“Why is that, Petal?” I ask, taking a mental note to punish her for this. Later.
“Because it makes me feel good,” she says. “Because it makes me feel warm and secure. It gives me a sensation of familiarity, intimacy... trust, even. I don’t understand it, but it’s there. You have no idea how much a person can yearn for such things when everything has been taken from them.”
There’s no reproach when she looks at me now, her face still so close to mine that either of us would have to move less than an inch to steal a kiss.
“It made me see things,” she adds, drawing another question from me.
“See things?” I probe. “Another vision?”
“I believe it’s a memory rather than a vision,” she replies. “I saw us, together. Very close, fucking, playing, succumbing to the same heat we’ve shared in here. But it was a memory older than that. It was before all of this.”
It takes a lot of effort not to let her notice how furious my heart is racing in response to her words. I could tell that hearing my name evoked something within her, and now she finally told me.
She remembers.
“We have done this before, haven’t we?” she wants to know now, the desire for an honest answer written across her expression with such strong strokes that it’s too painful to ignore.
“We have been together before, we have fucked before, played before,” she assumes. “Jayson, were we lovers before all of this?”
How am I supposed to give her an answer to this? It would be easy to be honest, but she won’t believe the truth. She wants to hear something I cannot give her. A lie.
“No,” I reply truthfully. “I haven’t robbed you of that memory, Petal. That day after the caning, over in that room, that was the first time I fucked you.”
She tries to distance herself from me, but I don’t let her, keeping her in a firm grip at the back of her head while a frown appears on her pretty face.
“I told you I would never lie to you, Petal,” I urge. “I may refuse answers, yes, but I will never lie. We have never done this before, none of this.”
“But then why...,” she stutters as her lower lip begins to tremble. “What did I see? I know there was something! I know you. We know each other, something has—”
“What makes you so sure you can trust your visions?” I ask, interrupting her.
She mewls, struggling again to escape me, but it’s as futile as before. Frustration runs down in heavy tears across her cheeks, despite her apparent efforts to prevent it.
“It’s all I have,” she utters. “What else could they be, if not memories from the life you took from me?”
“Memories can be contorted and deceiving.”
“Not mine,” she insists. “Not mine.”
I’m silently rooting for her. She tries. She’s fighting like few people ever could. She looks so fucking desperate, so exhausted from her constant struggle, and it pains me to hurt her like this.
I know I can’t give her the comfort she so desperately seeks. Not right now. But a part of me wishes I could, and that part is growing stronger with each day. I wish I could tell her everything, hug her, and take her by the hand to lead her outside. I wish we could take that stroll through the garden that she asked for, I wish I could see the sun kiss her cheeks like it did that summer.
But I can’t, now even less than before.
Because things have been put into motion in the outside world, causing an insidious danger to close in on us.