Four Score

Seven

Pain and darkness. Terror and despair.

My nightmare holds me under and pins me down. It leaves marks in me like a shark’s sharp teeth, even as I thrash in damp sheets, struggling to wake up.

It’s nothing new. My mother once told me that I used to have night terrors when I was a baby. That I would call out in my sleep, eyes awake but blank, and she would have to hold me up to the lights and shake me awake.

But when I was younger, my dreams were fluid, innocent, ever-changing. I might have looked panicked, but I always woke up and was fine. Whatever haunted me in my sleep never followed me through to my waking.

Not anymore.

Something completely disturbing, something that I have pushed away into the darkest recesses of my mind continues to trouble me as I lie panting, twisted in thin sheets, goose bumps and sweat lining my exposed skin.

I didn’t have a single nightmare the entire time I slept beside Dornan Ross.

All those weeks, the months I had lain beneath him as he drove himself inside me, enough to make me shatter. Then, afterward, the way he would lay a possessive arm over me, so that I couldn’t move away, pinned to the bed as his sticky fluid seeped from me and turned cold beneath us.

I slept like a baby every single night.

It disturbed me greatly, so greatly that I didn’t think about it, forced myself to turn off, but suddenly I’m reminded of those nights, and now I know why I wasn’t scared.

I wasn’t scared because I knew where he was. And I knew, that as long as I was with him, and he believed my lies, that I was safe. Not safe in the traditional sense—this was the man who beat me, who stabbed me for talking out of turn, who fucked me senseless, and choked me until I saw stars more than once.

But I knew where he was. And I knew he was under my spell. And I was feeding off his pain and grief like an addict, getting hit after hit as his sons fell like dominoes, victims of my treachery.

Now, I don’t know what’s going to happen. If he’s going to wake up. If he’s going to figure me out before I deliver his final death sentence.

If it’s going to be him that dies, or me.

If Jase really forgives me, or if he’s going to grow to hate me so much that maybe he’ll pull the trigger himself.

Tonight’s nightmare is a classic. I’m riding in the back of the car, on the way to my death six years ago. Dornan is in the driver’s seat, Maxi in the passenger seat, and Chad sits next to me, a smug smirk on his demented face. I try to open the car door, but there’s no handle. I bang on the window and suddenly, all three men turn and stare at me, but they don’t have faces. Only rotted flesh and shriveled white blobs where their eyes should be. Chad stares at me with unseeing white eyes and underneath a fat worm burrows out, making a hole in his cheek. Suddenly the car is covered in writhing maggots as Chad slides closer, caging me against the door with his arms.

I scream, and as I do, the maggots make a beeline for my mouth, crawling from everywhere to make their home inside me.

I need to get out of the car. I’m not dead like them. I’m not dead! As Chad grins and leans down so our eyes are inches apart, he laughs and brushes a maggot-infested hand across my cheek.

“What, Julie?” he asks, his breath smelling of decay and death. “You think you can escape us because we’re dead? You’ll never be free. You belong to us.”

He comes closer, pressing his dead lips to mine, forcing his tongue into my mouth. I scream as my throat fills with writhing maggots, desperate for their next meal.

“Juliette!” Rough hands are shaking me. I swat blindly in front of me, still half-trapped in my disgusting nightmare.

“Julz, it’s me.” The hands leave me and suddenly the room is bathed in light, making me wince painfully at the sudden brightness.

Jase stands just inside the door to his bedroom, one hand still on the light switch. He’s wearing black boxer shorts and nothing else, despite the cold night. His hair is all mussed up and his eyes are puffed from sleep. The swelling seems to have gone down a lot on the eye that Elliot punched, but I can see a cluster of broken blood vessels in his eyes, making a tiny spider web of bright red threads.

“You sounded like were being murdered,” he says. “Nearly gave me a fucking heart attack.”

I rub my bleary eyes, looking at the digital radio clock on the nightstand. One a.m. I’d barely even gotten to sleep when that nightmare took hold. Damn. I need sleep so badly right now, and even with Dornan in a coma, I can’t rest.

“Oh,” I reply. “What was I saying?”

“Nothing,” he says quickly. “Just general screaming.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

He hovers at the edge of the bed, still half asleep by the look of it.

“Well, try to get some sleep,” he says stiffly, switching off the light as he turns to leave.

“Wait,” I say, a little more desperation in my voice than I would have liked.

He turns ever so slowly, a look on his face that could be a frown or amusement. I can’t decide which. My eyes adjust to the dark and with the sliver of moonlight coming in from the window above the bed I can just make out his features.

He stands there awkwardly, looking around the room, looking anywhere but at me.

“Can you … stay for a minute?” Suddenly, I don’t want to be alone. Anything but being alone with the memory of his dead brother shoving his tongue down my throat.

He must see the fear on my face, even in the darkness, because his awkwardness disappears. “That bad, huh?”

I nod. “Yeah. Pretty bad.”

“Okaaaaay,” he says, perching on the edge of the bed. “Shove over.” I stare at him stupidly for a moment, until he gestures to the bed. “I’m lying down, Julz. It’s one in the morning and I’m tired as all fuck. Shove.”

I wriggle out of the way a little too eagerly, tucking myself back under the sheets on the far side of the double bed. Jase swings his legs onto the bed and turns onto his side, propping himself up on one elbow as he surveys me.

“I have nightmares sometimes,” he says quietly, his brown eyes dark and troubled in the night.

That slams into me like a sucker punch to the gut, almost making me double over in pain. My dear boy. Fate really dealt us a screwed-up hand when it chose our fathers. I might have loved mine more than almost anything in this world, but he still chose this life that took everything from our family. And Dornan … well.

He killed your mother. Why haven’t you tried to kill him?

I’m too afraid to ask him, and puncture the comfortable stillness that surrounds us. Right now, in this moment, I need him to be here with me, and asking the hard questions would no doubt destroy this fleeting peace we’ve found in the dark night.

I swallow thickly. “You do?”

He nods. “Always about the same thing.”

I squeeze my eyes shut as he continues to speak.

“It’s probably not what you think,” he says softly. “It’s not about that. It’s about afterward.”

“Afterward?” I ask hesitantly.

“Yeah,” he says, speaking slowly and deliberately, as though he’s agonizing over every word. “I’m at your funeral, and the coffin is being lowered into the ground, and as it is, I can hear you screaming my name.”

“Oh yeah?” I ask, the lump in my throat like a painful throb.

“It makes sense now, I guess,” he says, his hand brushing against my stomach. “Shit,” he says. “Where’s your hand?”

I reach in front of me and our hands find each other in the dark. His hand is warm and much larger than mine, and it brings me more comfort than I can say when he squeezes it gently around mine. The most platonic of gestures, but in this moment, it makes me feel so incredibly loved and safe.

“Keep going,” I prompt him. “Why does it make sense?”

“Oh,” he says. “Well, it makes sense that I’d be dreaming about you being buried alive. You were never dead.”

I sigh. “I’m sorry you had to go through that. I’m so sorry.”

I see the outline of his shoulders shrug up and down in the darkness. His hand is warm around mine, and I hold on tight, not willing to let him go just yet.

“It is what it is.”

Neither of us says anything for a while.

“Tell me,” he says finally. “What do you dream about? Is it what happened that afternoon? Or something else?”

Sometimes I dream about you.

“Sometimes it’s about that,” I say with difficulty. My throat feels like sandpaper. “But most of the time it’s abstract, you know? A loop of images that other people would probably find normal.”

My voice breaks on the word normal, and I choke a little getting it back under control.

“It’s okay,” he says quickly. “You don’t have to say any more.”

“I’m fine,” I say, swallowing the proverbial rock in my throat. “I can handle it. Compartmentalizing, baby.”

“I don’t believe you.”

The conversation skips a beat as I drown deeper in our collective sorrow. Our grief.

“I think about you all the time,” I whisper, surprising myself with my frank confession. “I could never forget you. Do you believe that?”

“Yeah,” he says, and I can hear the emotion waver in his voice.

“Why?” I ask. “You have no reason to trust me after the things I’ve done. Why believe me?”

“Because,” he says, and I’m so close to breaking down I can taste the salt of my tears before they’re even spilled. “Because, when you were screaming just now, you weren’t just screaming.”

I knew it.

His voice cracks under the burden of our past. “You were calling for me, Julz. Over and over again. For a minute I thought it was my nightmare, until I realized I’d woken up and you were still yelling for me.”

The dam bursts. I’m crying. “It was always you,” I say, my breath hitching as I drag in a sobbing breath. “It’s always been you.”

Before I can change my mind, I shift closer, closing the space between us. I nestle my face into the space under his chin, our bodies pressed tightly together side by side, and I don’t let go.

For six years, I’ve wanted him to hold me like this. To hold me and stroke my hair and tell me that it’s going to be okay. The words are slightly different, but that’s all right. It’s everything I’ve ever wanted, right here and now.

“Can you forgive me?” I whisper desperately in between my tears.

“I already have,” he says. “Damn it, Julz, you could burn the whole world down and I’d still forgive you.”