Chapter 32
CHAPTER
THIRTY-TWO
ASPEN
A crash rips me from a dead sleep.
My heart pounds in my ears as I peer through the darkness of my bedroom, trying to figure out what happened. It takes me a moment to remember I’m not alone—to remember the arms wrapped around my waist when I fell asleep.
That’s when I see it: the empty space beside me. The sheets are twisted and half-hanging off the mattress, and my lamp is on the floor.
I follow the trail of tangled cotton over the edge of the bed, and what I see cracks my chest wide open.
Emmett is sprawled on the floor on his back.
His head jerks side to side, movements sharp and frantic.
As my eyes adjust, each detail wrecks me more than the last. Sweat dampens his hair against his forehead, and he’s still only wearing the boxer briefs he slipped back on after our shower.
His legs kick against the hardwood, sheets tangled around them, the most anguished sounds spilling from his mouth.
I sink to the floor, giving him a wide berth and pressing myself to the wall beside him. When he lets out another garbled cry, the blood in my veins turns to ice.
He can’t see me. He can’t see this room. He’s most likely reliving the worst moment of his life, and he can’t escape.
Every instinct I have begs me to touch him, but I know that can make things worse. The longer I watch him suffer, though, the tighter my throat grows.
His fingers claw at the hardwood, and a deep cough chokes him before his whole body goes rigid, then curls, like he’s bracing for impact. I sit frozen beside him as he shudders and gasps for air.
I wipe at my face, finding hot tears that I didn’t realize had started flowing.
It feels like it goes on for hours.
Then slowly, his muscles uncoil, and his breathing shifts. His lashes flutter—the frantic edge softens little by little, confusion slowly replacing terror.
I edge closer, watching his throat bob as he swallows thickly, then he clears his throat, like the imaginary smoke is clinging there.
“Emmett?” I whisper into the darkness.
“Aspen?” he croaks uncertainly.
“I’m here.” I rush to his side, pushing the hair from his forehead. “Right here.”
He lifts to his elbows, chest heaving. His gaze skips around the room before finally landing on me. Relief hits his face so hard his shoulders sag.
His voice shakes. “Shit. Your lamp. I’m sorry.”
I shake my head. “It’s okay. It was ugly anyway”
His breath shudders out of him as he drags a trembling hand through his hair. His eyes are still wild as he takes in reality inch by inch.
“Can I touch you?” I ask.
He swallows, wrestling with it.
“Please,” I say. I need the comfort of his skin as much as I want to give it to him.
When he finally reaches for me, it’s tentative. “Did I hurt you?”
“No.” I don’t waste a second crawling into his lap pressing my palms to his face. “Are you hurt? Your burn or ribs?”
He pauses for a second, assessing. “No. I think—I think I’m okay.”
And then he folds around me, pulling me close, breath trembling against my skin.
Nothing about this is okay. I’m not okay, and he’s certainly not okay. He’s hurting, and I don’t think there’s anything I can do except be here.
“Do you remember the nightmare?”
He shakes his head. “Sometimes I do. There are nights where it’s so vivid I can still smell the smoke when I wake, and there are others when it’s completely blank after—a black hole, but the feeling is still there. Tonight, it’s the latter.”
“Rory?”
His jaw ticks. “Yeah.” His throat bobs. “Last time, it was you.”
My chest caves in a little.
I’ve seen PTSD before. Patients. Coworkers. Flight crews who carried terrible things home with them. But seeing it like this—seeing what it does to him—is something else entirely.
He lives with this. Sleeps with it. Carries it everywhere he goes.
And I don’t think he wants help nearly as much as he thinks he deserves the punishment.
“Have you ever really talked to someone about it?” I ask softly.
“Sure.” He won’t look at me. He’s curled up, but his head is buried in my chest. “Lots of people.”
“Recently.”
“No.” For a beat, it’s all I think he’s going to offer—there’s acceptance and finality in the word—but then he starts again, sounding hollow. “It’s never helped before.”
“Maybe you weren’t ready before.”
His laugh is wet against my shirt. “Ready for what?”
“To accept the help. To recover.”
His lips press together, and he shakes his head sharply. “I don’t deserve to forgive myself.”
PTSD recovery happens on its own timeline, and only when the person suffering wants help badly enough to fight for it.
But curled against me on the floor, Emmett doesn’t look like a man fighting to heal. He looks like a man serving a sentence.
My chest aches so sharply I can barely breathe around it. Because every warning he’s given me suddenly feels terrifyingly real.
Not about leaving. Not about time.
About the fact that somewhere deep down, Emmett doesn’t believe he deserves a future at all. And the worst part is, I already know walking away isn’t an option for me anymore.
“I don’t have much of a choice this time,” he mumbles, lifting his head just enough for me to see the torture in his eyes.
Lost, I stroke his cheek, waiting to see what he offers.
He swallows thickly and looks away. “My superintendent has made therapy a condition of my return to work.”
The confession cuts deeper than it should.
He doesn’t owe me complete transparency, but I should’ve known this ran deeper than he’d shown me. Emmett’s past is something that still owns pieces of him.
Everyone around him can see that Emmett needs support to deal with this, but it’s plain as day how much the idea of talking to someone distresses him.
“What do you need right now?”
He doesn’t meet my eyes. “I should probably head up to the loft. I won’t fall back asleep, and I don’t want to keep you up.”
Taking his chin between my fingers, I dip my head, forcing him to see me. “Leaving guarantees I stay up worrying. So if it’s me you’re concerned about . . . stay.”
His teeth roll over his lips, and I can see him stacking his bricks back up, so I add. “If you need to leave, leave for you. If you need the space to process, I won’t stop you, but if you’re using me as an excuse. Don’t.”
Something in him unlocks at that. His shoulders sag and his muscles relax under my touch.
The truth of it is, I’m not sure I’ll be able to go back to sleep after seeing him like that either. But if he stays and I know he’s okay—or as okay as one can be after something like that—maybe I’ll at least rest.
His grip on me shifts, and he stands, moving us both back to the bed and settling me against his chest.
“For a guy who prides himself on being alone, you excel in the big spoon position,” I say, a little unsure of where to go from here.
His chest rumbles against my back in what feels like a laugh, even if there’s no sound to accompany it.
“Only with you.” His voice sounds distant, like part of him is still trapped by the past.
The silence stretches between us, heavy with everything he just showed me. I don’t know where to go from here, only that he feels fragile in my arms in a way I’ve never experienced before.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.” It’s just as hollow.
“You don’t have to answer . . . I know you said you don’t remember . . .” I let my voice trail off and try to turn in his hold, but his grip tightens on me.
Not facing this conversation head-on, I guess.
That he’s willing to have it at all feels like progress, so I still lift my hand and snake it behind me to grip the back of his neck. “You said last time it was about me? Do you remember that one?”
He tenses behind me, and I sink my fingers into the hair at the base of his skull, pulling myself closer, letting him feel that I’m right here.
“Every fucking second.”
The way he grits it out is like a hot poker across exposed nerves. I don’t even know where the pain comes from, but it consumes me. Hearing the words from his mouth, seeing these moments of vulnerability from him just a few times—they’re snapshots of the agony he lives with every day.
“Will you tell me?”
“There was a fire in the house, you were trapped, and I went in to save you, but I couldn’t find you in time. I couldn’t save you either.”
I don’t have to ask who else he couldn’t save. Rory—his loudest ghost, a failure that haunts him. But I don’t dare ask about her or that night, not right now, when my grip on him feels so tenuous.
“I’m right here.” I rake my fingernails through his hair, letting him feel it.
His hand snakes tighter around my waist, like he feels the threat of me slipping away the same way I felt him trying to resurrect his walls moments ago.
“She looked like you,” I murmur, remembering the picture he keeps in his wallet.
“A little,” he agrees.
“Same wavy hair.” My fingers sift through his locks, and this time, when I turn, he lets me. “Same crooked smile.”
The corner of his mouth kicks up, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. “She smiled that way to hide her braces. God, she fucking hated those things.”
“Her eyes were different.”
“Her eyes were a fucking menace.” This time, a sliver of light returns to them. “Got her whatever the hell she wanted. Or maybe that was just existing.” There’s no jealousy or malice in his tone.
“My grandparents tried for years to have kids,” he says quietly. “My grandma had endometriosis. Finding out she was pregnant with Rory years after they’d given up was a shock.”
His mouth softens around her name. “Grandma called her their miracle baby.”
“Sounds like she was loved.”
“God, yeah.” A faint huff leaves him. “She could get away with anything. Smart mouth. Big eyes. Everyone in that house revolved around her.”
There’s warmth there now, threading through the grief.
“I’d never seen people love each other like that before I met them.
” His hand tightens against my waist. “It fucked me up for a while. I was angry I’d been kept away from them.
Angry I didn’t get that from the start.” His jaw flexes.
“And part of me was glad my parents were gone because it meant I finally had them. That really messed with my head.”
My chest aches. “You were a kid, Emmett, and you’d lived through horrific things. I think people would’ve been more worried if you hadn’t come out of it confused and angry.”
His shoulders lift slightly, like he doesn’t fully believe me but doesn’t have the energy to argue.
“Did you talk to anyone back then? After placement?”
“Yeah,” he scoffs. “Every week for six months.”
His entire mood shifts in an instant. Every muscle coils like he’s bracing for impact. I run my fingers over his jaw, and it twitches beneath them.
“Maybe if I’d listened to her, things would have ended up different.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, afraid I’m not going to like the answer.
“My grandparents pulled me after I broke down one night before a session, begging them not to make me go.” He paused, then continued.
“She thought kids from homes like mine were ticking time bombs if they didn’t get help early.
Every session turned into picking apart my behavior, looking for signs something was wrong with me.
Like everyone was waiting for me to turn dangerous. ”
Anger flashes through me so fast it makes me dizzy.
He was just a kid. No, worse, he was a grieving kid who’d had his entire world flipped on end at no fault of his own, and this shitty therapist made him feel worse.
I want to seek her out and do . . . I don’t know what.
I want to make her look me in the eyes as I tell her what a terrible person she is.
And then I want to make sure she’s not practicing anymore.
“Tell me your grandparents reported her.”
“I begged them not to.”
“Why?”
“I was afraid that I’d get removed from their house somehow and placed in foster care as retaliation.”
Oh.
My eyes sting, and fight back my own emotions, but I can’t imagine. He went through so much trauma so early in life, and to have that weaponized by the person who was supposed to help him sort through his feelings . . . it’s no wonder he’s not eager to go back.
“But I’m pretty sure they did.”
“They found me another therapist after Rory’s death, but I never trusted him enough to talk.
Most of my sessions were complete silence.
Eventually, I told my grandparents to stop wasting their money.
They weren’t happy, but by that point everyone was tired and things were tight. So they didn’t fight me on it.”
“Are you going to find one now? If it’s a requirement to go back to work.”
“Fighting fires is all I know. It’s the only thing I’m good at,” he says, completely resigned. That only makes my hatred for his past therapist burn hotter. She’s, at a minimum, part of the reason he won’t get the help he needs now.