The living room was quiet, strewn with sleeping bodies in awkward positions. Winder grabbed a pillow off the couch as we passed, tiptoeing around the passed-out house guests. He tugged me inside his room, closing the door, and locking it behind both of us.
I glanced back at him. There was only one bed in here, and not a very big one at that. Where was he planning on sleeping?
He smirked, apparently reading my mind. “Don’t worry. I’ll sleep on the floor. I just don’t trust you not to try and sneak out the door again. This way, if you want to escape, you’ll have to step on me first.”
“If you don’t want me to leave, just say so.” I climbed back into the bed, listening to Winder settling on the floor next to me. The sheets he had swapped the garbage-covered ones for were less scratchy, but not by much. I wasn’t about to complain. I could be home alone, listening out for every little creak, every scratch or whisper of a breeze. All things considered, it could be a lot worse than Winder’s bed.
“You’d like that too much.”
Silence filled the room, the earliest hours of the morning beginning to fight the night sky. The sun would be up in a few short hours, and the last two days would be behind me. Somehow, it felt like I had known Winder for a lot longer than that.
Although, if I was to believe him, I had. I just didn’t remember.
I wasn’t sure which was harder to digest.
“Blaire.”
I smiled to myself. My name was always a demand in his mouth, never a question. It was expected I would respond. One day I wouldn’t respond, just to see if it would bother him. “Yeah.”
“Did you have the nightmare again?”
“Kind of.” The dream was already disappearing the longer I was awake, and I grasped at the edges of the sensations that had woken me up. Sadness. Desperation. Longing. Anger. Fear.
He hummed. “What do you mean, kind of?”
“I mean, yes, I had the dream. But it was different. There was blood, and someone dying, but I don’t think I killed him. I think I was trying tosavehim. And the other weird thing was that I knew it was a dream…” This was what my life had come to, trying to decipher reality from delusion.
“Would talking about it help?”
I laughed, even as my heart squeezed. He was kind of sweet when he wanted to be. “Are you offering to talk out a dream with me?”
“I asked if it would help,” Winder snapped.
Never mind. “Yes. But don’t feel like you have to. I don’t want to put you out.”
Quiet stretched between us again, the understanding of two people who knew things that bound them together, the fool and the fooled.
“You’re already in my bed, Blaire. We might as well talk.” Winder’s voice finally drifted up from the floor. “What did he look like? The man in your dream.”
I frowned, scraping the back of my memory. “All I can remember is that his chest was stained with his blood.” I wanted to remember more. I didn’t want it to disappear before I had a chance to dissect it, especially now that I knew there could be clues to the truth hidden inside. “Sorry.”
“There’s nothing to be sorry for.”
“No. Well, yeah, Iamsorry for sticking you in this situation. But that’s what he said to me. Right before I woke up, he grabbed my wrist and saidsorry.” Those same feelings drifted over me again, in reverse this time. Fear. Anger. Longing. Desperation.Sadness. I touched my cheek to find it wet. A tear. The sadness was so overwhelming I was sitting here crying over a dream.
“Sorry.” Winder rolled the word around in his mouth, and for some reason I couldn’t get the image of his mouth out of my mind, and the way his full lips would round around the word. Everything was so deliberate with him. Purposeful. He was used to getting what he wanted in a world that wanted nothing more than to chew you up and spit you out. “Why do you think he said that?”
“I wish I knew,” I whispered. I wasn’t even sure if he’d be able to hear me, but the words needed to be said all the same. The gray light behind Winder’s thin curtains was growing brighter, the only sound his quiet breathing coming from the floor. “Are you still awake?”
“Yeah,” he replied. “I don’t sleep much anymore.”
I wasn’t sure what he meant by that. Maybe he had nightmares, too.
“Are you okay?” he asked. He shuffled on the floor, and I felt bad for making him sleep down there. He wasn’t exactly young, and the floor couldn’t have been that comfortable.
“Besides trying to make sense of everything I thought was true? I’m good.” I rolled onto my side toward the sound of his voice, my hand flopping off the edge of the bed. Normally, I’d be afraid of something grabbing me and dragging me to my doom, but I wasn’t sure a monster under the bed could be any worse than my current life. Hell, it might even be an improvement.
A whisper-light touch stroked my hand, and I wanted to pull back. Winder wasn’t a monster under the bed. Right now, hemight be the only person standing between them and me. But a touch this gentle from him was…unexpected.
