“You need to sleep, baby.”
“Stay,” she says again. “Can’t sleep.”
Her words are patently untrue, considering she’s sleeping right now. But there’s something about the way she says them—even when she’s mostly asleep—that gets to me. That reaches inside of me and tugs on my own issues before I can even begin to brace for it.
I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since the afternoon I was kidnapped. And I’ve pretty much given up on the idea of ever having one again.
But the idea of Lola suffering as I do bothers me more than I care to admit. It bothers me so much that, after I slip her shoes off and pull the covers over her, I find myself sitting on the edge of her bed, stroking her hair and whispering to her, though I’m really just making sounds instead of actual words.
She curls into me almost as soon as I sit down, one arm over my lap and her body curved around my hips. “Stay,” she says again, and though I know I shouldn’t, I can’t fight her. Not now when my resistance to her is so incredibly low.
After sending a quick text to my detail, I stretch out beside her, pulling the covers around us and sliding my arm beneath her head so she can use my bicep as a pillow. It’s just for a minute, I tell myself as she burrows close. But even as I try to fight it, her warmth sinks into me, burrowing inside of me and taking away the cold for the first time in way too long.
I take a deep breath and hold her even tighter. Just for another minute, I promise myself. Maybe two. Five minutes won’t hurt anyone—not Lola, who is back to being out like a light, and not me. And if I’m wrong, well, that’s okay too, because the only one I’ll hurt is myself…and that’s something I’ve been doing for a long time now. Something it feels like I’ve been doing forever.
* * *
—
The nightmare comes like it always does—in the quiet, in the dark, when I’m most alone and most vulnerable. There is no rhyme to the dream, no reason, no one thing I can point to and say, that’s it! That’s why I’m having this dream. That’s why I’m so damn afraid. There’s no image from my childhood, or even my captivity, manufactured by my brain to terrorize and hurt me.
But the dream does just that anyway. Dark and silent and empty, so empty, it looms in my brain, an open cavern just waiting for me to slip in, to slip down and down and down, until I hit the bottom.
It’s not a metaphor, I tell myself as I struggle to pull myself out of it. Any more than it’s real. I’ve clawed myself back from the edge, clawed my way up from the bottom, and I’m not sliding back again. Not now. Not ever.
And still the chasm yawns in front of me. Still I feel myself moving toward it, one slippery toehold at a time.
Michael tells me not to fight the dreams, to just go with them. But he’s not the one about to be sucked into the abyss. And he’s not the one who has to try to function with whatever he finds there. Sweat blooms on my brow and pours down my face. I want to yell, to tell myself again that this isn’t real. To say it over and over and over again, until it’s true. Or until I finally believe it, whichever comes first.
I’m getting closer to the darkness, closer to the emptiness, and I decide to take Michael’s advice this time. I give up trying to fight it. Instead I let it pull me forward, faster and faster, until I’m standing right in the middle of the darkness. Only then, as the horrors of the past nip at my heels and the blank emptiness of the future looms large and overwhelming, do I finally find the strength to do what must be done. The strength to do the only thing left for me.
I open my eyes…and find Lola staring down at me, crazy corkscrew curls falling half over her face as she watches me with obvious trepidation and concern.
Fuck.
I drape an arm over my eyes in a belated effort to hide myself from her as I try to get my shit together.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
“I’m okay,” I tell her a few seconds later, after I’ve shoved as much as I can back inside of me. To prove it, I shove my hair back from my face. Fake a smile I’m far from feeling.
Lola doesn’t answer, just continues watching me with too much compassion in those beautiful eyes of hers. Somehow it makes everything worse, as does the knowledge that I have totally overstayed my welcome.
I push up on my elbow, trying to get a look at the old-fashioned alarm clock on the dresser so I can figure out just how long we’ve been asleep…and just how long I’ve left my detail sitting outside, waiting for me.
I get a quick glimpse of the clock—it’s eleven thirty—but before I can move to shrug the covers off, Lola is leaning forward. Cupping my cheek with her hand. Pressing her lips to mine.
It’s not our first kiss, but it’s the first kiss we’ve shared that feels like this. Soft and sweet, and so much more than the heat from earlier. Which is ridiculous, I know. We barely know each other, no matter what it feels like in the dark.
As her lips move against mine—slowly, tenderly—I feel the tension inside me drain away. Feel the heaviness I’ve carried for months now lighten, just a little. I don’t know why, when she isn’t the first woman I’ve been with since the kidnapping. But maybe the why isn’t important. Maybe all that matters is that Lola feels good. So good. And as she scoots closer to me, as she wraps her arms around my neck and presses her breasts against my chest, I feel good too.
It starts with her whimper when I slip my tongue along the seam of her lips. Continues with the small gasp she gives as her fingers dig into my skin. And when she parts her lips for me, sliding her tongue along my own, the journey is complete. I close my eyes and sink slowly, inexorably, into the oblivion she provides.
Rolling onto my back, I pull her over me so that her glorious legs are straddling my hips, her sex nestled against my cock. She’s warm and soft and sweet, so sweet, as I wrap my hand around the back of her neck and pull her mouth back down to mine.
She comes willingly, her fingers sliding up my chest to tangle in my hair as I pull her lower lip between my teeth and nibble at it.
“Garrett.” My name is more feeling than sound, an echo that moves from Lola’s mouth to mine as I slip my tongue inside of her, as I delve deeper, as desperate to explore the recesses of her mouth as I am to explore her body.