She laughs, her warm breath brushing over my lips before she kisses me again. “I won’t say no to that.”
Before I can let my dick start calling the shots, I drag her over to the sofa and bundle her into my arms. For a long moment, the two of us just lie there. It feels surreal, to have her back in my arms again. I tried not to think about the worst possible outcome while Lawrence had her, but it was impossible to stop the dark thoughts from creeping in. The possibility of never seeing her again, of never having another quiet moment together, or watching her face light up when she tries a new flavor of ice cream. There are so many firsts she has yet to experience, and I want to capture every single one of them. This spitfire of a girl hasn’t had the chance to live yet, and I can’t imagine what sort of person I would have devolved into if Lawrence had robbed her of the opportunity to find out.
“What’s in the envelope?” I ask, pointing at where it’s still sitting, untouched, on the desk.
Hadley sighs and turns her head toward the desk, a frown tugging down the corners of her lips. “Barton set me up with a bank account.”
“Is that a bad thing?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want his money, or to be tied to him in any way, and I definitely don’t want to feel indebted to him.”
“I wouldn’t necessarily look at it as being indebted to him, but more as acknowledging what is rightfully yours.”
She turns to look at me. “That’s what Hawk says too.”
“Well, you don’t have to decide what to do about the money right now. Let’s just focus on getting to the end of the school year.”
We lapse into silence for a bit, before I dare to ask, “How have you been coping?”
She lets out a long exhale at my question and focuses on her finger as it trails a pattern across my shirt for several minutes before she finally responds.
“It’s weird being back here. Everything feels so…normal. I’m not sure how to go back to the way things were before.”
“No one is expecting you to just dive back in like nothing happened. You went through a trauma; it’s natural for you to have trouble adjusting.”
She just sighs and snuggles deeper into me. She’s got such strong protection barriers erected around herself that if you didn’t know her as well as I do—as we all do—or be on the lookout for small tells, you’d think she had assimilated back into her regular routine without any issues. She’s more standoffish than she used to be though, and the defenses she had in place when she first showed up here have been reconstructed and reinforced with steel. It’s like she’s here, with us, but she isn’t. A part of her is still trapped back in the compound, and I have no idea how to bring her back to us. I’m a school counsellor, not a goddamn psychiatrist. I’m not equipped to deal with post-traumatic stress. I know enough to know that’s what this is, and that I don’t have the necessary training in cognitive therapy to help her. I’m afraid of pushing her too hard and making things worse, but equally letting her struggle through alone isn’t going to help her. So instead, I’m settling for some middle ground where hopefully she knows we are here for her, but I’m not pushing her to talk about anything before she’s ready.
I roll us over so we’re lying side by side on the narrow sofa and I can look into her eyes. “Whatever you’re feeling right now is perfectly okay. It doesn’t make you weak, or less of a person. Taking another person's life can take a huge toll on you, mentally.”
Hadley scoffs softly. “I’ve killed people before, Beck.”
“This is different, and you know it. Lawrence wasn’t just some nameless, faceless hit.” I tuck a strand of hair behind her ear. “It’s okay if you’re happy he’s dead, or if you have mixed feelings. It’s even okay to not know how you’re feeling about it.”
She lowers her eyes, but I see the sheen of tears before she blocks them from my view, and I pull her in against my chest, stroking her hair reverently.
“It feels so surreal,” she murmurs. “I see him sometimes, or hear his voice…it’s like—I feel like I’m going crazy.” Her words are a barely heard whisper, but they break my heart all the same, and I wrap my arms more tightly around her, kissing the top of her head.
***
“We need to talk about Hadley,” I tell the guys on Sunday night. Hadley is at her movie evening with Wilder and Emilia, and it’s the first time since she’s been back that I’ve had a chance to sit down with the guys and actually talk. I hate talking about her behind her back like this, but I don’t see that there is anything else for it.
“We do,” Mason agrees. “I’m worried about her. She’s running herself ragged. She’s at the gym for hours every morning, and last night I caught her sneaking out for a run after we all went to bed. I don’t think she’s sleeping, not that she will let any of us in to sleep with her.”
“I snuck into her room the first night we got her back, but she’s started locking the door.” I can see the hurt in Cam’s face and the worry in his eyes.
“She seemed okay the first couple of nights, but since then, she’s been distant,” Mason explains.
I mull over his words for a second before saying, “I think she’s having nightmares, and she doesn’t want any of us to know about them. The painkillers she was on when she first came home probably knocked her out at night, and now that she’s no longer taking them, she’s not able to sleep as well.”
“It’s not just nightmares, though,” West mentions. “She’s not herself. Someone's phone went off in computer class the other day, and she nearly jumped out of her skin. I could see it in her eyes, she wasn’t there anymore. It was as if the noise triggered something and she disappeared somewhere else for a few minutes. She shrugged it off, but she was distant for the rest of the day after that.”
I chew on my bottom lip before deciding to tell the others what she confessed to me the other day. “She’s seeing and hearing Lawrence.” I feel like I’m betraying Hadley’s trust by telling them, but honestly, I don’t know what to do, and I know they’re just as worried about her as I am. If we have any hope of helping her, we need to work together, and to do that, we all need to know what’s going on with her.
“What?” Cam looks paler than he did a moment ago. “But he’s—”
“Dead,” I finish for him. “Yeah, you and I both saw him. There was no surviving that.”
“That bad?” West’s nose scrunches.
“I’m pretty sure I could see his intestines.”
“She was in some sort of trance when I arrived. It was as if she couldn’t stop herself, she just kept stabbing him.”
I sigh. “I think she has PTSD from it all.”
Cam nods thoughtfully. “Who could blame her? Anyone else would be a curled up ball, rocking back and forth on the floor, muttering nonsense to themselves.”