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“Tell me your name,” he said again.
“Trista.”
“There you are,” he said.
Words that Jersey had said to me before too.
But Jersey had done it mid-crazy fucking.
Why the fuck couldn’t I focus on anything?
“Can you look at me?” He asked. “Up here. My face. Can you look at me?”
He seemed to stop vibrating when my eyes found his.
“Can you feel my heart?” He asked. I shook my head and realized that my hands were still on his chest. That’s why he was asking.
“Find it,” he said. “Find my heartbeat, Trista.”
My fingers instantly stiffened against him, like my nails could dig beneath the surface to the steady thumping underneath.
“There you go. Find it.”
He waited another few seconds. “Feel it?”
I nodded when it was just suddenly apparent beneath my fingers. Pounding away like it was right under his skin rather than hidden away inside his ribs.
“Focus on it. Hard as you can. Until you can almost hear it, like it’s the only thing in this room with you. Because you’re standing right here in front of me. It’s safe here. You are safe here. You can breathe. You can cry. You can scream. You can do anything you need to do because you’re safe and you’re right here.”
My eyes dropped down to where my hands were digging into his chest in absolute disbelief, like I’d see something fucking magical happening right in front of me now that my lungs had decided to work again.
Was he a fucking witch?
Could men be witches?
He was probably just another regular demon.
“If you don’t get it together soon, Trista, I’ll have to start singing,” he said. “And my rendition of This Little Light of Mine is mind-blowing, so I feel like I need to warn everybody here that it’s on deck.”
I was suddenly very aware of the sound of my own heart when I looked down between us to realize we were standing entirely too close. And I realized his hands were still holding firmly onto my elbows when he squeezed them gently again. I took my own hands back quickly and he let go of my arms the next second. He took a step backward immediately and waited until I looked back at his face again before he winked at me. At some point, Memphis had come around the island to stand right next to me too. And all I could wonder at that point was how long had we stood that way? Because I was instantly fucking exhausted like it was somehow the middle of the night already.
“The fuck was that?” Memphis asked Utah. “Are you a Trista whisperer?”
“Trista Whisperer,” he repeated and laughed. “I’ll take that as an official title now. Panic attack. I grew up with a lot of kids who had issues with anxiety. I wanted to help them, so I learned how.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
jersey
It was a pill.
The small, blonde woman who worked the camera left it here. She’d stood in this corner, waited until I noticed her, and dropped a tiny, round pill for me to find once everyone else was gone. I only spent maybe four seconds wondering if I should swallow it; if it was something that would kill me. I decided even that would still be preferable to what was being done to me daily now. Swallowing it dry was less than pleasant. I felt it scratch and stick to my throat all the way down because every piece of me was terribly dehydrated. Even if the result was a painful death, it couldn’t have been much more painful than a fucking rat trap slowly cracking its way down to the bones in my fingers and my hand. It couldn’t have been worse than having nails driven through my feet hard enough that they’d broken into the concrete beneath. The amount of willpower that it took to get my feet free from the floor and then rip the nails out was astronomical, and it took every ounce of the energy that I had left.
It didn’t take long before my breathing slowed, and a familiar slightly nauseous feeling accompanied by an instant drowsiness told me that my small blonde savior had left me a painkiller. It didn’t take away all the pain. Whatever she’d brought me was fucking good, but there was a lot of pain and no chance that just one pill could erase it, even for a short time. All I wanted out of it was a solid round of sleep though, and it was looking like that wish would be granted. It left me wondering desperately who this woman was while I drifted into nothingness.
* * *
The legs of that fucking table being dragged back across the floor into the room woke me up. I didn’t feel any better. I’d slept right through the high from that painkiller and my body felt like it managed to age another twenty years in that timespan. Everything ached, my head was fuzzy, my mouth might as well have been made of fuzz, and I was in a piss poor mood.
