She smiled tentatively. “Are you back with me?”
“What happened?” His throat felt as dry as if he’d been licking asphalt.
“Nothing. Much.” Jori glanced at the front door as she heard footsteps crunch past the cottage. “You, ah, had an episode. Water?”
She offered him a cold bottle of water, which he gulped in big slugs that splashed around his mouth and onto his shirtfront.
Jori was ready, mopping up the water with a napkin and then adjusting the blanket she must have thrown around his shoulders sometime earlier.
“How did you find me?”
“I was looking for you. One of the bellboys told me he’d seen a man with a service dog out on the front veranda. I couldn’t find you at first. There was a lot of confusion out on the drive. One of the hotel guests, not a wedding guest thank goodness, had a medical emergency. The EMTs had been called. Finally I saw Samantha. She was jumping on you and barking. As I got close I could see something was wrong. You had that thousand-yard stare I’ve heard about.”
Law absorbed this information without responding.
“I didn’t know what else to do so I brought you here.”
Law’s gaze did a jerky hyperalert perimeter check. “Where is here?”
“It’s one of the private cottages on the grounds of the hotel. Mom and Dad rented it for the newlyweds but they had other secret plans. Mom gave me the key so we’d have a place to stay for the night.”
“She saw me like that?”
“No, Law. I got the key at the reception. No one saw you. I doubt anyone would have noticed anything wrong but me.”
Law looked away. He could just imagine everyone staring as she’d led the zombie away from the front of the hotel. At least he hadn’t passed out.
Cold shame washed through him. He was soaked in his own sweat. He smelled of Scud—no.
He looked down. Sam lay by his side opposite Jori, her big warm body pressed along his flank. She was sprawled as if half asleep. But even in the gloom he could see her big soft eyes gleaming as she watched him.
Not Scud. Sa—Samantha. His heart constricted. Fuck! He’d really gone in deep this time.
He tried to swallow but his throat was still as dry as the desert he’d just left behind.
“This one’s not cold.” Jori held out a second plastic water bottle.
He took it and drained the contents in one long series of gulps. “Why did you stay?”
“I thought you might want company.” She didn’t touch him but he could feel the penetrating force of her gaze through the darkness.
“I don’t ever want company when this happens.”
She nodded and moved to get up.
He grabbed her arm. He didn’t ask her to stay, couldn’t, but after a second of tension against his hold, she relaxed back onto the sofa.
They sat in silence for several minutes before he took a deep breath. Images still slid in and out from the edges of his vision, but reality held. “Did I ask you about baking products?”
She frowned then smiled. “Oh. You mean the muffin recipe I was reciting.” He sensed embarrassment in her voice and in her shrug that rubbed her slender shoulder against his arm. “I didn’t know what else to do. I thought the sound of a voice going on about something ordinary would help ground you.”
“I don’t need help. I can handle it.”
“Okay.” She sounded matter-of-fact, as if they were talking about a sneezing fit instead of a full-blown flashback that even now kept his heart beating too quickly.
“Still, you’ve got to admit that fresh blueberry muffins is a pretty good lure away from the blue devils. That’s what my grandmother calls sadness.”
He scrubbed both hands down his face and noticed they shook. “You think I’m sad?”
“Not exactly.” He felt her sigh, the little up–down movement of her arm along his. She felt warm. Or maybe it was just that he was freezing.
“I don’t know much about PTSD. Can’t imagine what you’ve been through. But I know about wanting to be somewhere else, anywhere else, and knowing you can’t get there.”
She took a longer shuddery breath this time. “The first weeks I was in prison, I’d forget to breathe sometimes. I passed out once. And I was always holding my breath. I was afraid that when I closed my eyes at night the walls would fold in and swallow me. The counselor said I needed to find a safe place to go to in my head when that happened. A happy place. It took a few tries but I found that when the walls closed in I could go into my head to my grandmother’s recipe box. Blueberry muffins is the recipe I remembered best. By the time I’d mentally collected all the ingredients, stirred them up, and they were done baking, I’d moved away from the worst moments.”
Law thought about that. He’d had so many worst days he could mentally bake a bakery shop full of muffins each day probably for the rest of his life.
“Who’s Scud?”
He jerked. “What?”
“You were talking about Scud. Was he your last military K-9?”
“Yes.” Law gritted out the word.