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I should never have pushed so hard on Charlotte that day.
I should never have just given up and let her run away.
I could have saved her, but I could never have imagined the repercussions of my inaction until it was all over.
“Breathe,” Kylie whispered as she stroked the hair at the nape of my neck. “Just breathe, Dylan. Everything will be okay.”
Fuck!She had no idea how much I wanted to believe her.
I didn’t want to have these dreams anymore.
I didn’t want to remember.
I didn’t want the guilt of knowing if things had gone differently, Charlotte wouldn’t be dead.
I didn’t want to keep reliving the same five or ten seconds that had happened over two years ago, over and over again.
I definitely didn’t want to worry about closing my eyes again at night, because I didn’t want to have this damn nightmare anymore.
“Everything was getting better because of my treatment,” I told Kylie, my voice raspy and desperate. “I stopped seeing the same damn horror scene over and over, all day, every day. I haven’t had that dream for several weeks. Why. Fucking. Now.”
“Breathe,” she said a little more firmly. “Slow and deep until you clear your head. Focus on just your breath.”
She took my hand and put it on her belly, signaling that she wanted me to follow her own breaths as she kept on belly breathing deeply and melted into me.
For some strange reason, the pattern of how the air moved in and out of my body did start to mimic hers.
Like I needed something to hang on to, I pressed my hand gently into her abdomen and silently began breathing at the same tempo as the gentle rise and fall of her stomach.
In.
Out.
In.
Out.
All I focused on was the rhythm of those slow, deep breaths, and eventually, my mind cleared, and those images faded away.
All I felt was Kylie.
“Feeling better?” she questioned after a minute or two.
“Yes,” I grumbled as I took my hand from her stomach and buried it into her hair. “But don’t move.”
The feel of her soft, warm body against mine was the only thing that was keeping me sane at the moment. I was drowning in the faint, alluring floral scent of her hair, and I wasn’t about to give up the only thing I needed right now, which was this. Her. The rightness of the two of us in exactly this position.
“I’m not going anywhere,” she said in a soothing voice. “You said you dream about the same day over and over. What happened? Why is one day so significant to you?”
My first instinct was to ignore her question because that was what I always did.
I didn’t talk about that day unless I was in a therapy session.
Ever.
But tonight, things were different.
It was Kylie asking, and she was the one person I couldn’t just brush off anymore.
