Chapter 12 #2
“What happened?” The words are out before I can think better of them. I know what happened. I’m no stranger to losing control of time and space, no stranger to slipping into that dark place where our memories live, where he holds my mind and body prisoner.
A cabinet bangs open, the jarring sound causing me to recoil in well-trained fear. From here, I can see bowls and mugs flying and crashing against the wall.
Despite the firm grip on my shoulders, my hold on reality starts to slip again as I become dysregulated. Only one soul would be cruel enough to leverage this trigger. I’m being punished.
It’s effective.
With each piercing splinter of glass, my train of thought fractures until it’s just microscopic pieces I can’t pick up fast enough.
With my breath coming faster and my pulse thrashing against my skin, I’m trapped inside the overstimulating cage of flesh and bone.
The girl within me rattles and shakes, all sense of safety ripped from between my fingers.
Dysregulation is a bitch. I can see it happen in slow motion, forced to watch everything slip away without being able to stop it.
Each time I crawl an inch toward putting myself back together, another ear-splitting sound sends me spiraling back within murky recesses of my mind where I wait for it to stop.
When it does, when the quiet drifts over me like the lap of summer waves on my toes, I settle back into my body inch by inch until I’m aware of every place that Hawthorne and I touch.
Like an apparition, he becomes more solid, more real by the second.
When I reach out and confirm the reality of him, that he’s not just a figment of my imagination I’ve conjured up to keep myself from completely falling apart, I launch myself at him, burying myself deep within his hold.
I hide there until I stop shaking, and he lets me.
“You’re okay, Sol.” Thorne strokes my hair, soothing and without judgment.
But that’s the problem. I don’t get to have that. It takes several seconds to put a leash on the tumultuous emotions rampaging within me before I can respond with anything coherent.
“No, I’m not. Neither are you.” A tsunami of emotion crashes into me. “Do you see now?” I slip from beneath him, needing him to see the destruction I’ve brought into his life. He needs to understand that this is all I have to offer.
So wrapped up in the rolling undertow within me, I don’t realize I’ve walked onto the glass until it’s piercing my skin. Tiny pin pricks of pain that poke holes in the ill-indulged facade. I don’t move. I deserve this. What a fool I’ve been to think anything otherwise. I never fucking learn.
Thorne follows me, struck with confusion as I stand there, sinking into shards.
“What are you doing? You’re going to get hurt.
Come back over here.” When the only answer he gets is a shake of my head as I’m waging a battle with my own tears, he stalks away, coming back with shoes on.
Fine fragments of porcelain grind beneath the soles as he takes determined steps toward me.
I can’t say or do anything, stuck in the looping montage of abuse that’s been triggered by destruction in front of me. It’s by design that Ivan takes me back to these moments where I was my most vulnerable, shell-shocked and cowering in fear, just waiting for the door to come crashing in on me.
And like always, Hawthorne does his best to pull me back.
“Please don’t lock me out.” His voice is gentle.
“Just talk to me.” One hand meets the countertop near my hip as he dips to meet my downcast eyes.
“Is this okay?” he asks tentatively, waiting for my acknowledgement, a shallow nod, before removing the glass pieces from my foot.
“I’m not going to let him do this to you. You don’t deserve to live like this.”
“Of course I do; it’s my fault I’m in this situation.”
Pushing his weight off the counter, he backs up, watching me intently. “Why would you say something like that?”
“Because I brought all of this on us. It’s the only reason he’s part of our lives.”
“Because you made a deal with him to save my life? In what way does that make you deserving of relentless punishment? Make me understand.” His tone is even, but there’s an urgency to each sentence.
Shame and disappointment writhe within me, acidic and gut-churning. “I’m the reason he tried to kill you in the first place…did kill you.”
“What?” The question isn’t accusatory, but it stings all the same.
“My affection for you is why he pulled you across the veil.” I breathe deeply, past my frayed ego, through my despair. “That night wasn’t the first time I’d met him. He—he’d come to me many times before.” My lips are numb with the icy death of this secret. “I’d let him.”
“What are you saying?”
“I invited him in. I’d allowed him access to me.”
“How long?” There are a dozen emotions flickering across his expression. None of them anger, all of them gut-wrenching.
“A little over a year.”
“A year?” He gasps. “You just…what? Let him watch you? Talked to him? What do you mean you let him come to you? I need more.”
Understandable, and yet, stringing together a sentence is like dragging an iron hot rod over my tongue, the words screeching and clawing as they’re pulled from the depths I’ve hidden this ugly truth away in.
“He came to me one night. In your room. While you were sleeping… At first, he wasn’t whole, wasn’t a man.
But he was still something I recognized.
” Now that I’ve started, it flows out of me easier, like a faucet.
“Remember how I’d told you that I’d seen spirits for as long as I could remember? Even as a little girl.”
Confirming with a single nod, Hawthorne doesn’t interrupt my train of thought.
“Some of them appear to me as whole and humanistic; others are simply shadowed energy. Some I can’t even see, just feel.
He started out that way, but that changed little by little.
For a while, it was just that heavy, lingering feeling of being watched.
Eyes tracking and consuming me with interest. I ignored it as best I could, told myself not to be afraid, and convinced myself that it was nothing.
That is, until he became a shadow, then I could see him watching me. ”
“What do you mean watching you?”
“In the doorway, beside the bed, in the corners of dimly lit rooms. He was there. He was always there. But he didn’t try to hurt me.
Didn’t even really do anything to scare me, just took me by surprise.
I told myself it wasn’t his fault that he looked like that.
That there wasn’t any harm in him observing me.
I’d learned by then that ghosts could be very lonely things sometimes.
But I’d never encountered anything like this.
I’d never been the prey of someone like him. ”
Hawthorne reaches for my hand, but I tuck it against me.
“Don’t. Trust me, you won’t want to when you let me finish.” He takes a step closer, and I shrink into myself.
“You still underestimate my love for you?”
“Could you really love someone who’s the source of all your pain and suffering?” I hold up a finger when he attempts to answer the rhetorical question. “You can’t answer that honestly because you don’t have the full story.”
Scrubbing a hand over his face, he takes a few steps back until he’s leaning against the counter. With a wave of his hand, he gives me the floor to finish the story.
“Many nights passed like that, me lying in your bed, him standing in the doorway or the corner. Occasionally, I’d wake to him reaching for me, leaning over me, but still, he hadn’t hurt me.
He hadn’t given me any real reason to fear him.
To me, he was simply a specter, a looming presence.
” A chill skates across my skin, cold as the energy he emanates.
“He followed you?”
Sitting with the question, I reveal another part of the story I hoped to keep vague. “Well, only around your family’s property. He died here.”
“How is that possible? My parents had this house built from the ground up.”
“Not here exactly, but on the land your parents own. His soul is tied to this place,” I clarify.
“But he followed you when you left…”
“I’ll get to that.” He nods, and I continue.
“Day after day, night after night, month after month, he watched. Over that time, he evolved, and soon I could roughly make out features—the type of clothing he wore, the hollowness of his eyes, a recognizable smile. Sometime in the month or so before…everything…he started appearing to me whole, almost human, but not. Still a ghost, but fully formed, his clothes and appearance clear to me for the first time. Then he really didn’t seem so scary.
He just looked like a normal man. And he—” I choke on the admission, surprised at myself at how easily it nearly slipped out.
“He what?” Hawthorne’s knuckles go white with how hard he grips the countertop to hold himself in place.
With a deep breath, he turns from me, and I fear it’s the last thing I’ll see of him.
My world teeters on the edge of a cliff face as I wait for him to tell me to walk out that door and never come back.
I stand at that edge and bare myself to him, the darkest of my secrets, the deepest well of my shame, the weakest part of me.
The truth of which I’ve hid in terror from, convinced it would disgust him, that it would taint his love for me, rot it from the inside out.
“He just wanted to be around me. Just wanted to talk, just wanted to listen. He found me interesting. He told me…he told me I was beautiful. He made me feel wanted.” The last of it crumbles like sand, barely something to hold onto, barely real.
“You were always wanted.” There’s a lancing pain buried in there, one I know well. The pain of not being enough.
“That was before we were together, before I knew how you felt.”