I felt arms wrap around me and hold me tight. I turned to him, to his familiar scent and pressed my face into his chest. Grayson held me while my mind replayed it again and again. And again.
When my crying subdued, he brushed the hair backwards that had stuck to my face from all the tears. His eyes were pained as he looked down at me. “I’m so sorry, Ava. For everything. It’s all my fault.”
The way he said my name, left a trail of warmth through my body. “Not all of it.” I had thought the opposite just last night.
“I’m the reason you’re in this fucking forest in the first place,” he echoed my thoughts.
I looked up at him. His hair was wet, glistening in the moonlight. “You saved me.”
He shook his head. “If I’d been there a few minutes earlier…”
I chuckled darkly. “Yeah, that would have been nice.”
He wiped another tear away. “I’m sorry, Ava.”
“Don’t be. If you didn’t show up…” I looked away. It took me a few seconds before I could trust my voice again. “Thank you, Grayson.”
I decided to be brave, while on the subject. I had to be sure. “Can I ask you something?”
He looked at me wearily but nodded once.
“When you drugged me that first night, did you…” I trailed off.
“No, Ava. I didn’t touch you. Not like that.” He lifted my chin so I would look at him.
“But I had different clothes on.”
He shook his head, his eyes piercing mine. “Gemma dressed you. I couldn’t get to all your cuts with the amount of clothes you had on, so I asked Gemma to dress you in those pyjamas. I know it was an invasion on your body, and I’m sorry about that, but I needed to make sure you weren’t bleeding out on me somewhere. Gemma was with me the whole time if you’d like to ask her about it.”
I believed him, but… “But why drug me then?”
“You were in shock. I could see you losing it. It was the easiest way to calm you.”
“Or you could have just been nice to me.”
He shrugged. “I’m not a nice person, Ava. And the whole situation pissed me off. You’re a fucking thorn in my side, Princess. I don’t know what to do with you.” He got up, pulling a hand through his hair, then threw a log on the fire.
It was dark already. There was a rustling sound in a tree close to us. We both pretended not to notice it. It called to me—my name whispering through the trees. It almost sounded human. Almost.
Grayson took a subtle step closer to me but didn’t dare acknowledge that he also heard it. He threw another log on the fire and took the opportunity to put himself between me and the thing up in the tree, closest to us.
I quickly whispered a prayer to Nyx while drawing her protection symbol in the dirt. “Goddess Nyx, I pray to thee, protect us from harm, seen or unseen. Cloak us in your night, to keep us from malefic sight.”
After another minute, the rustling moved further away. The tension in my shoulders eased a bit. That was very close.
There were a lot of stories about what these things were, and how they came to be. Almost just as much as the reasoning people came up with to deny their existence.
The story I chose to believe was the one where the gods created these beings to keep people away from something hidden deep within the heart of the forest. Or maybe they were an experiment by the gods gone wrong.
Or maybe they were all just a hallucination, caused by some unknown fungus’s spores in the air we breathed.
“I think it’s time we go to bed,” Grayson said calmly, but I could hear the tension in his voice. He pulled me from the log, careful not to step on the symbol I drew on the ground and smiled down at me. “Whatever that is, it seemed to work.”
I rolled my eyes at him. “You don’t look like the religious type.”
He lifted me and carried me to the tent while smiling. “But thank whatever god that you are.”
WhenIduckedintothe tent, I wasn’t expecting to see the sleeping bags separated again. And I had to admit, I felt a tinge of disappointment. I longed for that feeling I had the first time Grayson held me. Like the world couldn’t hurt me anymore.
