Page 17 of Lost Touch
I spent a lot of time wandering around the house and the back yard, feeling melancholy and adrift, and making simple meals for the both of us, followed by cleaning up by hand instead of using the dishwasher. After all, what use did I have for a time-saving device when apparently I had nothing but time to waste?
Drew ate with me and hung out a little bit in between, mostly sitting on the couch with a laptop or a phone while I surfed the internet, but otherwise he’d been holed up in his office or going for extended runs in the forest in his four-legged form. So it wasn’t like I had to plan my nonexistent schedule around him.
Besides, I honestly didn’t want to. He’d gotten less and less communicative, not quite getting snappish and snarling at me, but very, very close. I could tell he had to restrain himself.
At night, though…at night it was different.
I’d lasted two nights alone before I woke up in the wee hours of the third, panting and gasping and with spots swimming in my vision and tears running down my face, panicked and having no fucking clue where I was.
Drew appeared a millisecond later, claws out and lips drawn back in a snarl, obviously ready to eviscerate whatever had made me cry.
Maybe it said something a little unsettling about my psychology, but the sight of a ferocious predator in my bedroom all primed to maim and kill settled my panic almost instantly.
Well, that particular ferocious predator, anyway.
I flopped back onto the pillows, relief flooding every limb, and managed a breathless, “I’m okay. It’s not real.”
Drew nodded and dropped into the chair by the bed, his clawed hands flexing as if he were still poised to rip something to shreds. “I’ll stay, don’t worry. I’m watching over you, Ash.”
And despite the warmth blooming in my chest, that simply wouldn’t do. That chair, while comfortable as chairs went, was…well, a chair. And leaving Drew to sit awkwardly and with a crick in his neck all night byhis own bedwhile I lounged in its king-size, memory-foam luxury? Well, it’d been one thing when I was all unconscious. It had been gentlemanly and kind of him to sit in the chair and watch over me. Also, I’d probably smelled pretty terrible, so no doubt it’d also been practical for someone with a supernatural nose to be a few feet away.
But now it’d just be wrong of me to let him stay there, obviously.
So I budged over, taking two of the three pillows with me because I might feel guilty about taking his bed, but I didn’t feelthatguilty.
“It’s a huge bed,” I said, trying not to sound too pleading and pathetic. I didn’t want him to have to sleep in a chair, sure, but really, I was terrified that he might get sick of the discomfort and sneak back to the other bed once I’d dozed off, leaving me alone again with the phantoms of pain and anguish and torture and imprisonment. “You might as well get a decent night’s sleep, right? Thank you for staying,” I added belatedly.
Drew hesitated, sighed, and finally got out of the chair and slid in beside me without comment—or a complaint about getting one third of his own pillows. I snuggled down into one of my two and tucked the other against my chest. Who had an odd number of pillows, anyway? What a weirdo. He only had himself to blame.
I couldn’t go back to sleep, though. The nightmare’s power over me had been broken when Drew came into the room, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t lingering in my mind.
“Drew?”
“Yeah?”
The darkness made it hard to see his expression, but he didn’t sound annoyed that I wasn’t letting him go back to sleep. I drew a deep breath and asked, “What happened when we escaped? I keep dreaming about it. But I was unconscious the whole time. It’s weird, but it’s actually more upsetting than not remembering anything else. I can’t convince myself it’s really over.”
“Move the pillow,” Drew said.
I blinked at him. “What? Is this an excuse to get two of them, because—”
“Put it behind you, then,” he said, with a huff of a laugh. “Christ.”
The second I’d tucked it behind my back, Drew wrapped an arm around me and pulled me inexorably against his side. Oh, God. He was so much better than any pillow, even though he wasn’t nearly as soft.
“It’s easier for me to talk about it when I can feel you’re safe,” he said quietly. “Look, Ash. What you didn’t see? It’d give you more nightmares if you had. But I’ll tell you, don’t start arguing. I’m just saying. You’re not missing much. Five of us got out. The big guy and the other unconscious one, you and me, and a fairy who’d been there for a long fucking time, it sounded like. We cleared the labs. Killed everyone who was left, a couple of warlocks and one guard. And then we lit it all on fire, divided up the guards’ cars, and took off as fast as possible.”
Picturing that helped, actually, no matter how right Drew probably was about it not being something I’d have wanted to witness. Seeing the warlocks all torn to shreds in the lab where they’d tormented me might’ve only added to my trauma; imagining it made me smile.
“What happened to the rest of them? I mean, the other prisoners?”
“The alpha and his—I don’t know what they were to each other, but the alpha and the passed-out guy. They left together. I gave him my name, told him where to find me, but he didn’t reciprocate. Maybe we’ll hear from them, I don’t know. I’ve been answering calls from unknown numbers just in case. The fairy hitched a ride with us for a few miles, and then had me stop in the middle of nowhere, got out, and vanished. So who fucking knows.”
I snuggled against Drew’s chest, shivering despite the warmth of the bed. To be all alone after surviving something like that…it made Drew’s grouchiness seem a lot more bearable. At least I had someone.
Someone who’d hold me in the middle of the night when I woke up terrified.
Someone who might be a little grouchy because he’d had to see and do all the terrifying things he’d just described to me.
