The canyon.
Her arms were around me at the edge of all that emptiness.
‘I don’t want to lose you, too, Tate.’
‘Don’t promise me something you can’t keep. Just tell me you’ll do everything in your power to come back to me.’
I think of the weight of her on the back of my bike, and her cheek against my back on the ride home. The way she looked at the show, leaning forward in her seat, one hand pressed flat against her collarbone, completely absorbed and unaware of what she looked like from where I was sitting.
The way she handed the jacket back.
Our fingers not touching.
‘Goodnight, Tate.’
The moment at the canyon when her face was close, my eyes dropped to her mouth, and the thought arrived like cold water.
What are you doing? She’s not yours to kiss.
I stare at the ceiling, telling myself with considerable firmness that I am going to sleep because Mexico is coming. I need to be sharp, and whatever is happening in this house in the quiet hours of a Saturday night is not something I have the luxury of examining right now.
My eyes close and open again almost immediately.
Serious trouble,I think into the dark.In serious, serious trouble.
Memphis shifts at the foot of the bed and sighs, the sigh of a dog who is sleeping perfectly well and can’t understand why his human isn’t doing the same.
“Don’t,” I tell the ceiling.
***
The scream pulls me out of bed before I’m conscious of moving. Halfway down the hallway before the thought arrives, naked, which is how I always sleep, which is not how I should be arriving at her door. I turn back, grab the shorts from the chair, pull them up as I go, and move again before the thought is finished.
The sound came from Sophia’s room.
Pushing her door open.
She is sitting up in bed, covers twisted around her, hair loose and wild, hands pressed flat against the mattress on either side as if she is checking it is real. Her eyes are open, but she isn’t fully here yet, still somewhere between the dream and the room, that disoriented terror of someone who has woken themselves screaming and hasn’t landed.
She is wearing Tracker’s T-shirt.
She is shaking.
I cross to the bed and sit on the edge beside her. “Hey,” I say quietly. “I’m here. You’re okay.”
She looks at me, her eyes focusing, coming back from wherever the dream took her, and something in her face cracks open all at once. “Ryan,” she says. Barely a whisper. “He was, the fire, I could see him, and I couldn’t—” She stops and presses her hand over her mouth. “I couldn’t get to him.”
“It was a dream. You’re safe. You’re here.”
She is still shaking.
Reaching out, a hand goes over hers on the mattress, just that, just the warmth of it, and her breathing begins to even slightly.
“It felt so real,” she says. “It always feels so real.”
“It was. And now you’re here.”
“Every time I think it’s getting better and then…” she exhales. “Then it comes back.”
