Chapter Sixteen
I TOLD SIX different people it was nothing, and by the time I got to my own room I was almost starting to believe myself.
That’s the trick, I guess. Say something enough times and eventually it starts sounding like a fact.
It was nothing. I said it to Brenda in the car with her hand on my knee until we got home.
I said it to Fiona, who didn’t believe me but was nice enough not to say so.
I said it to Lucy, who absolutely did say so, and then three different people between the clubhouse door and my room who’d apparently gotten the memo that I’d lost my mind in a parking garage.
By number six, nothing was starting to sound pretty convincing.
I didn’t say it to Rune. I hadn’t said one word to Rune since the floor of that garage, since I’d pulled my hand off his chest and gotten away from him as fast as my legs would work, because there were some things I could lie about and some things were harder when the person had been right there watching.
He’d stayed back on the ride home. Gave me every inch of room I wanted without making me ask.
I got through dinner. Helped Josie clean up because my hands needed something to do besides shake.
I went to my room at ten like a normal person, brushed my teeth like a normal person, put on pajamas, plugged in my phone and did all the stupid little things normal people do before bed when they definitely didn’t see their father standing in a parking garage that afternoon.
Then I got under the covers, turned off the lamp, and told the ceiling one more time that it was nothing.
It was a face in a shadow. That was all.
Some man standing by a pillar in a parking garage, and I’d barely even seen him.
The thing with Tom had already happened, everybody was upset, my heart was going too fast before I ever turned around, and then I saw a jaw I knew.
Maybe shoulders I knew. Maybe the way he held his head.
Or maybe I didn’t.
That was possible.
People look like other people all the time. There were probably ten men in Charleston who looked enough like my father to scare me if I caught them wrong in the shadows. A hundred, maybe. And my brain knew his face better than it knew almost anything. Of course it could find him where he wasn’t.
It was nothing.
Twenty minutes later I was asleep, and the nothing came for me.
* * *
The dream is always the same, and I don’t go over it in the daytime. I’ve learned not to.
It’s always the hallway. It’s always the sound of him before the sight of him, that particular weight on that particular board, and in the dream I’m small again and the door doesn’t lock and my body won’t do anything but the one thing it learned, shut up, pretend, go away inside myself until it’s over.
I never fight, in the dream. Not once, in nineteen years of it.
That’s the part that makes me hate myself when I wake up, and I know it isn’t fair, I know all the things people say about freezing, know your body does what it has to do when it thinks there’s no way out, and I know I was a kid.
Knowing has never once helped me at three in the morning.
Tonight it was worse, because tonight he had the garage in it. Tonight the hallway ran out onto concrete and pillars and my own car, and he was standing at the end of it in the shadow, and he saw me. He knew me. And his face started doing the thing his face does right before —
I came up out of it like a drowning.
That’s the only word for it. Not woke. Drowning people don’t wake, they break surface, they come up clawing.
I woke up sitting straight up in bed.
For a second I didn’t know where I was. My hands were out in front of me like I was trying to keep somebody away, my heart was beating so hard it hurt, and I couldn’t get enough air no matter how fast I tried.
My shirt stuck to my back. The sheets were wet.
There was some awful sound coming out of me, and I slapped both hands over my mouth before anybody could hear it.
The walls in this place are thin. Brenda is three doors away and I couldn’t have her running in here. She loved me. That was the problem. She’d come. She’d sit on the end of the bed and hold me, tell me I was safe, and I would feel nine years old all over again.
So I didn’t make a sound.
I sat there in the dark until the shaking got smaller and my breathing stopped sounding like I’d run somewhere. Nobody knocked. No doors opened down the hall.
I’d gotten away with it.
Then I turned on the lamp, because I was nineteen years old and apparently still needed one on after a nightmare, I sat with my back against the headboard with my knees pulled up until the room started looking like my room again.
I knew I wasn’t going back to sleep. I’d done this before. Wait for the sun. Get dressed. Pretend it didn’t happen.
Except this time, sitting there with the lamp on and my heart finally slowing down, I thought about the cabin.
* * *
Here’s what I know. Here’s the thing I’ve been working all day not to know.
There is exactly one thing on this earth that has ever gotten me through a stretch like this.
Not a pill. I’ve tried the pills, they put you under and lock the door behind you and you dream anyway, only now you can’t get out.
Not Brenda, because Brenda loves me too much and that’s its own problem; she worries and hovers and gets that look on her face like she’d fight my childhood with her bare hands if somebody would just point her at it, and then I end up worrying about her worrying about me.
Not Sawyer, who’s across a river and can’t ever know, because there’s a version of me that he has never met and I would like to keep it that way.
It’s him.
It’s been him since my first month here, when I was so far gone I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep and flinched off every man who came within ten feet of me, except, for reasons I have never once been able to explain to myself, the biker with the dirt under his nails.
He never made me talk about it. He never asked me what I dreamed or who did what or how bad it got.
He just turned up with something warm, and then he’d sit down outside my door with his back against the wall, close enough that I could hear him breathing through the wood, far enough that I never once felt cornered, and he’d stay.
Sometimes an hour. Sometimes all night. And I’d lie there on the other side of that door, put my breathing on top of a sound I could barely hear, and I would go to sleep.
Actually sleep. Because some old, wordless thing in me had decided that as long as that particular man was sitting between me and the hallway, the hallway couldn’t get in.
That’s all he ever did. Sat on a floor and breathed.
It worked every single time.
And this afternoon, on the concrete, scared and shaking with people standing around us, he put my hand flat on his chest and did the same thing he’s always done, and it worked. Right there in front of everybody, my body begged for him so fast I was ashamed of how badly I’d needed it.
So now I’m sitting up in a soaked bed at two in the morning with my heart still going, and I know, the way you know your own name, that if I got up and went out the back, down the path through the pines and knocked on that cabin door, he’d open it.
He wouldn’t ask me one question. He’d put the kettle on and he’d sit down on the floor.
And I would sleep.
God. I want to sleep.
* * *
I didn’t go.
It wasn’t pride. Or it wasn’t just pride. I had the rest of the night to sit there and come up with reasons, and some of them were even good ones.
If I went out there, I was that girl again.
The one Brenda found on the street. The one who couldn’t sleep and barely ate and made everybody lower their voices when they talked to her like one wrong word might send her running.
I’d worked really hard not to be that girl anymore.
I crossed the river by myself every morning.
I went to college. I knew answers in rooms full of three hundred people.
Yesterday I’d put myself between Brenda and a federal agent before I even thought about being scared.
I liked that Amy.
I wanted to keep her.
And that Amy did not sneak through the woods at two in the morning to knock on the door of a man who’d put another woman on his arm and made damn sure she saw it, just so she could ask him to sit outside a door and help her sleep.
That’s the first reason, and it’s a good one.
Reason number two was worse.
I wanted to go.
Bad.
I’d wanted to go before I even admitted to myself that the cabin was what I was thinking about, and once I did admit it, every part of me seemed to know exactly how far it was from my bed to his door. Down the hall. Out the back. Across the yard. Through the pines.
I could’ve been there in five minutes, and that was the problem.
Because maybe the nightmare wasn’t the reason at all.
Maybe it was just the world’s shittiest permission slip.
Maybe some stupid part of me had spent months waiting for one good enough excuse to go back to Rune, and tonight my own screwed-up head had finally handed me one.
I couldn’t do that, because if I went, I’d never know which Amy had gotten me out of that bed, the one who was scared and needed him, or the one who still wanted him after everything he’d done.
And God, I still wanted him.
There. Fine. I said it. To myself, in a bedroom, with nobody around to hear it, which barely counted, but still.
I wanted Rune.
I wanted the cabin, the garden and his stupid tea. I wanted that soothing voice telling me to breathe. I wanted to put my hand back on his chest, feel it move under my palm, and that thought got shut down so fast I nearly gave myself whiplash.
None of it mattered.
He chose somebody else.
That happened. That is still true tonight, it’ll be true in the morning, it’ll be true next week, and there is no amount of a man kneeling on a garage floor being the only thing on earth that can reach me that changes one single fact of it.
So I sat up with the lamp on until I saw dawn outside my window. Then I got up, showered, put on the good jacket, drew the line on my eyes sure as a surgeon, and I went out, got into a car Gearhead had fixed, and I drove to school with a man on a motorcycle behind me all the way.
I didn’t turn my head. Not one time.
And I didn’t go to him.