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She smiles faintly. “You get comfortable. I’ll get the drinks.” She opens the fridge. “Water, beer, or soda?”
“Water’s fine.”
She pulls out two bottles and passes one to me, then clambers onto the bed. We sit side by side against the headboard. She’s agreed to talk, but she doesn’t speak, so I break the silence. “How about I start by telling you what I know, and you can fill in the gaps?”
She nods.
“You have night terrors. Sometimes when you go to sleep, you get trapped in your past and have trouble waking up. When you do, it takes time to reorient yourself, and in that period when you’re not fully aware of your surroundings, you’ve been known to fire your handgun, and that happened tonight.” I glance down. “How am I doing?”
“Accurate, but understated. It’s not just ‘sometimes’ anymore.”
“How often does it happen?”
She drops her head, her posture ringing with defeat. “Every night.”
Shit.
I slide my arm around her bony shoulders, troubled by her too-thin frame. She nestles closer into my side, her head against my shoulder.
“Tell me about your gun.”
She doesn’t lift her head. “Taurus nine mil, fifteen in the clip and one in the chamber.” She pauses. “I guess it’s thirteen in the clip and one in the chamber now.”
I nudge the side of her head with my chin. “Not what I meant.”
She glances up. “What did you mean?”
“As soon as we walked in the house, you got your gun. Do you always carry it?”
She nods. “I have my concealed carry permit.”
I smile. “I’m not talking about when you’re in public with strangers. I meant the rest of the time, when you’re somewhere you’re comfortable being. Do you always keep your gun on you?”
She nods. “It stays in my desk at work, but aside from that, I’m virtually always armed.” She lifts the hem of her tee shirt, revealing a soft spandex holster, though it’s currently empty. “But I’m never comfortable, no matter where I am.”
Even awake, she’s held captive by her past.
“Do you sleep with your gun?”
She falters. “That’s complicated.”
I smile, trying to inject a bit of levity. “It’s a yes or no question.”
“I don’t sleep much. I can’t. I have to monitor the entrances.”
Tucker was right. She’s hypervigilant.
My voice is intentionally gentle. “Why?”
She swallows hard and looks down at her hands, shifting her golden brown hair forward to hide her face. “I can’t be a victim again, Mark. I won’t. Not ever again.”
Her anguish washes over me, a tidal wave of fear and hurt and anger. “So you don’t sleep in your room.”
“No. I stay on the bench outside your door. I can see where the back door leads into the kitchen from the opening in the living room, and I can see the hallway where someone would approach if they came in through the sliding glass doors. I can also watch the front door and the opening of the clinic hallway, all from that spot. I spend every night there, but I rarely get more than a couple hours of sleep, and –” she hesitates “– and if I do, it’s fragmented. I wake up a lot to check and make sure no one snuck in when I dozed off.”
Damn.
Charlie can’t escape her fear, so she’s always on alert, prepared to fight.
