Never Have I Ever (38 page)

“It’s okay,” I eased, slowly taking a few steps into the room. “It’s just me.”

He stared at me in silence while I flicked on the lamp beside the bed. Water covered the bedside table, dribbling off the edge. As I expected, the glass was cracked in half, the two large pieces and several smaller ones scattered across the floor.

“Piper.”
He said my name as if he’d forgotten it. The reality of what happened
came
flying back to him all at once the moment it left his mouth. He rubbed the sweat from his face with both hands.
“Oh, Jesus.”

“Just sit tight a sec. There’s broken glass on the carpet.”

“You don’t have to—”

“It’s okay.” I snatched a towel from my bathroom and mopped up the water as best I could while simultaneously collecting the pieces of glass into a centralized location.

“Were you…” Noah swallowed hard, still trying to catch his breath. “Were you in here?”

“No,” I said as I gathered up the last of the glass. “I couldn’t sleep. I got up to make some tea.”

His head dropped with an exasperated sigh. “Thank fuck.”

“Probably a stupid question, but are you all right?”

He snorted and looked the other way. “I’m fine.
Except maybe my pride.”

“Hey, don’t talk like that.” I set the glass in the towel and placed it off to the side, then sat next to him on the bed swiftly to give him a reassuring touch on his arm. “Nothing happened. We’re both still in one piece, see? We survived.”

“Don’t. Don’t do that,” he said as he shrugged away.

I retracted my hand. “I’m sorry, I just thought—”

“Coddling doesn’t make it any better.”

Noah whipped the blankets from around him and left the bed. He seized his pants from the chair in the corner, dug his cigarettes from a pocket and slipped into the jeans, followed by his shoes. Without a word, he exited the room. I started to follow, but stopped at the door when I saw he was headed for the pack porch.

“You want to be left alone?”

“I think that’s a good idea, yes. Try to get some sleep for yourself.”

He pulled open the back door and shut it firmly behind him.

For a while I just stood there, propped against the door frame of my bedroom, watching the blinds on the back door sway to an eventual stop. Though he probably didn’t think I did, I understood. It was one thing to live with the night terrors all alone; it was another entirely
to
suddenly have a witness to them. If it were me, I’d see it as a personal weakness, especially if my personality was as put-together and assured as Noah’s was normally. It must have been an embarrassment for him.

Because I was peering in from the outside, though, it was easier to look at it objectively. In the end, it didn’t make him a weaker person. There was certainly nothing to be embarrassed about considering the terrors weren’t anything he controlled. Brain chemistry is funny that way. If anything, they enhanced his caution. They made him stop and think about consequences of his day-to-day life, as messed up as it sounded. Anybody could see that if they got to know him. And it was just part of who he was: strong, beautiful, and deeper than I ever imagined.

Eventually, I pushed off the wall to busy myself before my brain ran too far away. I trashed the second broken glass of the night, vacuumed both the kitchen from my explosion as well as the bedroom from Noah’s, and re-heated my tea in the microwave.

By then, he still hadn’t returned. I wasn’t at all going back to bed without him, so I ran a warm shower and washed the day away in the hopes of calming my nerves. The shower served the dual purpose of preventing me from joining him on the patio against his wishes. All I wanted to do was let him know the world wasn’t ending. I wanted to hold him and kiss him and tell him everything would be all right. Even if that was a lie, I’d rather live with the lie than watch him chastise himself for something that wasn’t his fault. I also kind of hoped he might join me in the shower since the opportunity presented itself. After a good twenty minutes, though, it became clear he wouldn’t.

I took some extra time to thoroughly dry my hair before donning my robe once more and emerging from the bathroom. The bed was still empty, so I checked the living room, praying he hadn’t run away in my absence.

To my relief, Noah was sitting on the couch with a wine glass in his hand. He was also fully clothed, which worried me. The remainder of the white wine from dinner was gone, the bottle set off to the side of the table, and it looked like he managed to down most of the blush already. I walked into the kitchen and took a fresh wine glass from the cupboard, then returned to the living room to sit on the sofa a couple of feet from him.

“I thought you were going to try to sleep,” Noah groused.

The remaining wine bottle was still about a third full, so I filled my glass and drained the rest into his. When I finished, I picked my glass up and made a subtle toasting motion towards him.

“You shouldn’t drink alone,” I advised, then tossed in a, “Sir,” for his benefit.

He threw me a wan smile. “I had to step out earlier because I’m a bear in a piss-poor mood when I wake up from those. Sometimes it takes longer to come back to Earth.”

“I get like that too, only it happens every month for about five days straight. No night terrors required.”

He almost laughed at that.

After I took a sip of wine I asked, “How can I help?”

“There’s nothing anyone can do really.”

“Can I try?”

He set his own glass on the table. “I don’t quite know how to put it in the right words to make any sense.”

“Maybe I don’t have to understand. I can just listen.”

“They aren’t dreams. There are never dreams to accompany the feelings. It’s just the unadulterated, overwhelming bombardment of fear and panic out of the black.”

“At least I’ve seen it first-hand now. I knew what to do. Or not to do as the case may be. Next time I’ll be even more prepared.”

“Next time,” he echoed.

“Right,” I encouraged.

Noah took a deep breath and said, “There are these images in my head. Images I can’t get out because they block access to something worse. The unspeakable things that I saw myself doing in those images—” he stopped short and stared at nothing in particular. I sat perfectly still, holding my breath for him to continue. “I control them, for the most part. I don’t let them become me. But there’s still this—this thing inside me, this regret and anger that pushes out from way down deep, because Selene was my fault.

“There’s always a woman, not her, in those flashes of color and light. For a long time the woman was faceless. She didn’t mean anything, just like all the women I took to bed never meant anything, and so I could get away with thinking and doing such things to them and cast them aside in the morning.”

“How was Selene’s suicide your fault?”

He held up a hand to stop my thoughts right there. “It just was. Let’s leave it at that for now. I’m not exactly in the mood to make the night any heavier than it already is.”

Then it was probably not the best moment to bring up her state of being very much alive. I had to bite my tongue to keep from saying it.

“These days,” Noah went on, “the woman in those images is you. It’s
only
you. I’ve tried, actually, to turn her into someone else just to see if I could. I can’t. The rough, glorious, perfect passion that you possess satiated the depravity in those pictures so that they wouldn’t devour me, so that those images served as a catalyst to focus on you. Your image,
your
very being kept the worse terrors of a darker sin away. The crazy thing is… it worked, Piper. You were my cure; a smaller sin to cover a larger one.”

At the end of his strange explanation, which I only understood a small percentage of, Noah was close to tears. His eyes were red with the force of holding them all at bay and my heart ached for him.

“Why do you think they came back?” I asked softly.

He stood up and laughed; ironic and inappropriate, but the only thing he could do with the tension raging against him. He ran his hands through his hair, inhaled sharply, and made certain his back was facing me.
“Because you made me talk about that greater sin!
You wormed your way into my heart and undid me! I opened up Pandora’s Box when I knew better than to talk about those events. You were supposed to be my escape! I wanted you for that. And now—” He cut himself off. He was nervous and shaking and anything but fine, which made me nervous and wary and bordering on anything but fine.

“What are you saying?” I asked tentatively. Noah paced in front of me, his vision focusing on anything and everything in the room
except
me. “Are you saying this happened tonight because of me?”

“No—Christ, no!
Don’t be stupid.”

“That’s sort of what it sounds like.”

“Not by a long shot. But, it means there won’t be a next time. What I thought was my cure, this figurative magical spell of you, is broken. And it means I don’t think I can do this. Not after I lost it tonight and not to you. Fuck, not to you, of all people.”

I set my glass down beside his on the coffee table. “Hang on, are you about to give me the, ‘It’s not you, it’s me,’ spiel?”

Noah pulled his keys from his pocket. There was one, a small one, attached to a thin loop of its own. I started shaking my head, dread and heartbreak twisting my soul as he peeled it off the ring because I knew exactly what the key was meant for: the cuffs he gave me.

“No. No, please.”

Then the key was off the ring, and Noah was in front of me, and the key was pressed into my palm, and he wouldn’t look at me, and I felt like my heart was going to explode as my eyes stung with tears of my own.

“No,” I breathed out. “You’re tired, a little drunk and upset, and you don’t want to do this.”

“What I want and what I can have are two very different things.”

“They aren’t, they
really
aren’t.”

“Take the key, Piper.”

I shook my head violently, refusing to let go of his hand. “No, I won’t!”

He finally looked at me. “Take it. That’s an order!”

“God, please, no.”

“I’m releasing you from this now… before I can’t bring myself to do it later.”

“NO!” I shoved it back into his hand and pushed his hand into his chest as I stood up. “Take it back! Take it back, I don’t want it! I have to belong to you! I went through everything; I even quit my job to keep Ethan at bay! You’re the only one who matters to me!”

“You did
what
?”

My breath hitched my voice. “I… I quit the observatory.”

“Why?” he demanded.

“Because.”

“Because why?” His tone grew dark and harsh.

I struggled to find my verbal footing. “A-At the café, Ethan said either I left you or he would take the financial aid away.”

He practically roared, “And you invited him to your house for dinner after that! Are you insane?!”

“It was more like he sprang that on me in the midst of my inviting him to dinner,” I explained quickly. “He showed his hand, though, said if I didn’t work there he wouldn’t care about it, so I beat him at his own game and quit. That way they get to keep their funding, and I get—I get to keep you.”

“Fucking hell.
Why didn’t you come to me about this?”

“I fixed it myself,” I insisted. Once more I pressed the key toward him, pushing my hand against his chest. My eyes implored him to reconsider. “Take it back.”

“No.” He shook his head. “No, I’m not allowing it. You’re getting your job back, and I’ll make sure Ethan signs off on the funding. But if he’s so unrelenting then I can’t risk him hurting you just like I can’t risk letting what’s fucked me up spill over on you. That’s baggage nobody should have to deal with.”

The key dropped to the carpet as Noah started walking towards the door. He hefted the bag he brought with him from beside the wall. I scrambled between him and his escape, backing up with every step he took until I was flush against the entryway. If nothing else, he wasn’t leaving while intoxicated. I snapped the extra lock shut quicker than I ever thought my shaking hands could shift and stared him down in defiance.

“Move away from the door,” he commanded.

We played this game once before. The last time I convinced him to stay. This time, though, things weren’t as light-hearted. The night wasn’t as assuring. I wasn’t certain if my will could outlast his.

“I gave you everything,” I pleaded with all my heart. “All of me.
I can’t
not
belong to you.”

“Not if it destroys both of us in the process.”

“Then let me help.”

“You can’t! It took me this long to understand nothing can help me.”

“What about the rest of our lists? What about ice fishing? Climbing the pyramids in the dead of night? Meeting the Dali Lama and
Michio
Kaku
and all the others?
Holi
in Utah?
And all the things we wanted to do together intimately; just us?”