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I can’t let that happen. I won’t.
Anger explodes inside me, and I push to my feet, only to sway all over again. I pause for a moment, regaining my steadiness, and in the process, my anger simmers and burns. Determination explodes inside me, and I launch myself at the door, pounding on it. “I want to talk to West!” I shout. “I want to talk to West! Tell that bastard to face me himself.”
Abruptly, the room goes black, as in pitch black, to the point I’m not able to see my hand in front of my face. The claustrophobia that’s haunted me much of my life, the beast itself with fangs, sinks into me. Panic rises inside me hard and fast, a sense of suffocation overwhelming me. My hands grip my throat, and I fight the fog of the drugs and remind myself what my therapist taught me. Breathe through my reaction. Breathe…
I force air into my lungs, focusing on the process of doing so, not the darkness, then on the thickness of my lungs and the sensation of the tightness in my chest easing. “Damn it,” I murmur, furious at myself for my reaction to what others would process in a calmer way.
I don’t like the darkness.
I hate the darkness.
I have since that night years ago, when I’d ended up locked in Damion’s family’s wine cellar with the lights out and the door locked. Damion and I were down there talking and flirting, when our pizza had arrived. He’d gone upstairs to grab it when the storm battering the house had killed the lights and the electronic door. We should have never been down there in the first place, but our parents were on a date night, and he’d talked me into it. It would be our secret, he’d promised. Damion had tried to free me, but I’d ended up down there for hours, alone, suffocating in pitch black. It had been West Senior who’d called the fire department to get me out.
Afterward, I’d developed this stupid phobia I’ve sworn will never defeat me or own me. It doesn’t own me. Just as Damion’s father doesn’t own me or him.
Of course, he knows damn well I didn’t come out of that wine cellar unscathed, and the idea that I’m weak enough for him to torment me infuriates me. He doesn’t get to hold that kind of power over me. He does not. I clamp down on any reaction that will please that man.
I will not scream.
I will not give him that satisfaction.
My hands flatten on the wall, and I slowly lower myself until I’m kneeling, willing my racing heart to calm. For long seconds, I hold my position, counting: one, two, three, four—another technique I was taught years ago by my therapist. It’s a way to distract myself and control my mind. It’s not actually the darkness that scares me. It’s the way it creates a sense of being in a box that’s unnerving. But the room is not a box. Nothing about darkness has not changed that fact.
With that logical thought, I return to counting, picking up where I left off: five, six, seven…
I rotate my body, settling my back against the wall, and sit down, pulling my knees to my chest and curling my arms around them. The darkness expands around me, suffocating me, and I squeeze my eyes shut, counting again: eight, nine, ten…I get to twenty and chide myself for allowing this weakness to live inside me. It’s stupid. It was just a wine cellar, and nothing happened to me down there. Only my therapist suggested my reaction wasn’t about the place, but rather something going on in my home life at the time. That something was my father disappearing for random periods of time, and despite my mother telling me it was for work reasons, I’d sensed differently.
In my core, I’d known something was wrong at home, but I hadn’t dared speak it out loud, beyond the admissions I’d made to a therapist who’d played tug of war to pull it from me. I hadn’t even told Damion. In truth, I hadn’t wanted anything to disturb the world as it appeared back then, with our two happy families next door to each other. Apparently, trauma and stress can create phobias, and it’s forever irritating that I can’t beat it, at least, not wholly.
My fingers curl into my palms. Pull it together, I scream in my head. I cannot afford to be this weak and survive this. I have to stand up and fight. I will stand up and fight, but as I open my eyes, the darkness swallows me.
And it destroys me.
I’m shaking all over, and I can’t make it stop.
Chapter Fourteen
Damion
The Past—Age Fifteen
While most of my buddies are at some party, chasing a couple of girls from our class, I’m in a better place—weathering a hell of a storm while hanging out with Alana and waiting on a pizza we just ordered. I’m not chasing Alana, and trying to make her mine, but—okay, maybe I secretly am. Whatever, though. No one knows but me and probably her, and tonight our parents are out at some gala that will last until well after midnight, which makes tonight the perfect time to get her to see us as more than friends.
That means loosening her up a bit.
At present, she’s flipping through the TV channels, trying to find us a good movie to watch while I plot the best moment to kiss her. I catch her hand and motion toward the hallway. “Come on. I want to show you something.” I tug her to her feet.
She laughs one of her sweet as sin laughs and jokes, “Oh no. Do I want to know what?”
“I thought you wanted to know all my deep, dark secrets,” I tease.
“I do not remember ever saying that.”
“Well, maybe I want you to,” I counter, a flirty reply that I favor with Alana, therefore, it’s no telltale sign to her that I’m about to make a move. We flirt. And then she cockblocks me, and while I know why—she doesn’t want to lose our friendship—it’s fucking killing me. Her sweet-smelling floral perfume dances in the air and tickles my nose. It might as well be her hand on my cock, I’m so fucking hard. I want to pull her into the closet, repeat our childhood, and kiss her again, but I won’t just yet. I’m a gentleman, at least where Alana’s concerned.
I’ll ask her before I kiss her again.
I lead her down the hallway to the basement door and punch in the door code. Her pretty blue eyes go wide when she realizes what I’ve just done. “I thought you weren’t allowed to go down there?”
