Page 90 of Everything You Hate
Whoever you are, you just made the biggest mistake of your life.
Chapter Twenty-Six
SCARLETT
“Abort! Abort! Abort!”
I jolt awake at the sound. My skin goes cold. I know that cadence. I’ve heard it squawked from a perch in a boat cabin, repeated with perfect mimicry by a bird who picks up whatever its human says when the human isn’t performing for an audience.
Captain says “Abort” like a party trick. Dean says it like someone is dying.
“Abort! Abort! Abort!”
His hand reaches. Fingers splayed, grasping at empty air. His breathing has gone shallow—short, tight pulls that don’t reach his lungs. A sheen of sweat covers his forehead despite the room’s chill. The scar through his eyebrow stands pale against flushed skin.
“Dean.”
He doesn’t hear me. His eyes are open but fixed on something twelve years and eight miles of open water away. His chest hitches on the next inhale. A sound escapes him—not aword, something lower, wounded. The sound a man makes when he’s watching something happen, and he can’t stop it.
“Dean,” I say it louder. I put my hand on his shoulder.
He jerks. His whole body goes taut, then collapses inward like a sail losing wind. His eyes find the ceiling, then the wall, then me. They don’t track right. He’s still half inside whatever memory has him by the throat.
“Hey.” I keep my voice low. “You’re okay. You’re at the B&B. Room three. Shea’s place.”
His breathing rasps. He swallows. His throat works. The arm that was reaching drops to the mattress, and his fingers curl into the quilt. He’s looking at me now, really looking, and the relief when recognition finally lands in his eyes is so sharp it hurts my chest.
“Scarlett.”
“Yeah.” I don’t touch him yet. I wait. His skin is clammy under my palm, and the muscle of his shoulder twitches in sporadic bursts, like his nervous system is still firing signals from somewhere else. “Bad dream.”
He closes his eyes. Opens them. Looks at the ceiling again. “Shit.”
“It’s okay.”
“It’s not.” He pushes himself upright. The quilt falls away from his chest. He’s wearing the same shirt from last night, salt-stiff and wrinkled, and his hair stands in damp spikes where he’s been sweating. “I should go.”
“Stay.”
“I’m fine.”
“No, you’re not.” I don’t say it hard. I say it the way you state a fact about the weather. The sky is blue. The tide is out. You are not fine. “And that’s allowed.”
He stares at me. The darkness in the room is the thick, pre-dawn kind that turns everything to silhouette. The digital clockon the nightstand reads 4:17. Outside, the harbor is quiet. No boats moving. No gulls. Just the low, constant murmur of water against shore, eight hundred yards down the hill.
“I’m going to make coffee,” he says.
“You’re going to sit here until you stop shaking.”
He looks down at his hands. They are, in fact, shaking. A fine tremor runs through his fingers, the kind that comes after adrenaline, when the body has burned through whatever reserves it had and has nothing left but the aftershocks. He closes his fists. Opens them. The tremor doesn’t stop.
“I don’t talk about it,” he says.
“I know.”
“Then why are you still here?”
“Because you don’t have to talk about it.” I shift on the mattress until our shoulders touch. Just that. Shoulder to shoulder, heat passing through two layers of fabric. “But if you want to, I’m listening.”
