She wasn’t sure he did know, however.
And it was only right that she didn’t lay claim to whatever he had been through. “Yeah, but I doubt you were having nightmares while awake about stuff coming out of the walls or out from under the bed. Then imagining that the stories you wrote were stoppingthem from getting you,” she said, half of her cringing as she did at the thought. Sure that he would now find it all just too weird. She even tried to look away, at anything but that steady, assessing gaze of his.
But when she did, he followed her.
He bent his head until she had to meet his gaze again.
And it was so steady, and so serious, and so damnedgood.
“Right, and which one troubled your dad the most? Which one did he find the most objectionable? Your terror of something you desperately felt like you needed protecting from? Or the slightly weird way you, a teenager, achild, went about protecting yourself from it?” he asked.
She couldn’t answer him, however. It made her too speechless to hear someone put it like that. As if they believed the things she’d feared had been real, or at least real enough to her that her dad should have cared about them, instead of her writing spells in the air. And somehow, Jack knew it. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. Listen, kid. Sometimes you’re not just imagining things. Sometimes you haven’t just gone round the twist. And even if you have, even if you are, even if you were, it’s okay to do little things to help you get through. A good father wants you to be safe, no matter how little he understands what you’re scared of. A good father believes his daughter, and wants her to be okay. He doesn’t send her somewhere even less okay than where she already is, with a terror in her heart for the only weapons she believes she has. Do you understand?”
No, she thought.
Yes, her heart said.
“I understand that nobody has ever said anything like this to me before,” she told him, finally, once the ability to speak came back. And he looked so disgusted at whoever these nobodies were she could honestly imagine him spitting.
“Yeah, well, maybe they should have. Maybe they’re guilty of not.”
“Maybe they thought it was all fine. Maybe they thought it was for the best.”
“For the bestis the enemy of what’s right, kid. Don’t forget that.”
Jesus Christ, she almost blurted out. But before she could, he stood. He left her sprawled on his carpet, flabbergasted, and went to his dresser. Gathered up a pen and a notepad, and held it out to her. Then when she didn’t automatically take it, he knelt and forced it into her hands. “Anytime you feel scared, you write down something. You write it now—and not like a kid playing pretend. Like it’s real. Write like it’s real. Write what the adult you would do to stop a threat to your well-being.”
And for the first time in over a decade, she looked at the pen in her hands—just a battered silver thing, with that same word emblazoned on it that his hat had, that same strange company out of a Stephen King story thing that had made her feel weird—and she wasn’t afraid. She didn’t feel embarrassed.
She clicked the button on top, and wrote down almost instinctively:
Let me be. Let me be. Let me be.
And when she did, she felt it in her bones.
A kind of brightness, a burgeoning spark. Something reigniting after years of long disuse. Then, finally, a sense that the darkness she hadn’t even known had been closing in was drawing back. It lifted, and for the first time in a long time, she felt safe. She felt okay. She felt like herself again, at last.
CHAPTER NINE
She expected to be embarrassed when he emerged from the bedroom in the outfit she’d suggested. After all, that was what usually happened when she freaked out over weird stuff, or spilled too much of her guts. Five minutes spent away from whoever she’d spilled her guts to, and suddenly she’d be filled with emotional buyer’s remorse. And this time she’d really spent a lot. She’d tried to hide in his closet. Then told him things she had never toldanyone. Mortifying things that usually made her feel delusional and weird.
It made sense that she might be awkward with him.
It even seemed like a good thing, in one way. If she was busy being nervous about seeming like a weirdo who freaked out over probably nonexistent things, she was less likely to make a fool of herself on a date that wasn’t even really a date at all. She would be reserved, mindful. Not prone to gushing over him, or getting ideas in her head.
But then he finally strolled out in the outfit she’d suggested, and every single certainty and slip of reassurance she’d just felt dissolved in an instant. Partly, she thought, because of how he seemed: a little nervous to show off his look, one hand pulling at his cuff, seeming slightly baffled over the choices she’d made, already mouthing,Are you sure this is right?Partly because of theclothes themselves—that soft Hawaiian shirt contrasting sharply with the rough facial hair, the big shoulders, the belt she’d chosen with that heavy buckle.
But mostly it was the way her brain immediately registered him.
Not as a person she’d just embarrassed herself in front of. Not as a source of awkwardness. No—all she could see was a kind man who’d easily accepted something so weird and uncomfortable and off-putting. He was still accepting it now, in fact. He didn’t even mention it. He didn’t even look like it was something worth going over again. There wasn’t so much as a hint of judgment on his face.
Like it was normal to have odd things like that in your past.
And to the point where he still saw her as someone to be respected. He still thought she had advice for him worth listening to, and ideas that would help him on his journey toward the affectionate, kind girl of his dreams. “What do you think?” he said. “Good enough to pass for a normal, dateable man?”
So it really wasn’t a shock when her heart tried to answer for her.
It dissolved her from the inside out, immediately. Then just jumped directly into her eyes. She could practically feel her own gaze trying to swoon all over everything about him.Whatever you do, do not throw yourself at this man, she had to order herself.
