Page 17 of Not Another Yesterday
I jerk awake, my breathing out of control, my heart stumbling in my chest, desperate to find a steady rhythm. My skin is clammy, sweaty, despite the coolness in my room. Holy fuck. I had a nightmare. A nightmare so sickening that I roll out of bed with a groan, rush out of my room and into the pitch-black bathroom where I drop to my knees in front of the toilet and get violently sick.
Nightmares are nothing new. I started having them a couple of weeks after waking up in the hospital over a year ago. They were bad for a while—so bad that I’d fight going to sleep. But they had become less frequent, less vivid. I haven’t had one in over a month now.
Things have been going pretty smoothly. So smoothly, in fact, that I broached the subject of taking a break from my therapy sessions with Doctor Seivert. We had tapered our sessions down to once a week after the trial. We ramped back up briefly in August, around the anniversary of the last time my mom hurt me, when I was triggered and sleepless again. But by mid-September, I’d leveled out. Three weeks ago, Doctor Seivert agreed to let me try just living life for a while. She assured me that the moment I felt I needed her again, she was only a phone call away.
I didn’t expect things to take a turn so damn quickly.
In my nightmares, I’m always on the floor with my mother standing over me, her face contorted in anger as she beats and kicks the life out of me. But this? This was different. This wasme. And holy fucking shit, it’s freaking me the fuck out.
I stay hunched over the toilet, my forearms draped over the cool porcelain, my clammy forehead resting against my arms. And I try to breathe. I know it was just a dream, but it was so vivid, so fucking real. I swear I could feel the warmth of Cat’s soft skin as I hammered my fist into her perfect face, heard the cartilage of her nose as I broke it.What the fuck is wrong with me?
“Ran, are you okay?” Shane asks, standing in the doorway to the bathroom. His voice is raspy, thick with sleep.
“Yeah,” I groan.
“Are you coming down with something?”
“No.” I push myself up to stand, then walk to the sink and grab my toothbrush. I hate the taste of vomit in my mouth.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah.” I squeeze some toothpaste onto my toothbrush. My hands tremble with the adrenaline that horrific dream dumped into my system. I turn to him, my jaw tense. I’m completely shaken, and though my instinct is to push it deep down inside me, I decide to confide in my best friend. “I had a nightmare.”
Since moving in with Shane, I’ve had them only a few times, though Shane did have to wake me twice, so he knows what it is I’m dealing with.
“You haven’t had one in a while,” he says, watching me.
“Yeah. And this one was different. Shane”—I inhale a shaky breath—“I dreamed I was beating the shit out of Cat.” The nausea rolls back through me just saying it. I stare at the floor, ashamed, like I actually laid a hand on her.
“What?”
“Yeah. God, what the hell is wrong with me?” I groan, running my right hand roughly over my face.
“Wait, so, what happened in your dream?” He moves into the bathroom and sits on the bathtub ledge.
“I have no fucking clue. I just remember being so angry and then I just started hitting her. I didn’t even know it was Cat until she begged me to stop. And then she was on the floor in my dad’s house, lying in broken glass on that fucking rug,” I choke out, my head spinning. “Fuck, Shane, I feel like I’m losing my mind.”
“Okay, deep breaths, Ran.” He stands and grips my shoulders, grounding me. Cat does this, too—touches me when I’m spiraling. Shane picked it up somewhere along the way. It helps. It always helps. “First of all, it was just a dream. It was a fucking nightmare. I bet it was because of whatever the fuck your grandmother told you yesterday. It’s probably just your subconscious trying to work through it. I know for a fact that you would never lay a hand on Cat,” he says intently, his eyes locked on mine. “You would never, ever hurt her. It was just a dream, Ran. Just a terrible fucking dream.”
“But what if I—”
“You wouldn’t,” he says. “You won’t, Ran. I know that like I know that the sun will set tonight and will rise again tomorrow. You’re nothing like your mother or your grandfather.”
He holds my gaze.
“I see the way you look at Cat, how you touch her, how you talk to her. There’s not a chance in hell that you’d ever hurt her,” he says. “This dream was just a manifestation of your fears, but it means absolutely nothing.”
God, I want to believe him. I want it so badly.
He studies me for a moment longer, then gives me a nod. “You know what you need? Heavy weights. Go, get ready. We’re heading to the gym now. I’m going to text the guys that we’re leaving. They can meet us there whenever.”
“Okay,” I say, and start brushing my teeth while Shane walks back to his room. I glance at my watch. It’s barely six-thirty. I got a whopping three hours of sleep. But Shane’s right, I need to get this damn dream out of my head, out of my body, out of my system.
Cat
As I had expected, my mom is absolutely frantic today. This is a pattern of hers. My mom loves the holidays—all of them—and she loves the opportunity to get everyone together, to be surrounded by family and friends. Unfortunately, she also seems to forget how stressed she gets. She wants everything to be perfect—even though nobody careswhether things are perfect; they’re usually just happy to be together. She worries about the cleanliness of the house while trying to cook way too much food that she believes should live up to the creations of a Michelin-star chef. It would be funny if her frenzy wasn’t so contagious.
So I got up early this morning, even though I was bone tired after getting to bed so late last night. I honestly haven’t stayed at Murphy’s until Ronan closed since the beginning of September, since everyone went off to college. Last night was the first time in about three months that we were all together. My heart was full, even though I was worried about Ronan after his grandmother’s unannounced visit yesterday afternoon.
