Page 17 of The Rut in the Road

“Unless you don’t want me to…” He’d stopped moving around.

“I do,” I answered quickly. “I just… feel bad.”

“Well, don’t,” he replied, the sounds of activity resuming. “I always sleep better with you than without you.”

I couldn’t help a small smile—not that he could see it—even though I still felt guilty that he was about to get in his car and drive all the way to my apartment just because I’d had a bad dream. “Okay,” I said, since it seemed like I was supposed to saysomethingand I had no idea what.

“I’ll be there soon,” he told me, then hung up.

I pushed myself up off the mattress and shuffled to the bathroom, then, when I finished, out into the main room to wait for Raj’s text telling me he’d arrived. I was tired, worried about Garraway, and just generally unsettled by the dream, and I kept shivering as I waited, even though it wasn’t particularly cold.

When my phone buzzed, telling me he was downstairs, I let him in, then waited next to the cracked apartment door for him to appear.

He immediately pulled me against him as soon as the door was closed and he’d dropped the small duffel bag he sometimes brought with him. A toothbrush and a change of clothes. He was wearing a t-shirt and a pair of sweatpants—clothes I knew he never wore outside. I wondered if that’s what he wore to bed in his own house, or if he’d put them on because that’s what he’d worn here the last time he’d stayed the night, although then the sweatpants had been mine.

I relaxed into the warmth of his big body, although a shiver ran through me even with his arms around me.

“You should have put on a sweatshirt,” he said softly.

“It’s not that kind of cold,” I said.

Even though I couldn’t see his face, I knew he was probably frowning. “What do you mean, not that kind of cold?”

I leaned even more heavily into him, not that it mattered. He had several inches and a good forty or more pounds on me, all of it muscle. “I don’t know,” I admitted. “Psychically cold? Psychologically cold?”

His arms tightened. “Was that—” He hesitated.

“Was it what?” I asked.

He drew in a long, slow breath. “Was that what it was like?” he asked softly. “At Tranquil Brook?”

“Garraway wasn’t there,” I replied.

“But the straps and the bed?” he asked, and there was a current of something in his voice I didn’t recognize.

“Yes,” I answered honestly. I know that sometimes you aren’t supposed to answer people honestly, but I often can’t tell when those times are. I also figured that lying to the man I was dating probably wasn’t a good foundation for a relationship. There were things I knew he didn’t tell me—and there were probably thingsI didn’t know that I should have been telling him. But that felt different than actually lying, even if social propriety thought that I should have.

His arms tightened around me. “Jesus,” he breathed. “How do you get over something like that?”

I sighed into the warmth of his shoulder. “According to my psychiatrist, you don’t,” I replied. “But you learn to live with it.”

“This is Dr. Nowse?”

“Yes.” I was supposed to see him at least once a month. I usually did. He’d been extremely concerned about how my kidnapping would impact what he called mylong-term recovery. I wasn’t. Maybe I should have been, but, to me, it felt like just more of the same. The same derision of what I was, the same dismissal of my worth, the same painful theft of my magic for his own purposes. It didn’t really matter to me that he wasn’t one of the doctors—it was all functionally the same thing.

I’d said as much to Dr. Nowse, who had clearly disagreed. He’d argued that what Garraway had done must have upset my newfound sense of safety.

I’d looked him right in his brown eyes and told him that I had no sense of safety.

He’d seemed offended and horrified by that.

So I’d explained that when every time you looked at the news, whether on television or social media, and saw people protesting your existence, whether the one you’d been born with or the one you’d acquired from a disease, it was hard to actually feel safe anywhere.

His mouth had made a tiny little oh of surprise, and he’d looked at me as though I’d just destroyed some lingering fragment of childhood innocence. And then he’d conceded the point.

I’d been wrong, though. I did have a sense of safety—with Raj. When he was with me, I felt as though I could let my guard down. I knew he would protect me.

He wanted to protect me from things I didn’t need or want him to protect me from.