Ollie closes his eyes for a moment and licks his lips. “Do you understand now?”
I bring my palm to his face, nodding. “Yeah. I do.”
Shaken awake, I blinked my eyes open to Ethan, standing over me with a bag in his hand.
“Did you have a terror?” he asked with his brows bunched together. “You’re crying.”
I swiped the back of my hand across my cheek and shook my head.
“I’m sorry I left you alone,” the mattress dipped as he sat beside me, “I have pants for you. A pair of jeans and these,” he took a pair from the bag and examined them, “sweats. They’ll probably be too big, but I grabbed the smallest size.”
It was the most he’d said in days.
Ethan was trying to reverse the damage he’d done, but couldn’t. We would never be the same, and all I wanted was to go back to sleep and be with the man in my dreams.
He would only come when the sun was out, never in the middle of the night, never when Ethan slept beside me.
I wished there was a way I could stay locked inside the dream forever and never leave, but Ethan always woke me. Ethan always took me away from him.
“Let’s take a walk,” he offered with a single shoulder shrug. “You need exercise. You can’t sleep your days away anymore.”
The last time we went for a walk, I’d taken off running into the woods but didn’t get far. He’d quickly caught up to me, wrestled me to the ground, and put me to sleep. Ethan was good at that. He knew just how much oxygen to cut off for me to lose consciousness. And the less I struggled, the quicker I was out and back in Ollie’s arms. That day had been the first time I dreamt of Ollie, and since then, it was all I wanted to do.
“Okay,” I mumbled through a sigh and sat up.
Victory laced his expression, and he broke the zip ties around my ankles. Once my feet would touch grass, it was game on. I would run, and he would catch me and put me back to sleep—back with Ollie. It would be a win-win for us both.
Ethan was right, the sweatpants were loose, but didn’t fall off my hipbones. Once my feet were securely inside my combat boots, he walked behind me up the stairs and toward the front door.
The same silver Nissan was parked in front of the cabin. The last time I’d seen it, I’d memorized the license plate number just in case, but I’d since forgotten the plate number, unable to contain information any longer. Even Ethan’s expressions had become unreadable. His body language, too. I had no idea what his plans or intentions were. Simply, I’d become a ghost, moving along to every demand and adhering to what Ethan had expected of me. I was nothing more than a shadow with morbid thoughts of everything I wanted to do to him.
I thought about breaking the glass cup against the dining table and slicing his throat. I thought about suffocating him in his sleep with a pillow. More than a dozen murders played out inside my sick head, none of which I had the heart anymore to carry out. There was a nagging voice stopping me. Ollie’s voice. The angel.
Side by side, we walked the trails in silence until we came across a clearing in the middle of the forest. Ethan paused and turned to face me with curious eyes. “I hadn’t always been like this, you know,” he began, and I pried my eyes away from him and toward the tree line. “I had my first kiss here,”—in my peripheral, he took a few steps to his right— “Actually, right here to be exact. Her name was Ashlyn. I was fifteen when she showed up one night on the doorstep of my family’s cabin wrapped in a winter coat over her pajamas, asking if we had a bottle opener.”
Ethan’s chuckle should have made me feel lighter, but it didn’t. I froze, catatonic and eyes fixed out before me, refusing to look at him and counting how many steps it would take before reaching the forest.
“I mean, what on earth could she need a bottle opener for? She was fourteen at the time, hardly of drinking age, especially at one o’clock in the morning. But later, I discovered it was for her father.”
“I don’t care,” I finally whispered, but the frozen, lifeless parts of me slowly chipped away. The only thing it revealed was a rage. For some reason, Ethan’s confession made me angry.
“No,” he appeared before me, cutting off my direct line to the trees, “It’s time you heardmystory.” His eager tone stirred the calm of the woods, causing birds to fly from their branches. I held my gaze, not moving an inch. “I walked her back, all the way to her cabin. It was a tad over a two-mile walk. Four thousand one hundred and forty steps. But it didn’t take all of them for me to fall for her. It only took half. Right here, I stopped her rambling about how crazy it was that we found ourselves walking in the middle of the night in the cold, two strangers. She joked that I could easily murder her and throw her body into the woods, but said she felt safe with me. And something came over me. If I didn’t kiss her right then and there, I was so afraid I would never have the chance again. So, I kissed her,” his voice faltered. “I’d never kissed before, and I’m sure she hadn’t either, and it was sloppy and messy, but it was ours.”
I kissed Ollie in my dreams. Over and over, we kissed, and it wasn’t sloppy or messy. Every single time it was earth-shattering, breathtaking, and painted an endless array of color in my black and white dreams.
“We walked the rest of the way after that, hand in hand until we reached her cabin. Her dad yelled from the inside once he heard us laughing, so we said our goodbyes after I kissed her again. It was the first and last time I ever saw her. The next morning, I woke up to helicopters flying over us, firetrucks, and alarms going off. Her cabin went up in flames because her drunk dad fell asleep with a cigarette in his hand. Ashlyn and her little sister never even made it out of their beds. They died in their fucking sleep, but her dad and his mate made it out alive. I punished myself every godforsaken day for not listening to my gut. I should’ve never let her back inside that house with those two drunks.”
Ethan paused, and the only thing simmering in my mind was the fact the girl died in her sleep. If I died in my sleep, did it mean I could be with Ollie locked away in a dream forever? The idea washed a sense of peace over me.
“That’s why I joined the police force,” Ethan continued. “All I’ve ever wanted to do was protect those who couldn’t protect themselves. I’m not going to hurt you, Jett. I’d never intentionally hurt you. Despite what you might be thinking right now, I do care about you. Maybe I’m not doing it right, and maybe I just don’t know how, but … fuck … I don’t know. Anytime I let someone I care about out of my grasp, death follows. I’m scared for a million damn reasons to let you go at this point.”
I think a part of me could have felt for him at that moment or understand him at the very least, but this need to run had complete control of me.
As soon as Ethan turned his back and took a step in the opposite direction, I sprinted toward the trees.
One.
Two.
