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“Brace yourself,” he warns me, then presses play. I watch the scene play out before me. It starts with Charlie asleep on the bench. Her knees are pulled to her chest, gun loosely gripped in her right hand, her head on her knees. Within seconds, her head snaps up, scanning the area with unseeing eyes. Her feet drop to the floor. Her shoulders twitch erratically. “She’s only moving her shoulders because she believes her arms are still tied above her head,” Tucker says quietly.
My stomach lurches as I keep watching. Her upper body spasms intensely before her whole body explodes into movement, kicking, thrashing, punching empty space. Tucker adjusts the volume so I can hear her snarled profanities. My chest tightens as she fights to free herself from long-dead assailants. She slides smoothly off the bench into a crouched stance facing the living room, her gun firmly held in both hands as she stares down the barrel. A flash erupts from the muzzle as she fires three times in rapid succession. Her spine stiffens at the noise, and she pants as her head sweeps the room from side to side. “The gunfire usually breaks through her terrors,” he mutters.
I lift my gaze to his troubled blue eyes. “Usually?”
He sighs heavily. “Sometimes we’d have to come over.”
I look back at the screen, envisioning Tucker and Lila entering the home of an armed sharpshooter trapped in the throes of a night terror. “And do what?”
He shakes his head. “We have kevlar vests and helmets. I’d unlock her door and cut the chain with bolt cutters.”
“And go inside? With her like that?” Jesus. Talk about a recipe for disaster.
He shakes his head. “We’d stand on either side of her front door and talk to her from outside until she knew where she was. Then Lila would calm her down.”
I close my eyes. I never knew. I was half a world away, with my best friend reliving brutal horrors night after night, and I never knew.
“I wish you’d told me.” My voice is quiet, but there’s no accusation in my words. “I understand why you didn’t, but I wish I’d known.”
“You couldn’t have helped from where you were, and Charlie needed you to come home alive. She was barely hanging on as it was. Losing you would have destroyed her.”
My eyes return to the screen. Charlie’s sitting on her backside now, knees bent, gun on the floor beside her. She’s still breathing hard, but she’s talking to the camera in the ceiling. The pain in her expression guts me. Tucker closes the program. “You said Lila had flashbacks and night terrors. Does Charlie have flashbacks, too?”
He shakes his head. “Not that I’ve ever seen. And Lila’s were mostly when I would touch her, when I first came home. She hasn’t had them in a while now.”
I draw a slow breath. “So I stay out of reach and talk to her? That’s all I can do?”
Tucker nods. “You’ll feel completely and utterly helpless. Suck it up. It’s not about you. It’s about getting through to Charlie without escalating her fear. Until she realizes where she is and that she’s safe, touching her will only make things worse.”
It’s late when Charlie gets in. I’m prone on the living room floor having “tummy time”, as we now refer to it, stretching and straightening my thigh. I roll to my side and look up when she pauses beside me. “Hey, Baby Girl. How was your evening?”
“Different,” she muses, “but good.”
“You’re smiling.”
“I am. I’m going up to shower and change. Do you need anything before I head upstairs?”
“I’m good, thanks.” I turn onto my stomach again as she jogs upstairs.
When I’m done, I grab a bottle of water and stretch out on the sofa. I can’t erase the images I saw on Tucker’s laptop from my mind. Until I came home, Charlie relived what those bastards did every time she’d close her eyes. Knowing I’m beside her, knowing I’ll protect her with my life, has allowed her to mostly move past that. The magnitude of her trust in me leaves me awed.
I only wish I deserved it.
After several minutes, Charlie comes downstairs and stops in the kitchen. She joins me moments later with iced tea. I’m surprised when she curls against my side and leans her head on my shoulder. “Got a minute?”
I look down at her anxious expression. “What’s up?”
She sits up, then bites her lip. “I need to talk to you about tonight, but I have to back up a couple of days first.”
I nod, curious.
“I told you I’d seen a new therapist. She’s actually an intimacy counselor slash sex therapist. Lila recommended her.”
A sex therapist? That’s the last thing I’d have expected her to say, considering the way she panics around men. Then I recall our discussion last night. “This is the therapist who encouraged you to be open and vulnerable?”
She nods. “Her name is Willow. I made the appointment because –” she falters “– because at the end of my date with Blake, the thought of a goodnight kiss sent me into a full-blown panic, even though he wasn’t even within two feet of me. And I’m tired of freaking out for no reason, so I called her.”
So that’s what was troubling her after her date. I study her face. “What did you think of her?”
