I crack my lids open, squinting in the light. Everything’s blurry. Everything hurts.
“There you are.”
Her face is out of focus, but her voice is clearer now.
She starts talking again, telling me I’m lucky.
Familiarity niggles inside my aching skull as something damp is removed from my forehead and replaced with something colder.
“I know you,” I say.
My voice comes out as little more than a hoarse whisper.
“Ssh. You need to rest.”
She holds something to my mouth and water passes my lips.
I swallow, wincing. My throat feels like a dry desert that’s finally received its first drop of rain. Only the rain burns like acid.
“Saw you at the marina,” I croak. “Crying.”
“You don’t have amnesia, then. That’s a good sign,” she says kindly.
I struggle to focus on her face, but my eyes are bleary and stinging.
“Not your fault,” I whisper.
She doesn’t speak for a while. I lie in silence as she mops my brow, memories of running into her filling in the blanks about what she looks like. How her eyes were filled with sadness as she sat weeping, her feet dangling off the boards at the end of one of the walkways.
I’ve always hated seeing women cry. My mom. My sister. Nothing gets to me more.
I’d asked her if she was okay. And she told me she would be. That she was just remembering.
“What happened to her… you’re not to blame,” I say.
My vision finally clears and the sad smile on her face is waiting for me.
“Neither are you,” she says softly.
I manage to hold her eyes for a heartbeat before my lids close and I’m pulled back under, my words slipping out in a broken confession.
“Not true. It happened because of me.”
I wake with a start, my brow clammy with sweat.
The sky is a deep orange, and Jude’s lying, curled into my side, stroking my chest.
Shit.
I reach up and crush a finger and thumb into my eye sockets, rubbing away the memories that haunt me whenever I close my eyes.
I fell asleep beside her. Something I should never have allowed to happen. Sleep can’t be trusted. Secrets that are hidden so deep that it takes everything in you to keep them locked firmly away are safe when you’re awake, when you’re in control.
But when you’re asleep your body is the one in control, not your mind.
People talk in their sleep.
I’m a reckless idiot.A Risk Taker.
