Page 147 of Haunt Me

“Yeah,” I say, “just got lightheaded.”

“Because of…?”

“You. Because of you.” I can’t take my eyes off her. She blushes abruptly, the color climbing up on the side of her slender neck. Gosh, how can a human be so beautiful?

“Oh.”Oh indeed.If she only knew that thoughts I have to fight—just to manage to stay upright. “I’m not sure what to say. ”

“Say what you’re thinking.”

“I’m thinking that we need to talk before this…” she gestures between us. “Before we gets too carried away.”

“Too late, but continue.”

“We have so much to talk about, right?” I nod, agreeing. “It would be the responsible thing to do.”

“We are nothing if not responsible.” My eyes are still on hers.

“Right.” She looks away first. “I kind of blurted out to you some of what I have been thinking yesterday, but there is so much more.”

“There is so much I need to say to you too,” I say. “We have had so many conversations inside my head, and it’s hard to keep track of what I have actually said to you, because it all feels so real.”

“In your head?” she smiles, wiping her lips. They are swollen and look tender to the touch. The sight makes me weak.

“Yeah,” I reply, distracted. “I think about you constantly. Sometimes I think if I was dying, suffocating or drowning or something… I would not think about my next breath. I would think about you.”

“I… I don’t know what to say.” She said that before too. It’s beginning to worry me, if I’m honest.

“Say that you knew I felt like this.”

“I didn’t, though. I don’t.” Eden’s brow wrinkles. “I mean, I didn’t all those years. It felt like you had forgotten all about me.”

I push my shoulder off the wall and take a step away from her, knowing fully well that I won’t be able to control myself if I so much as breathe her in. I have to concentrate on my next words. I must be very clear here.

“Do you think,” I enunciate, “that I forgot about you, that I ever could? Even for one second? For one breath? Do you think I could ever have forgotten about you?”

She looks at me with those eyes that own my freaking soul.

“I did,” she says finally. Simply that.

An unearthly groan comes out of my throat. I can’t believe I screwed this up so badly.

“I’m sorry,” she says, her eyes filling with agony. It’s not her fault. I need to tell her it’s not, but I can’t utter a word. “When I saw you for the first time after I broke up with… After I brokeyou, itstirred up so many things inside me. I realized I was not ok. I mean, I had made some progress, but I don’t think I had realized until then how much not ok I was. I was stuck in survival mode, frozen up, distant from a reality that was too much for me to handle.”

I bite my lip hard, closing my eyes against the pain her words evoke.

But the pain won’t go away; it slices me clean through, like a knife.

“I know I said we need to talk,” she goes on, “but right now, I can’t even begin to explain to you what happened, without being intensely triggered. I can’t… I can’t even sit here, in this house for long. I always run away. As you saw.”

I stand still, listening to every word she is telling me. I won’t interrupt her with one syllable. I just nod so that she can continue.

“I have so many things that I can’t control inside of me, because I was too little to remember what happened to me. All these things that might set off a PTSD episode for me, these triggers that I… I don’t even know what they are. And I have been working on it all, but it’s going so slowly that sometimes it’s hard to keep hoping.”

“We can wait,” I say. I didn’t mean to say it like that, it just came out. But the light that fills her face at my words fills me with encouragement. “I will wait for as long as you need, Eden. I have waited for so long without a hint of hope. I sure can wait now.”

“You have waited?” she repeats in wonder. “For a long time?”

“I have.”

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