The rest of their evening was spent blissfully lazing around the apartment, eventually throwing together dinner and curling up on the couch afterward to watch a movie. There wasn’t really enough room for two people to lie on the couch together, but they made it work.
After the movie, Willow sent her parents a text to let them know she wouldn’t be home. Influenced by their closeness on the couch, she then took Ethan by the hand and suggested they go to bed a little early. He told her he wasn’t tired yet, and she assured him he would be by the time she was done with him.
Promise fulfilled, they fell asleep together wrapped up in a heap of tangled sheets and each other.
Hours later, Willow’s eyes jerked open to the unfamiliar darkness of Ethan’s bedroom.
There was a leaden weight in her chest, inching down, burrowing into her gut. It felt like a dream, but it was too dark; she slept with a nightlight like a fucking toddler because it still made her nervous to wake to a blanket of darkness—she couldn’t handle the one or two beats while her eyes adjusted and she wasn’t entirely sure she was safe.
Despite the feeling of dread nestled in her gut, she slowly turned her head to the left. Ethan was lying there, sleeping peacefully. Looking beyond him, she saw a window instead of a door with a little line of light streaming in from the hallway.
She was safe.
It had only been a dream.
If only that knowledge magically swept away the unease she woke up with.
For a few minutes she remained still, staring blankly at the ceiling. On one hand, she needed to go back to sleep. Not only because it was still dark out, but because she needed to have a new, better dream to push out the lingering anxiety from the bad one.
On the other hand, she no longer felt tired. What if she went back to sleep and she went right back into that dream? What if she was back in that shitty, cramped bedroom in Chicago? What if she went to work (the logic was twisted in her dream, and she lived at the hell-house while working at the pizza shop whorehouse) or, perhaps even worse, what if seeing Ethan in bed beside her brought him into her dream? It was a coin toss whether he would be a hero or a villain; she would just as soon have him excluded altogether. What if he was the villain, and she couldn’t even stand to look at him or talk to him for the whole day?
She didn’t want him to feel as bad as she did. Especially if it would be reflected in his mood after she was done thinking about it. Experience told her that thinking about it during the day was the surest way to have nightmares when she closed her eyes.
It made her feel somewhat resentful toward her own mind that it would sully her first night back with Ethan that way. What made it worse was knowing exactly what had triggered her memories—and being unable to prevent it from happening again. If she told Ethan she didn’t want to have sex in that position, she knew he’d be fine with it, but he would also know why. Talk about a mood killer.
Physically that position felt good, but not so much emotionally. Not for her. Not with only one memory of ever being in that position before.
Helpless tears sprang to her eyes and her face flushed with impotent anger as she quickly blinked them away. No. She was not going to cry about it.
Sighing irritably, she pushed herself up, moving her legs over the side of the bed and perching there for a moment.
Behind her, she heard Ethan shift, felt him move on the bed. Her bastard brain continued to associate the bed with the filthy mattress from the Chicago house, even though she knew it wasn’t.
“Hey,” Ethan murmured, his voice thick with sleep. “You all right?”
Closing her eyes for a second, she attempted to inject a little more evenness into her tone as she said, “Yep.”
“What are you doing?” Another creak as he moved. “It’s the middle of the night.”
She didn’t want to say. Her brain wasn’t functioning quickly enough to come up with a cover story, and she didn’t want to lie anyway—she just also didn’t want to tell the truth.
Her silence lasted too long.
His voice lower than before, Ethan asked, “Did you have a bad dream?”
It felt like her brain cringed at the question, a grimace touching her face. She was glad she had her back to him.
“Yeah.”
He sighed—an expulsion of breath that communicated his defeat as effectively as the look on his face probably did. Willow’s shoulders tensed.
“You weren’t there,” she added, so he didn’t have to ask. “It was just… the house we were at. The bad guys were there.”
“And I wasn’t?” he asked dryly.
Willow shook her head. “Sometimes you’re there—sometimes you’re the hero.”
Scoffing lightly, he took a few seconds before responding. “I’m definitely not that.”