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“Nothing,” I said. “Just... I’m going back to sleep.”
But Shannon wasn’t having it. He pulled me into the bedroom with him and nudged the door shut behind us, which set off shrill outrage from the white cat, who by this point had come back only to realize I was being allowed into the one room in the house she was consistently barred from.
“Shut the hell up!” Shannon barked at the closed door.
The cat made one last angry snippy yowl, then shut up.
Without another word, he guided me to the bed and pulled back the blankets. He wrapped his body around mine like a guy who understood how comfort worked.
And in that moment, I believed him.
He didn’t push or pry or ask for anything, either physically or emotionally, from me. He just held me and let me sleep. In his arms, I didn’t worry about Professor Stevens coming back, not even in dreams. Because if he did, I knew Shannon would fucking kill him without a second thought.
8
Iwoke the next morning to a tray of coffee and toast in bed. This might seem like the most mundane and bland thing. For a normal man in a normal household, this would be just something moderately nice and considerate that nearly anyone would do for someone they cared about if they were sick or had a bad night. But Shannon wasn’t exactly normal by anybody’s metric. It was huge that he’d broken hisno food outside the kitchenrule for me. At least I thought it was. If I hadn’t been sure before that he truly did feel something toward me, I was sure now.
I was beginning to see sociopathy as not a black or white—either you are or you aren’t—kind of deal, but rather a spectrum. On one end were your serial killers who didn’t have a single thing in their life that wasn’t entirely for show—every displayed emotion carefully calculated for the maximum socially appropriate impact. Then on the other extreme were the people so empathetic that they were too sensitive to ever watch even a single bit of news on TV without bursting into tears and being depressed for the rest of the day.
Most of us lived somewhere in the middle of all this. We didn’t cry when random people got swept away in a tsunami on the other end of the world, but we’d be upset if our neighbor’s kid skinned his knee in our backyard. In a way, human nature seemed to have designed us for sociopathic indifference toward distant strangers from other tribes and caring empathy toward our own small group. Toward that end, Shannon was just extremely fine-tuned for survival.
Being with him made me wish I’d majored in psychology rather than botany. Knowing with more authority than hunches and mere guesses how the human mind worked might come in handy here. But if it was like the other sciences, nobody really agreed on any but the most basic principles. There were theories and notions and people in this camp and others in that one. Nothing prepared one for the live study of a thing or person right there in front of you.
I was beginning to firmly believe that Shannon did in fact feel real emotions, and not just selfish ones that only pertained to himself and his own outcome. He might not have a big circle of people he would protect and defend, but he had one. I still didn’t fully understand—and I don’t think he did either—how I came to be in it, but nevertheless, there I was.
And despite his warnings to scare me before going to his parents’ house, I was convinced he felt more than casual disinterest toward them as well, even if the feelings were vague and not strong enough to fully quantify. Like he’d said, their parenting had made a difference in the type of monster he’d grown into. He had to feelsomethingwith regards to that. Didn’t he? Also, I was pretty sure if his house were on fire, he’d grab the white cat on his way out the door.
Shannon sat in a sleek gray chair across the room, quietly observing me while I had my coffee and toast.
“Thank you,” I said.
He just nodded.
The tray was a simple white porcelain. Plain. Zen. Minimalist like everything else he owned. The plates were square and white as if ready for gourmet edible art to be splashed across them to the delight of some food critic somewhere. The coffee cup was plain and white as well, steam still rising up off the hot black brew.
Along with the toast, he’d brought raspberry jam. He’d already slathered the butter on, so that it would soften and melt against the heat of the bread. I spread the jam on top and poured some cream he’d brought in a tiny white creamer into my coffee. He knew by now that I didn’t take sugar, so he hadn’t brought any.
Shannon watched me like this for a while, but he didn’t speak until I had finished both my toast and my coffee. When the last crumb of toast and the last drop of coffee were gone, he finally spoke.
“What was it about this new nightmare that was bad enough for you to come to my room? You never came to my room before.” His words didn’t seem accusatory or annoyed, merely curious.
I looked up, startled. “You knew I had nightmares before last night?”
He nodded. “I’ve heard you scream in the night.”
I hadn’t realized I’d called out in my sleep.
“And you didn’t say or do anything?” I asked.
He shrugged. “You didn’t call for me. You didn’t come to me. I assumed that you wanted to deal with it on your own and that you required space.”
This was exactly why I wasn’t a useless ball of human rolled up in the fetal position on the floor all the time. Shannon had the most amazing sense of space I’d ever encountered in another human being. It occurred to me that some measure of his coldness wasn’t garden variety coldness because he wasdead insideor whatever, but was instead an expression of trying to project what he would want onto someone else. It just seemed to him like the natural thing to do.
I had the sense that, in general, Shannon didn’t give a damn what other people wanted in any circumstance really, but if hedidgive a damn, it seemed more likely he’d think about what he would want instead of trying to guess at how other people’s minds and emotions operated.
It was only the fact that what he wanted was so very different from what the general population wanted that someone could interpret it as a total lack of empathy—or at least this was what I kept telling myself.
“What was different about this nightmare?” Shannon asked again.
