23
I WOKE, MY breaths pushing from my lungs like broken glass. Jackson wasn’t in bed beside me, and I curled into a ball, glad for his absence.
Pieces of my dream were slipping away, and I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to try to hold on to them to examine or to push them away so I wouldn’t have to.
I’d been twelve again, but in that way that dreams don’t make sense, I was also twenty-two. Mom and Dad were arguing in the kitchen, and Mr. Ames, Dad’s business partner, had come upstairs. He said he was looking for a bathroom, but there were two on the bottom floor. He touched my shoulder. He told me I was soft. And like those animated flip books I played with as a kid, the sheets of my dream began to fan, and it wasn’t Mr. Ames’s hand against me, but the boy I’d lost my virginity to just a year and a half later.
He trailed his fingers to my neck, and then down to my chest. The pages flipped. More hands, a different one on every page. Some looked familiar. Some didn’t. But with each page, the hands swept across my body. The pages flipped and the locations began to change along with the hands—the back of a pickup truck, my freshman dorm, my apartment, a few hostels.
The scene shifted, and it was me and Mr. Ames in all those places, and I screamed and cried long after the dream had shifted on to a new person, a new place. And each hand carved away a part of me, sanded and chiseled until I was hollowed out, a wisp of a girl.
I pulled away, crying, and stumbled from a hostel bed to my parents’ living room couch. This time I was just me, present day, but my parents looked down at me like I was still only four feet tall.
Dad was talking, saying I was blowing things out of proportion. He morphed into Mr. Ames for just as second as he said, “Quit playing the victim.”
Mom asked me questions, asked me how Mr. Ames touched me and where. When I showed them, when I put my hand to my chest … I knew what was coming next. I knew the words like they were carved into my skin, like the pulse of my heart beat them out in Morse code.
I waited for them, cringed for them, begged for them because I needed to hear that it didn’t count.
But instead, my world was filled with Hunt, with his all seeing eyes, with his blistering touch, with his consuming kiss and the words, “Tell me this counts.”
His hands, large and callused lay atop my chest where the heart beneath had been sanded down to a tiny thing. In my dream, he held my crumbling body, and he told me that it was okay. His touch was soft and perfect and exactly what I wanted, but I didn’t stop crumbling in his arms, no matter how gentle he was.
That was when the lies I’d built so high that they scraped the sky shattered. Every brick I’d laid between me and that day when I was twelve crumbled as if they were made of something less than sand.
Because it mattered.
Who touches you, whether it’s your skin or your soul, matters.
I sat, huddled alone in bed in that Italian apartment, shaking from a dream that I knew was nothing more than synapses firing in my brain, collecting recent thoughts and putting them together regardless of sense or order. I knew that’s all it was, but things didn’t always have to make sense to be true.
And I could feel every hand that ever touched me, the ones that I’d welcomed along with the one that I didn’t, as if they were bearing down on me, pushing me below the current until I had no choice but to breathe in that shattered glass of truth.
It all counted.
Hunt walked through the door of our poisoned oasis, held up a bag, and said, “I’ve got breakfast.”
It took everything in me not to cry. Because he was perfect. So goddamn perfect. And I was a mess.
“Thanks,” I shrugged, the corners of my lips jumping briefly in a similar motion. “I’m not hungry, though.”
He laid the bag, probably containing some kind of pastry on the bedside table, and toed off his shoes.
Lifting one knee up onto the bed, he smirked, before crawling toward me. “I can think of a few ways to work up your appetite.”
He pushed my tangled hair to the other side of my neck, and lowered his mouth to my shoulder. I closed my eyes thinking he might be just the thing to clear away the cobwebs from all those newly opened doors.
Instead, his kiss was like a puncture wound, and I couldn’t decide which part hurt worse—the beginning or the end, the knife going in or pulling out. His sweet kiss only made me think of all the other kisses I’d given away without a thought. It only made me think of how much I didn’t deserve him. Or rather … he didn’t deserve to get stuck with someone like me.
I moved away from him in the guise of facing him instead.
“How long have you been up?”
He settled back against the headboard. “A while.”
“Couldn’t sleep?”
I wished I had never gone to sleep.
“Something like that.”
“More nightmares?”
He took hold of my waist, and pulled me back between his thighs. My back rested against his chest, and he tucked his chin over my shoulder.
“Enough about that. Any thoughts on how you’d like to spend the day, princess?”
The scruff on his jaw grazed my neck, and I shivered. His hand smoothed up my thigh, and panicked, I said, “Let’s go out.”
He paused for a few seconds, and then wrapped his arms around me in a loose embrace.
“And do what?”
“I thought you were the one with all the plans.”
“Yes, well.” He pulled me close. “I’m easily distracted.”
God, first I can’t get him to make a move, and now he’s full of them.
“What about swimming? There was that swimming hole that the lady at the restaurant mentioned.”
“As if I could say no to you in a bathing suit.”
I donned the same swimsuit I’d worn that night in Buda-pest. His eyes went dark when he saw me, and he grasped one of the ties hanging off my hip, tugging me forward.