Page 67 of Her Rival

I hadn't had it in fourteen months. I knew because I kept a record, in the back of a notebook I'd been keeping in a desk drawer since I was twenty-three. A small private spreadsheet of dates. The nightmare had a pattern. It came on the anniversary of bad days, the way certain knees ache on rain days. It came when I was sick. It came when I'd been thinking about my father longer than my body could metabolize.

I'd been thinking about my father, more or less continuously, since Friday night at six-thirty.

I should have known it was coming.

It started the way it always started. With the hands. The hands on me from behind. The breath at the crook of my neck. The voice saying my name from inside my own skull, the real voice, the one I'd heard for the first time in eight years on a cell phone in Brynn's living room thirty hours earlier.

Dani.

I felt the hands.

Dani.

"No, please. Dad. Stop. I'm sorry."

Dani, it's me. You have to wake up.

"Noooooo."

Dani.

"Dad. I'm sorry. I won't do it again."

"Hartley."

"Ah!"

I bolted upright in the bed, panting, sweating through Jett's old practice shirt I'd pulled on at some point in the night when I'd gotten too cold. The room was dim. The lamp was on the lowest setting, the one I hadn't noticed Jett turning back on. I scrambled backward against the headboard, my arms up, my brain still in Tennessee, still in the kitchen, still in the part of the dream where the hands were coming.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa." Jett's voice. Low. Slow. Hands up.

"AH."

"Hartley. It's me. You're in my bed. You had a nightmare. I'm not going to touch you. I'm right here."

He was sitting up against the headboard about three feet from me, in sweatpants and a t-shirt, his hair a mess, his face the careful flat thing it had been on Friday night in the kitchen. He had his hands up the way a man holds his hands up to a spooked animal. Palms out. No sudden movements.

He waited. He'd clearly already been waiting.

I closed my eyes. I focused on my breath the way the therapist in Brooklyn had taught me years ago. In through the nose for four. Hold for four. Out through the mouth for six. I did it three times. The room came back. The lamp. The bed. The dark windows above. The valley below. The man across the bed with his hands up.

"Jett," I croaked.

"Yeah."

"I'm sorry."

"For what."

"For the. all of that."

"Hartley, you had a bad dream. You don't apologize for a bad dream. Are you back."

"I'm back."

"Okay."

I let the breath out in a long shaky line. I dragged my hand across my forehead. It came away soaked.