Page 40 of Teach Me How To Fly

“You’re having nightmares, right?”

I furrowed and nodded, tilting my head so I could look at him. “Yes, I am.”

“I’m having some nightmares too, but mine are more like flashbacks I get from my childhood. As if my brain tries to remember something, but it can’t manage to do it,” he explained in a lower tone of voice.

“Flashbacks of what?”

He sighed and took a deep breath in while his hands started wandering on my arms and playing with my fingers.

“There’s this man who has a tattoo with a bird in flames on his hand. He’s always keeping little me locked in the basement,”he spoke slowly, the pain he was feeling coming to the surface like a hurricane. “I’m always trying to save little Maksen from him, but I end up frozen in place, unable to make any move. And the man laughs at me, and Maksen is crying and I wake up even more scared and lost each time I’m having these nightmares.”

Oh. He was going through the same things as me.

“Maybe it is just a nightmare, Maksen. How do you know these are flashbacks?”

“They feel so real, and they’re affecting me in real life ever since I can remember,” he explained. “I’m afraid of being locked in tiny spaces, especially if there’s no light. I always have been. And the nightmares are so vivid, like I’ve lived each of them.”

I snuggled into his arms and let my head rest on his shoulder. With my nose so close to his jawline, I inhaled deeply, his cologne waking my entire being. I closed my eyes and kept silent for a few moments to think about what I should say.

And then it hit me.

“Do you recall anything unusual from your childhood?”

Please, don’t say you don’t remember anything.

He looked at me, and I saw a flicker of fear creeping into his eyes.

“I don’t rememberanythingfrom my childhood. My first memory is of me looking at you while you were studying for your first grade.”

No. It can’t be possible. He has to remember something. It can’t be the same.

“You don’t remember anything before that?”

“Absolutely nothing,” he quickly replied, and I saw how worried he was.

My head started spinning, and I felt increasingly dizzy with each passing second.

“Are you sure? Are you really fucking sure that’s the very first thing you remember??”

He grabbed me by my hands and moved me with ease so I could sit directly in front of him. Everything around me spun, and I felt bad. Really bad. My stomach was hurting and my entire body started shaking.

“Annalise, are you okay?”

“No,” I replied briefly, feeling the tears welling up behind my eyes. “I am not, because that’s my first memory too, with you looking at me as I took my first notes for the first grade.”

We both didn’t remember anything before then. We both had nightmares of this man hurting us. We both shared past traumas we had never spoken about until now. And I felt as if the entire reality I had constructed had been shattered and replaced with the biggest lie I had ever believed to be true.

What had happened to both of us?

My vision began to become blurry, and an overwhelming desire to vanish and never return engulfed me.

We were both broken, so how could we possibly repair each other when we didn’t even know what broke us?

14

MAKSEN

Ileft her house wanting more of her, and as I was walking down the stairs to the car that was already waiting for me, I turned my head and caught a glimpse of Anna looking at me.

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