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Shane’s mine to protect. My only family. But there’s nothing I can do to help him.
Nothing’s okay. I’m not safe. This isn’t safe. The guard is coming closer and closer, and I don’t know if I can survive another night in this place.
Need to get out. Need to get up. Need to move. But I can’t. Can’t move. My knee burns. My heart hammers. A scream is building up in my throat.
Fuck, fuck, fuck! Let me out. Let me—
“Seth. Wake up.” Feather-light touches on my face, my hair. “It’s just a nightmare.”
Nightmare?
My eyes are blurry. I lift a hand to rub at them, and it’s shaking. My heartbeat is pounding in my skull, in my ears. It’s not the images that linger. It’s the feeling of helplessness, despair and terror—an acid taste in my mouth, a cold burn of fear that has my skin breaking into goosebumps.
Not a nightmare. Memories.
I’m not there. I’m not trapped. I didn’t stay in prison. The pain I feel is part of the memory. I can move. My knee isn’t broken anymore.
I’m not broken.
Repeating that to myself in case I forget, I cautiously twist onto my side on the bed and crack my eyes open. Light stabs through them, right to my brain, and I groan, throwing an arm over my face.
The mattress shifts and someone—Manon—pads quietly around the bed to stand in front of me, a beautiful shadow against the gray light of dawn seeping through the blinds.
“Want to talk about it?” she whispers and sits down on the bed beside me.
“About what?”
“Your dream. You kept saying you had to get out. And you were searching for someone.” She hesitates. “You seemed to be in pain.”
Dammit, she seems as shaken as I feel. I scared her, that much is clear, and I wonder what I looked like, thrashing about on the bed, muttering things. Like a crazy person, I guess.
Awesome.
“You said it. Just a nightmare. It’s over now.” I sit up and straighten my bad leg, flexing it just to make sure I’m right—that the pain I remember in my knee is only a pale ghost of the agony I’d felt back then.
Yeah. Bearable. Survivable.
“But…” She puts a hand on my ankle, and I jerk instinctively away. Too soon.
“Don’t, okay? Just don’t. I…”
My voice goes out, and my lungs are too small for breathing. I pant in the sudden quiet.
She pulls away, her face stricken. “Okay.”
I’m still shaking like a leaf. Not free of the memory yet, like I thought. My body remembers, taking longer to believe it’s over. It reacts as if I’m still there, in that bunk bed, my life gone to hell, my body beaten and battered, every touch causing me pain.
Even as I want to comfort her, repeat the lie, tell her I’m okay, I can’t. Not when I’m barely holding it together. I need a minute or two for the shudders to pass, for my heartbeat to slow.
But by then she’s standing up, fiddling with the tiny buckle of her narrow belt. “I should be going,” she says quietly.
I wince.
“Need to get home and change, then talk to my studies advisor,” she goes on.
Of course. She has other crap on her plate, better things to do than to be wiping vomit from my face and being shoved off when she tries to help me. She has a life. I’m only a temporary problem, an accident that belongs to the past.
What the fuck? Stop pitying yourself, Seffers, for chrissakes.
