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A fond smile curved his mouth.
Had her off-the-wall, unscheduled lifestyle really annoyed him before? Because now the challenge of pinning her down excited the shit out of him. Like he’d said yesterday afternoon, she could show up late as long as she kept showing up. Period. Right about now, he liked the idea of carrying Hallie to bed and showing her there was no set schedule in terms of when he needed her. It was all the time. Every minute of every day . . .
Where the hell was she, though?
The living room sat eerily silent, the other, smaller bathroom empty. No one in the kitchen. No sign of anyone having passed through to get a drink of water or fix a snack. And the lights were off in the backyard. He went to check, anyway, opening the glass double doors and doing a turn around the unoccupied garden.
“Hallie.”
She’d gone out. At . . .
He turned on a light to check his watch, before remembering it was on the nightstand. Glancing back over his shoulder toward the kitchen, he spied the time on the microwave.
2:40 a.m.
She’d left the house at 2:40 a.m. There was no reasonable explanation for that. Not even for Hallie. People didn’t go for walks in the middle of the night, and if she did, she would have taken the dogs, right? Nothing in town was open. Not even the bars. She had a friend . . . Lavinia? But he had no phone number for her, and anyway, regardless of where she’d gone or with whom, why wouldn’t she wake him up? What the fuck was going on?
She couldn’t have been . . . taken against her will somewhere, right?
The idea of that was ludicrous.
Was she a sleepwalker and failed to tell him?
What was that sound?
He listened for several long seconds before realizing it was his own wheezing.
Fuck. Fuck. Okay, take a breath.
But he couldn’t. And in some weird, parallel universe, he could hear sirens and smell the cloying scent of smoke. There was no fire. No one was in danger. But he couldn’t convince himself of that. Because Hallie could be somewhere out on the road in her pajamas or trapped somewhere. Was she trapped?
Now the dogs had gotten up to follow him around the house, their tails wagging, heads butting up against his knees. When did his pulse start ricocheting around the inside of his skull? He could hear the pumping of blood in his veins like there was a microphone inside of his chest. The kitchen, which he couldn’t even remember entering, was smaller suddenly, and he couldn’t remember the way back to the bedroom.
“Hallie,” he called, a lot more sharply this time—and the dogs started to bark.
Goddammit, he didn’t feel good. The closing of his throat and blurring of the immediate area, the stiffness in his fingers—he remembered it well. Too well. He’d spent four years trying to avoid this happening again, this helplessness running into him like a cruise liner splintering a rowboat. And before that, before the fire, he’d worked his whole life around not ending up here. So he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t.
“It’s fine,” he told the dogs, but his voice sounded unnatural, his gait stiff as he moved through the dark living room to the front door, throwing it open, only vaguely aware that he wore nothing but briefs. The blast of cold night air on Julian’s skin alerted him to the fact that he was sweating. A lot. It poured down his chest and the sides of his face.
Panic attack. Acknowledge what it is.
He could hear Dr. Patel’s voice drifting forward from the past. From those sessions a hundred years ago, when they’d worked on emergency coping strategies.
Name the objects around you.
Couch, picture frame, dogs. Howling dogs.
Then what?
He couldn’t remember what the hell was supposed to come next, because Hallie was missing. This wasn’t a dream, it was too vivid. Nausea didn’t come in sleep like this. Nor did his jaw lock up, his hands useless and fumbling as he tried to get outside to go find her.
“Hallie,” he shouted, walking stiff-legged down the path toward the street, searching right and left for her figure in the darkness. No truck. It wasn’t parked in the driveway. Why didn’t he think to look for that? Why hadn’t he tried calling her? His brain wasn’t functioning the way it was supposed to, and that scared the shit out of him. “Dammit,” he huffed, rubbing at the concrete pouring down his throat. “Dammit . . .”
He needed to get back into the house to try calling her.
Focus. Focus.
The sound of tires on gravel stopped Julian short, just before he walked into the cottage. He spun around quickly, too quickly, to find Hallie running across the lawn, white as a ghost. Relief almost knocked him out cold, his hand gripping the doorframe to keep him on his feet. She’s okay, she’s okay, she’s okay.
