single forever because I’m too scared to take a chance?
I rip open the box of Pop-Tarts.