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When he pressed his lips to the top of my head, I held my breath for a minute. A few weeks earlier, I’d understood what those little gestures meant. I craved them. Now…
“I’m here,” he murmured in agreement. “Think you can go back to sleep?”
I had no idea. “What time is it?”
He shifted, barely, then there was a flash of the light from his phone but I kept my eyes closed. The gentle cadence of his heart soothed some of the jagged edges left by the dream. I could almost see the shadows reaching out, smothering me.
Had Mitch done that? Had he tried to smother me during that time I couldn’t remember? My brain kept spinning off little what if and had he questions. Had he chased me down that hallway? The guys told me I was in a little event room not far from where we’d been having the dance. But I couldn’t picture it in my head.
I couldn’t picture anything. I could barely remember the bathroom. Had there been other girls in there? Where had I run into Mitch? In the bathroom?
“It’s a little after three,” he murmured, and the light clicked off again. “Plenty of time to get more sleep.”
As tired as I was, sleep was the furthest thing from my mind. Maybe I could just lie here and rest while Ian slept. That would keep the nightmares at bay, right?
I don’t know how long we lay there, Ian stroking my hair and my head tucked against him, before he said, “You’re not going back to sleep are you?”
“I want to,” I lied. Well, not lied really. I would like to go back to sleep if I was sure I wouldn’t have another bad dream. Even if my pulse had slowed and my breathing deepened, I couldn’t shake the claustrophobic notion of being smothered.
“Want to talk about it?” The offer was there, a gentle olive branch. Would I take it?
Did I want to take it?
“Not to much to talk about,” I admitted. “It’s all shadows, like I said.”
“Shadows and running,” he said. “Do you remember anything else about it?”
“I can’t breathe.” Was it a hand over my mouth? Something else? “Not through my nose or my mouth. I’m fighting, but I can’t get it to stop. Then I’m running again.”
He flexed his arm around me, and then he cupped my face with his free hand. “No one is smothering you, I promise.”
I laughed. “You make that sound like a metaphor.”
“Eh.” The grimace in his tone echoed loudly. “I’m not going to try and psychoanalyze anything. Doing that before got me into trouble.”
“Before?” Okay, I was going to keep digging into this apparently. It was better than digging into my dreams. I hated horror movies, and those nightmares were like living through my own personal one.
Ian went quiet. When I shifted a little closer, he pressed his lips to my forehead again. “You asked me why now.”
“I did.”
“I said a lot of things.”
“You did.”
“I really suck at this.”
I smiled. “No you don’t.”
“I do,” he admitted. “I suck at it where you’re concerned. I want to say all the right things. I want…I want to make it easier for you. Better. I want you to have everything. I want…”
I bit my lower lip and waited him out.
“I want to take back asking my dad for advice and then listening to him. He pointed things out to me, and maybe they were true, maybe they weren’t. But I made the mistake of trusting what I was afraid of instead of trusting you.”
Lifting my head, I tried to stare at him in the dark, but I couldn’t really make out anything other than the outline of his nose. The cats were wandering back onto the bed. Tiddles had settled by my lower back, and Tabby moved her way up onto my pillow, but since I was more lying on Ian than it, I didn’t care.
“It isn’t just now,” he continued, and even though I couldn’t see his eyes, I could feel the weight of his gaze. “I was pushing you away because I thought it was the right thing to do, but I never wanted to push you away. When you walked away, you were right to do it. I wanted to undo what I’d done, but I didn’t know how.”
