Relish: A Vicious Feast Book 2 (22 page)

The shrink’s expression turned thoughtful. She tapped the butt of her pen against her cheek. “There are many facets to Luka’s search for clarity. He came to me for help, and that’s what I’m doing through our sessions.”

I dropped back down on the couch. “Great. That answers none of my questions.”

“I know it’s frustrating. But haven’t you considered the fact that Luka might be equally frustrated?”

“How so?”

“Well, you said you believe he has feelings for Phoenix—”

“I don’t believe,” I cut her off. “I know. He told me so when he got drunk on gin last New Year’s Eve.”

“And since then Luka has sought help. Wouldn’t it be possible that maybe he’s had a change of heart? That maybe he’s realized what he’d done wrong and wishes to rectify the matter?” 

“Are you psychologizing me, Doc?” I stared at the ceiling—my favorite past time of late.

“I’m just saying that it’s entirely possible that the Luka you left behind months ago might not be the same Luka you know today.”

That statement got me. When Luka and I first met, he couldn’t keep his hands to himself. I’d found myself in several compromising situations with him. But since he picked me up at my hotel in London to rejoin the fold, no fondles. Yes, a touch here and there, but nothing that crossed the line. Even last night he found the strength to pull away and fall asleep by my side without as much as a make-out session. Could it be that he had actually changed?

The tops of my cheeks burned as I crossed my arms. “I’m not fully convinced.”

“You don’t have to be. Just be open to what he has to offer. Let him show you.”

“If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were a closet romantic, Doc,” I teased.

Samrah cleared her throat. “Well, we all have our weaknesses. Now, if you’re ready to talk about what happened to your eye…”

I inhaled the sage haze hanging in the air and brought myself back to the night my life changed. As Samrah said, if I wanted her to help me make sense of the dreams, she needed to know everything about me. I found it difficult to talk about my past not because the event was traumatic. More like I was so used to not talking about it at all that I had a hard time finding the right words. In the end, like my mother always told me, it was better to start from the beginning and work my way forward.

I closed my eye and said, “I wasn’t really into parties in high school. I couldn’t be called a loner, but I wasn’t popular either. I was more content to coast.”

“You were everybody’s friend but no one’s best friend.” Samrah’s pen flew over the notepad, its scratches particularly soothing to me.

“Yeah, I guess so.” I shrugged. “Anyway, word was going around about this party by the lake. Something to do with celebrating the football team winning…I can’t be a hundred percent sure.” Pausing, I rubbed my forehead. “It was an open invitation. My mother thought it would be good for me to get out, so I went.”

“Did you drink at the party?”

“Who says I even made it to the party?”

“I’m sorry.”

“What for?” I looked over my shoulder at Samrah, whose frown dominated her features. She met my gaze with those disturbing garnet eyes of hers.

“For jumping to conclusions.”

“Look, Doc, let’s get something straight,” I stared her in the eyes so she knew just how serious I was, “this is not some sob story. It happened long ago and I refuse to let that night define who I am today.” She nodded once and I resettled on the couch. After another inhalation of the sage infused air, I breezed through the retelling. “Like I was saying, I was on my way to the party when I got attacked. I didn’t even see the guy, it was so dark. First I’m walking down the dirt road to the lake and the next I’m yanked into the bushes, repeatedly stabbed, and left to die.”

“Did they ever catch the bastard who did it?”

The emotion creeping into her tone touched me immensely. I shook my head even if I knew she could only see the top of it from my position on the couch.

“The cops said it was some maniac terrorizing our area. I couldn’t give them a description because everything happened so fast. I don’t even know if they caught the guy since they never really called me back after taking my initial statement.”

“That’s just horrible!” Samrah slammed her pen against the notepad.

I sat up and swung my legs over so my feet touched the floor. “I appreciate the freak out and all, but that doesn’t do me any good.” I touched my patch. “If this didn’t happen to me then I wouldn’t have found an appreciation for photography.” I studied my camera on the table, longing to pick it up.

Samrah tilted her head, her lips pursing. “You seem detached from what happened to you.”

“I’m not saying it wasn’t hard,” I said. “And I’m certainly not saying there are days, especially when I slam against a corner because of my depth perception issues, when I wish I hadn’t gone out that night, but what more can I do? Feeling pissed off, or worse, sorry for myself, isn’t gonna bring my eyesight and my ability to have children back.”

“What?” The shrink’s jaw dropped.

 “The scar beneath the patch isn’t the only one I have.” I stood and lifted up my sweater to reveal the myriad of other scars I possessed. Samrah covered her mouth, absolute horror in her eyes. I pulled the hem back down. “The asshole didn’t just take my eye. Let’s leave it at that.”

It took the good doctor ten minutes to regain her composure. A procession of emotions crossed her face like floats in a somber parade. She started with the most obvious, shock, which quickly turned into anger. I hated the sadness the most. Hell, I should be the one a mess of tears, but the Doc beat me to it.

She got up from her seat and hurried to the bathroom, returning a minute later with a box of tissues. The whole thing would have been comical if we hadn’t been discussing my past. She dabbed at her eyes and sniffed. Right then I would have rather discussed my feelings for Luka and his apparent feelings for me. Talk about a scary idea. Him? Possibly liking me? The world officially turned on its head.  

“You’re not going to hug me, are you?” I asked when Samrah resorted to staring at me silently for the next couple of minutes.

She shook her head and I made a show of my relief, exaggerating my sigh by swiping at imaginary sweat on my forehead and blowing out my breath, puckering my lips as I did so. That got me a laugh. Samrah shook her head at my theatrics and dried the last of her feelings.

“I’m sorry for my unprofessionalism, but it baffles me how detached you are from all of this,” she repeated. “Granted it’s been a few years since the incident, but generally, traumatic events such as the one that happened to you leave more than a physical mark.”

“Maybe I’m the repress my feelings type.” From the way Samrah considered my words, I knew I should have kept my mouth shut.

“No. Repression isn’t really what’s happening here.” She reviewed her notes. “From what you’ve told me, it seems like you’ve moved on from the incident.”

“I have.”

“But you are experiencing the dreams.”

“What does one have to do with the other?” I leaned forward without actually getting off the couch. My ass balanced at the edge.

“The dreams can be your subconscious coping with the trauma.” Samrah looked at me then. “It could be that you’re not fully at peace with what happened to you. That you only seem like you’ve moved on, but in reality you’re focusing on other things like work instead of dealing with your trauma. I take it you didn’t seek counseling after your attack?”

“No.”

“Why not? Didn’t the hospital give you information about the help you can get?”

“They did.” I nodded once. “But I didn’t want to and my mother didn’t push the issue. I thought it best to just put it behind me.”

“But, you see, you haven’t really put it behind you. That’s why you’re having the dreams.”

“Besides the guy with the knife chasing me, nothing about my dreams connects to the events of that night.”

“They don’t have to.” Samrah clasped her hands together over the notepad. “The dreams are your mind’s way of letting you know that you need to deal with what happened instead of just sweeping it under the rug.”

Again the shrink made sense. “What do you suggest I do?”

“Have you ever heard of hypnotherapy?” 

“You mean like hypnosis?”

She smiled. “Yes. I’d like to use hypnosis to bring you back to the night you were attacked. Maybe that way we can gain new information about what really happened or just give you closure.”

“And you think this will put a stop to the dreams?” I ran my fingers through my hair until they touched the strap that kept my patch in place.

“I can’t say for certain,” she said honestly. “But it can shed some light on what we’re dealing with.”

“What does it involve?”

“Just you and me and another session much like this one. The only difference is I put you under a hypnotic state.”

“Will you record the session?”

“If you want me to.”

We stared at each other for the longest time. Surely, we’d passed the one hour mark, and I needed to be at the arena for a few more behind-the-scenes photos I wanted to take. Yana said I didn’t need to, but I had to keep busy. More pictures meant more to choose from for the final layout of the tour book. What Samrah suggested intrigued me. I’d seen people being hypnotized on YouTube, but never really believed it possible.

I came into this seeking a way to understand the dreams. If it meant I’d let someone hypnotize me then I was willing to try it.

“I want the session on video,” I said.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-F
IVE
O
FFER

I enjoyed the concert from the warm comfort of the Odyssey Arena’s green room. I had everything I needed. An eighty inch flat screen streamed everything live, all the junk food I could eat arranged in bowls on a long table and a cozy spot on a brutish couch that gave me ideas for a photo shoot. As I ran my fingers over the buttery leather, I imagined the band in jeans and white T-shirts, buckets of popcorn among them. The more the picture solidified in my mind the more my trigger finger itched. Yes. Before we left Belfast, I needed Vicious on this couch. It sounded dirty in my head, but I didn’t care.

Besides daydreaming of future projects, my gaze focused on Luka standing to one side of the stage, his bass in his hands. Sometimes it was impossible to imagine having the guy in my bed when he was up on stage rocking the hearts of thousands. Was I a lucky girl or what? It didn’t feel like that most of the time. If they only really knew him…his fans.

I shifted in my seat and brought a fistful of chips and chocolate to my lips, humming at the salty, sweet, crunchy mix when it reached my tongue. Heaven. My ears thanked me for not subjecting them to the constant screaming. How the fans kept at it for almost two hours exhausted me just thinking about it.

The energy was totally different. I still felt the excitement generated by the show, even alone in the green room. Being on the concert floor with twenty thousand screaming people was unreal. I preferred my current situation.

Vicious were in the middle of Poison, the audience singing along, when I reached into a bowl of peanuts. Without taking my eye off the screen currently focused on Luka’s gorgeous face, I stuffed a fistful of honey roasted nuts into my mouth. The crunching my teeth produced warred with his sinfully smooth voice. I paused, waiting for the song to end before swallowing.

I never got tired of listening to that song. The fact that it was an ode to Phoenix no longer bothered me. I understood why Luka felt the need to compose it. Something told me he wrote songs not just as a way to express himself, but also as a coping mechanism. How they continued to work together baffled the hell out of me. One word:
Awkward.

Seeing my ex shacking up with my cousin, the guitarist of my band? It would drive me up a wall. No wonder Luka felt the need to control everything. He plunged himself into his work to keep from noticing the little touches between Phoenix and Demitri and the way they looked at each other. My whole stay at Lunar Manor made sense now that I saw a majority of the picture.

What was more awkward was me sitting through the entirety of Breathe. Of all of Luka’s songs I had memorized, it seemed the most unpolished. Lots of repetition, especially of the word “there.” Besides the fact that parts of this song came from my dream, which still freaked me out, I felt cheated. Compared to the chart-topping, heartbreak-inducing power of Poison, Breathe was more like a jingle. Catchy, yes, but nothing more than that. And he wrote it for me?

I tuned out the rest of the concert after that. Sure the pyrotechnics and the visuals were amazing, but I couldn’t get into the whole experience anymore. My junk food forgotten, I pulled my legs up to my chest. Resting my chin on my knees, I went through Breathe line by line. At least what I could remember of it. As a representation of his feelings for me, it sucked balls.

When the concert ended, I unfolded myself from the couch and grabbed my camera. Because of my abrupt departure from the O2 arena, I didn’t get shots of the band post-concert. I wanted pictures of sweat, of winding down, of their after performance rituals.

Dodging around scrambling staff and security, I made it to the backstage area just in time for the band to file down the steps leading to the stage. They’d finished singing their second encore of the night. The crowd still cheered despite the house lights coming on.

“Great performance, guys!” Yana yelled, handing out towels and bottled water.

I got the feeling support staff should be doing that, but the visual was too fantastic not to capture. Band manager takes care of more than band business. Nice tagline for the photo, which I already envisioned in black and white with pronounced gray tones.

Dray downed an entire bottle of water in seconds, asking for a second after crushing the container. Phoenix covered her face with a towel, not rubbing. Good move. It got the sweat out without messing up much of the makeup. Demitri poured water all over himself then wiped the beads streaming down his chiseled chest and abs. I got the entire thing in four consecutive shots. Boy was I glad I left the green room when I did. When I turned my camera toward Luka, my finger froze on the shutter release.