Total pages in book: 145
Estimated words: 138274 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 691(@200wpm)___ 553(@250wpm)___ 461(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 138274 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 691(@200wpm)___ 553(@250wpm)___ 461(@300wpm)
Nate shrugged and didn’t look at her. “One that vivid, at any rate.”
There were so many questions to ask, but she was not going to pressure him—
“It’s just a nightmare,” he said. “Everybody gets them, you know. You probably have them, too, right?”
Yes, she thought. But not because she was reliving being an animal in a lab.
“I do.” She cleared her throat. “From time to time.”
“What are yours about?”
Struggling to focus, she tried to get her brain to plug into her own life. “Wasps. I dream of—wasps.”
“Oh, good one.” His voice became a little lighter, like he was trying to embrace normalcy, fuse it to his own experience. “Do you come up on a nest or something?”
“I, ah…” What the hell was she saying? “No, it’s not like that. I’m not in the woods or anything. The wasps are in my bed… under my pillow, actually. I roll over and flush them. I always wake up just as they start to sting me.”
“It happens when you’re stressed, right.”
“Yes. When I’m stressed.”
“I don’t like cramped places.” He shook his head. Then ran his palm over his skull, his biceps bunching up. “Claustrophobia does it to me every time. Common thing to worry about, like wasps in your bed, right?”
“Yes,” she said again, softly.
He nodded, but it was in an absent way, and he still wasn’t looking at her. When he finally got up in silence, then said something about taking a quick shower, she wasn’t surprised. She told herself it was fine, that he was still sorting through what was real and what wasn’t, and a rinse off would help that.
But as he shut the door firmly, she knew it was more than just the bathroom getting closed off.
See, this was why you couldn’t get too invested in the rosy start of a relationship, she thought.
There were always layers to people—and some of them went so deep, they created fault lines that couldn’t be repaired.
* * *
Twenty minutes of hot water drilling on his skull later, Nate stepped out onto his bath mat and toweled himself off. Leaning over his sink, he cleaned the condensation off the mirror with a swipe and stared at himself. He looked like shit, his face pale, the whites of his eyes bloodshot, his lips pursed.
A ghost haunting himself. Oh, wait, his past was the specter stalking him.
He should have known that he’d have one of his really bad nightmares again. He’d never had a female he’d cared about in his bed before, he’d been kicked out of the Brotherhood’s fighting protocol, and the best friend he hadn’t had for thirty years had broken things off with him. Oh, and then there were his parents, and the fact that he was coming to understand what an absolute shithead he’d been to them. And Rahvyn.
And everything else.
Jesus, why couldn’t he just dream about wasps under his pillow? And why did he have to fall asleep in the first place—
“Because you didn’t sleep all day,” he muttered as he looped the towel around his hips. “You were too busy thinking about her.”
Over at the door, he braced himself. Nalla had to have questions, and all the answers he didn’t want to give her were going to be a wedge between them. She deserved some kind of explanation, but he knew, by the look in her eyes, the conclusions she’d come to were the accurate ones, even if she didn’t have all the details.
So did he really need to get personal about things…?
Yes, he fucking did. Because he cared about her more than he cared about himself, and his father was right. That transformed a person… and was the kind of self-improvement that made all the difference.
But God, he just couldn’t find the words.
Opening the door, he stepped out into the much cooler and drier open space, and looked to the bed.
She wasn’t in the messy sheets—
How could he have missed the smell of bacon, he wondered as his head snapped over toward his hot plate.
Nalla was standing with her back to him, the Oscar Mayer package open on the counter, along with the eggs and the loaf of bread that had yet to be called into service. She was in her turtleneck and jeans, but her feet were still bare and her hair was still loose down her back.
But she hadn’t left him. Yet.
Glancing toward the steps up to the cabin, he told himself not to dwell on the fact that she’d hung her parka off of the end of the railing, and positioned her snow boots right under all that Patagonia.
He went over and took out a fresh pair of jeans from his dresser. After pulling them on, he grabbed a t-shirt to cover up his torso.
“Can you set out plates?” she asked without looking back at him.