“All right, then. You can come inside.”
To be honest, I’m a little surprised she’s agreeing to this. If I were in her position, I probably wouldn’t have even opened the door. She melts into the shadows again, and I follow her into her apartment, my movements very fucking slow, and very fucking considered. I’ve never been tagged with a Taser before, but I can’t imagine it’s any fun. Newan hits a light somewhere inside the apartment, and her cold, sterile little world comes to life under a series of halogen spotlights. She jerks her head toward a massive couch, which has been parked right in front of a vast wall of glass. No sign of a TV. It’s as though the sweeping view of the city in the distance, visible through the floor-to-ceiling windows, has negated the requirement for such a thing. I stalk through the apartment, my mouth aching from the effort of keeping myself from smirking as Newan trains the Taser squarely on my chest. I shrug out of my jacket, mainly so she can see I’m just wearing a T-shirt and I’m not packing anything under the leather, and then I slump down onto the couch.
Newan sidles past me and perches on the edge of an arty, thoroughly uncomfortable-looking armchair. If the chair were a person, it would be a supermodel—far too skinny and far too pretentious. “So what do you want to talk about?” Newan asks.
“Aren’t you supposed to tell me?”
She rolls her eyes. I bet this woman was such a spoiled brat in high school. “Zeth, it’s midnight. This is hardly your typical session, okay? Let’s cut to the chase.”
“All right.” I fix my eyes on her, wondering how she’s going to take this. I haven’t told anyone about the darkness that plagues me. Not a single soul on the face of the planet. I’ve imagined the reaction of others enough times, though. Disgust. Horror. Pity. Pity is the worst. “I have nightmares,” I tell her. “And I’m often violent when I wake from them.”
“And what happens in these nightmares?” she asks. The change in her is subtle enough, but I see it a mile away—she suddenly becomes a doctor, albeit a highly suspicious, cautious doctor, instead of a woman holding a grudge. The way she asks about my nightmares is so perfunctory, so clipped and clinical, that it’s almost easy to tell her. Almost.
“I’m asleep in my bed,” I tell her. “I’m young. I don’t know how old.”
“Before or after your parents were killed?” Newan cuts in. No softly, softly approach with that one. She just comes out with it.
“After,” I say.
“Do you know where you are?”
“Yes.”
She gives me a look.
“I’m in my bedroom. I’m in my bed at Charlie’s place.”
“Right. And what happens while you’re in bed at Charlie’s place?”
“I wake up, and there’s a pillow over my face. I can’t breathe.”
Newan nods, passing the Taser from one hand to the other. Shouldn’t she be writing this shit down or something? “And what do you do?” she asks.
“I freak the fuck out. I kick and scramble and fight myself free. I fall out of the bed, and I hug the wall. I see…I see him, then.”
“Him?”
“He says he’s me, a shadow of me, but I know he can’t be. This man is fully grown and smells like bourbon, and I’m small. I’m really small.”
“So you talk to him?”
“He talks to me.”
“Does he say anything else?”
“He tells me he’s going to kill me.”
“And how do you react to that?”
I shoot her an unimpressed look. “Badly.”
“I’m just trying to get a sense of who this version of you is, Zeth. Sometimes our subconscious embodies our secret fears, making us weak in our dreams, stripping us of our power so we feel incapable of protecting or defending ourselves. This often relates to a sense of insecurity we may not even be aware we’re experiencing in our day-to-day lives. And given the life you lead, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what’s happening with you.”
“That’s not what’s happening with me,” I tell her.
“Oh no? Because you’re invincible, I take it? Because you’re the big, bad Zeth Mayfair and you don’t worry about a fucking thing?”
I laugh at that. She’s doing a relatively good job of hiding it, but I feel like pointing it out—Hey, Doc. Your contempt’s showing. “No. I’m not invincible. And I do worry about things. More and more every fucking day, it seems. I say that’s not what’s happening with me, because it really isn’t. My subconscious doesn’t fuck with what happens in my head when I sleep. It’s more like a broken video recorder. It plays back the same thing on repeat over and over. It replays what actually happened.”
That takes her a second to process. “So this is real? Was real?”
“It was.”