Page 45 of Layla

He’s quiet for so long I think he isn’t going to respond. Finally, he murmurs, “I really do.”

He feels so close laying like this in the dark. Like I could just reach over and touch him. And a part of me wants to. It’s been so long since I’ve let myself be close to someone at night. Sure, I do the hook-up thing and I have fun with those guys, but I never let them stay. I’m definitely a get-in-and-get-out kind of girl, and that works for me. Just by laying here in the dark John is already closer to me than any of my hookups have been in years.

“Do you have nightmares?” I whisper after a long moment.

“Yes.” He’s quiet again. “You do too?” He phrases it like a question but he already knows the answer.

“Every night. If I’m lucky, they don’t wake me up. Those are the only times I manage to sleep through the night. Once they wake me up, that’s it. There’s no going back to sleep after that.”

He makes a soft noise of agreement. “Same for me.”

I should probably roll over and try to sleep now. Talking about this isn’t going to help—the nightmares always seem more dangerous when I let this stuff get close to the surface. But I can’t help it. I want to know more about him. “What are your nightmares about?”

He blows out a long breath of air. “I’ve been in two wars.”

That shuts me up. I should have known it was something like that. There’s something in John’s eyes every so often, something beyond the laser focus and sharp control, something that looks almost haunted. I can’t even begin to imagine the things he might have seen.

The things he saw as a cop are a lot easier for me to understand.

“That must have been really hard,” I murmur lamely.

“It was, sometimes. It was hard to be away from home. The work was almost always difficult. Some of the stuff we saw…” he trails off before continuing in a stronger voice. “But I was over there with my best friends. Those guys were like brothers to me. I never had that kind of closeness at home.”

“Not even on the police force?”

He snorts loudly and his voice drips with bitterness when he answers. “Definitely not on the police force.”

“Do you still talk to them?” I guess. “Those guys you were so close to?”

“No.” His voice is flat enough to make me think question time is over so I’m surprised when he speaks again. “What about you? What are your nightmares about?”

I suck in a breath. What a dummy. Of course he was going to ask me this.And this is why you don’t let people in,I remind myself. Everyone who needs to know already does. My band, Louis. Dee. That’s my family, my circle. They’re the ones I trust.

“You don’t have to tell me,” John says softly, and I feel like an ass. He told me about his shit.

“The people who would come to my mom’s house were…well, they were garbage. I saw shit no kid should see. There was one guy who used to slap me around a lot—her boyfriend. He wasn’t always around but when he’d show up, that was when I knew she was about to start spiraling down again. Start using again.”

John’s voice is tight. “He hurt you.”

“Not too bad.” I cleared my throat. “Broke my arm once.” He swears softly in the darkness and I hurry to continue. “Mostly he scared me. Being in that house scared me. I still dream about it.”

I don’t tell him the rest. I don’t tell him how it could be just as scary—worse even—outside of the house. That I was in group homes where broken, desperate kids did broken, desperate things to each other. I don’t tell him about the foster parents who were only in it for the money, about a system with too few resources to keep track of all of us. About the foster “father” who beat me and my siblings, always on the stomach and legs where our clothes would cover it up. About the drug use I saw in some of those houses, too. About the foster mother that would lock me in my room for days at a time when I pissed her off or she wanted to score. I don’t tell him about the foster brother who used to sneak in my room at night and touch me under my blankets or the parents who did nothing when I told them.

As if he can sense the dark turn of my thoughts, John reaches his arm up from the floor, grabbing my hand in his and squeezing it, hard. When he speaks his voice is strong and calm. “Tell me about Dee.”

I breathe in, trying to dispel some of the panic that’s crept in over these few minutes. I close my eyes and picture Dee. “I went to live with her when I was fifteen,” I say. “The courts had finally terminated my mom’s rights, so I could have been adopted, but I knew that was a long shot. Most people just don’t want teenagers. Especially teenagers like me.”

John chuckles softly, his hand still covering mine on the blankets. “God you must have been a hell raiser.”

I grin. “You have no idea. I drove everyone crazy. I snuck out all the time. I would drink anything I could get my hands on. I talked back, I swore in front of the younger kids. I messed around with any boy who showed an interest.” I shake my head. “It’s a wonder I didn’t end up pregnant or on drugs.”

“What stopped that from happening?”

“Dee,” I say simply. “She was the only person I’d ever met who wouldn’t give up on me. No matter how hard I pushed, she stuck around. And she didn’t put up with my crap, either. She had rules and there were consequences when I didn’t follow them.”

“Like what?”

I laugh a little. “She’d take away my clothes and hair stuff and make me wear khakis and turtlenecks to school when I acted out.”