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Lachlan rubbed my back and rocked me slightly. “Laurel, calm down.” He took a deep, slow breath to encourage me. “Come on. Breathe with me.”
At the very least, I could pull myself together after falling apart. This wasn’t fun or sexy or anything someone would want in a fling. It was broken and strange. I pulled in a shaky breath, not daring to look him in the face.
“Tell me what happened,” Lachlan said.
How can I? How can I tell you that I knew my husband was fucking another woman and I debased myself in a desperate attempt to make him stay with me?
“You’re shaking. Hey, come on. You can do this. Calm. Neutral zone.”
I forced a breath through my lungs. Then another. And another. As more awareness slammed into me with each beat of my heart, my crying stopped, and I reached up a hand to wipe away my tears. My body stiffened against Lachlan’s. I wanted to run far away. Preferably without having to look him in the face again.
But his hands were still massaging me, squeezing up and down my arms, rubbing my neck. “Laurel,” he said, and I felt his voice in his chest. “Are you okay?”
I sniffed, wiping my nose on the back of my wrist and pulling away from him. “Yeah. Just a nightmare.” I stared down at the sheets. How was I supposed to explain this? I didn’t understand it myself.
“That wasn’t a nightmare,” he retorted angrily.
I raised my eyes swiftly, worried I had done something to offend him. A sheen of wet shone on the edges of his eyes, and he wiped it away with his shoulder. His expression was full of tortured emotion. “None of that was okay. Tell me what just happened.”
I brought a hand to my mouth. I had really upset him. “I’m so sorry, Lachlan. I usually set my alarms—it’s just a thing my brain does.”
He didn’t buy it. “I know how PTSD works. Don’t sugarcoat it.”
Shock slammed into me. “I don’t have anything like that, Lach. It’s just a bad dream I get.”
“About a real memory?”
My body went stone still. “I mean… Yeah.”
It looked like he was fighting to keep the intensity of his anger from showing through his expression. “In this ‘dream,’ who’s hurting you?”
I swallowed hard, holding his gaze. I wasn’t sure what to say. I had hurt myself, technically.
“I’m going to kill him,” he said, suddenly getting off the bed and throwing the blankets aside. “Where’s that asshole’s number?”
“Oh, fuck, Lachlan, no!” I catapulted myself up to wrap my arms around his waist. My knees balanced on the edge of the bed, my arms wrapped around his hard waist, and he stood rigidly, like he was about to go kill something with his bare hands. “Don’t,” I breathed against his tan, warm skin. “It’s okay. I’m okay.”
“You’re not okay.” He twisted, and his hands gripped my arms, like he was going to pry my hold off him. But then he lifted me, and I stood on the edge of the bed, just barely bringing my head higher than his. He framed my face with his long fingers. “You are not fucking okay, Laurel. That was genuinely terrifying, and I wasn’t even the one living the memory.”
I leaned my forehead against his. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s not your fault,” he said, disgusted. “It’s his.”
I exhaled through my nose. “I know that, logically. But I brought a lot of suffering on myself, too.”
He brought me back into a hug, and I leaned the side of my face on top of his shoulder. “I don’t know what he did to you, but I’m going to make it right.”
I squeezed him. “You can’t change something that already happened.”
I felt him sigh. Then he asked, “What do you mean you set alarms?”
I pulled away again, resting my forearms on his shoulders, and studied his scowl in the semi-darkness of the bedroom. “I set alarms for every two hours to keep from falling into a deep sleep. It’s the only way to keep the dreams at bay.”
He looked at me like I was stark, raving mad. “You’re telling me that you keep yourself from REM sleep every night?”
“Yeah. Calla got a stomach flu soon after they started, and I noticed when she woke me up every two hours or so, I didn’t get any dreams. So, I just kept doing that.”
“For how long?” He sounded aghast. Horrified.
