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It meant that he had existed in that somewhere else, somewhere beyond the pain in his body and the strain in his limbs and that fierce engine inside him that had chanted this address and insisted he keep getting up every time he fell.

It meant there was more to him than the wall of white noise in his head.

Here, now, there was warm tea between his hands. There was the scent of mint rising from it. The fragrance of the soap he’d used in her shower and the blood he’d watched wash away into her drain. The clothes she’d left out for him that did not quite fit him, but were warm and dry.

He had left what he’d been wearing in the bathroom, hanging it all on the towel racks to dry out. From the boots he’d been wearing to the warm jacket that hadn’t felt that warm outside, but he’d made it into this house, so perhaps it had done more than he realized.

Getting here had been the only goal.

Now he supposed he ought to find out where the hell he’d come from—but he felt no urgency. No engine. No driving force like the one that had kept him going when he’d wanted nothing more than to lie down in a snowbank and rest a while. Just a little while. Just until his body stopped hurting.

It was her voice, he decided now. That was the difference. There was something about the sound of it that seemed to hit a frequency inside him and hum, making him feel…different.

Calmer. Quieter. Good, even.

It was a lower voice for a woman, faintly husky, and it didn’t matter what she was saying. It was as if the sound of her alone reset something deep within him.

Without meaning to, or thinking about it, he took in a deep breath. Then released it.

And realized it was the first such breath he’d taken since he’d… Well.

For as long as he could remember.

She was staring at him from across the counter in this kitchen with clean lines that also felt comfortable. A combination he felt certain, for some reason, was unusual. For him, anyway.

Her green eyes were intense upon his. “What do you mean?” she asked, her voice even lower than before, and he was certain that was shock. Her expression suggested the same. “What do you mean you can’t remember who you are? Or anything else?”

He took stock of what it was he did know. The snow. The door. The shower, now the tea. He felt oddly complete with that, though he understood that he should remember more. That he was a grown man—the mirror had showed him his face, though he’d recognized it less than hers—and he must have therefore lived an entire life to become grown. To get to this point.

And yet.

“It is a blank,” he told her. “All I know is that I was outside, in the storm.” He frowned, as a recalled sensation, maybe some kind of memory, pushed through. “There was a crash. I think.”

“Your face is cut. And you’re beginning to bruise.” She studied him closely and he could see from the way she did it that she was familiar with him. He was certain too that there was also some kind of longing in the way she looked at him. In the way she’d reacted to him at the door. Something that suggested a dynamic far more dramatic than the one he might have imagined, going purely from the way her voice felt inside him.

He didn’t like that.

“I don’t remember the crash,” he said, slowly. Carefully, as he tried to piece through the oppressive wall of noise in his head, but got only…fragments. Nonsensical pieces of something he supposed were a kind of puzzle, but he could see no way to put them together. “I remember the snow. And the city rising high before me, so I went in that direction. I knew only that I needed to come here. To find my way here. That it was of critical importance to me.”

“You remembered my address, but not my name?”

“It is more that I knew where this house was and that I needed to get here. I don’t think I could tell you a precise address.” He shook his head slightly as he said that, because that churned up…something, deep inside. “That does not seem possible. And yet it was what happened.”

“There are many things impossible about this night,” she said quietly. “They keep multiplying.”

He found himself studying her then, watching her as dark shadows chased themselves across her bright eyes. He didn’t like that either.

She moved then and he followed without her asking, because everything in him was shouting—loudly—to keep her right here. Within his sight at all costs.

No matter what.

She led him into a graceful sort of living area with a gas fire burning on one wall and a happy, traditional Christmas tree, trimmed in bright, twinkling colors in a set of bay windows. The ceilings were high, the floors a polished, deep wood. He thought it was an old building, and yet even as he thought that, something in him questioned the use of the term old. As if there were different definitions.

Though he could not have said why.

She sat down on one end of a sturdy, thickly cushioned couch. He sat on the other. It felt profoundly wrong to him to keep this much space between them, when everything in him demanded he simply move to her, reach for her, put his hands upon her in some way.

He realized as he gazed at her that he knew how she would taste. And he could not remember it, exactly, but he was also certain that he was deeply familiar with her body. She was tall and was an athletic sort of slender. Not emaciated, he thought with something like relief, or perhaps it was satisfaction—and then wondered why he thought she might have been. Why that was a factor at all.