I HURT HER.
I fucking hurt her.
I sit up in an instant, my heart hammering even harder than before, if possible. I’m all keyed up; the nightmares always leave me with more adrenaline than I can handle. Sometimes I just throw myself onto the floor and do push-ups to force the bloody images from my mind, but that’s not an option right now.
“Show me. How badly does it hurt?”
Mia’s face looks pale in the dark, her eyes huge and nearly black. Her hair, messier than earlier, hangs around her face; she pushes it behind her ears. “Just my stomach. It’s fine.”
“Like hell it’s fine.” I reach out tentatively, brushing my hand over her stomach. Her tank top bunched over her ribs in her sleep, so I stroke her bare skin. She doesn’t wince, but knowing her, she could be holding back. “Shit.”
“It’s fine, Seb.”
“Don’t lie,” I say, a touch too sharply. I swallow. I need to calm the fuck down, but the nightmare is still a rabid beast prowling around my mind. Shattered glass. Blood on leather. My father shouting, throwing his arm over my mother like that would help any more than her seat belt.
The memory played on a loop, morphing with each impact. Richard and Sandra in the front seat instead. James and Cooper. Izzy, her body broken, blood leaking from her mouth.
In the last iteration before Mia shook me awake, I was driving, and Mia was in the passenger seat. I flung my arm out to save her, but I couldn’t. One moment she was screaming, and then she was silent.
“I’m fine,” she snaps back. “What about you? What happened?”
“I… I have nightmares sometimes.” I grimace, jerking my hand through my hair. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“Don’t be an idiot, I know that.” She scoots closer, taking my hand in hers. She squeezes tightly. “It doesn’t even hurt anymore. Do you want to talk about it?”
“This is why I prefer not to sleep.” I’m shaking, so I squeeze her back, hoping she doesn’t notice. The very last thing I saw before I woke up was her, those golden-brown eyes blank and unseeing, crimson blood smeared on her face. A piece of glass lodged in her throat, cutting straight through the artery. I force myself to study her. She’s fine. There’s no blood, no broken glass. We’re safe in my bedroom, and she’s unharmed, aside from my kick.
I need to pull it together.
“Tell me about it,” she insists. Her voice is soft again, coaxing me into answering. “Don’t keep it inside.”
Aside from the therapist I had throughout middle and high school, and Cooper—although I haven’t told him every detail—I haven’t spoken about my nightmares. But this is Mia. Not Dr. Barnes or my brother.
Just Mia.
She’s safe.
I pull her into a hug so tight I’m worried I’m hurting her again, but before I can force myself to break away, she hugs back, holding me just as tightly. I bury my face in the place where her neck meets her shoulder, taking in a deep, shuddering breath. Tears burn my eyes.
She smells like jasmine.
She’s safe.
She’s my friend.
She’s safe and sound and willing to listen.
“I dream about the accident,” I whisper. I went to sleep shirtless; her fingers dig against my bare back. It doesn’t hurt, but the pressure keeps me grounded. It’s like Cooper’s hand on my shoulder, but better. “But it’s not just them. It’s… it’s Richard and Sandra, and my siblings. I even saw you, this time.”
She blinks, a stripe of moonlight illuminating part of her face. Her long eyelashes frame her eyes so beautifully. How come I’ve never noticed her eyelashes? I’ve looked at her so many times, and I’ve studied her like she’s a painting hanging in the Met, but right now, I might as well be seeing her for the first time. She has a freckle on her earlobe that I never noticed either.
“What happened?” she asks. “I know you were in the car.”
“All three of us went out to dinner,” I say. “The season had just started, and it was my dad’s first night off in two weeks. My mom’s birthday was coming up. I remember—fuck, I remember I didn’t want to be there. I thought it was boring, so I was happy that they let me bring a book to the restaurant.”
“What was it?”
“What?”
“The book.”
“It was a biography for kids about Joe DiMaggio.”
“Naturally.”
Her slight teasing makes my lips quirk up. “It was pouring that night. We got soaked in the thirty seconds it took to get from the restaurant door to the car. My parents were in a good mood, though. My dad had gotten off to a nice start for the season, and he bought my mother a diamond necklace for her birthday. Gave it to her early since he was supposed to be on the West Coast for a road game on the actual day.”
That diamond necklace, absurdly, didn’t break in the crash. Glass in my mother’s throat, but that necklace stayed intact, shining in the light from the sirens. Sandra has it now, along with the rest of my mother’s jewelry. She and Richard handled my parents’ estate, and all that stuff is in storage, waiting for me to do something with it.
“That’s sweet,” she says. Her thumb rubs over my knuckles. “I’m sure she loved it.”
“She did. And she loved that we got a whole evening with him. During the season—it’s hard, you know? He was around when he could, if there was a day in between series or a day game instead of a night game, but most of the year, it was Mom and me, and lots of phone calls.” I swallow, trying to dislodge the lump in my throat. It’s hard to imagine that being me one day, so it’s easier not to think about it. “It happened so fast. One minute we were driving, and the next, we hit a tree. They said that my father must not have seen the curve in the road, and by the time he tried to course correct, it was too late. The road was wet, and we just spun out.”
Her grip on my hand tightens. A silent invitation to continue.
I gather all my courage and say, “He put his arm out, trying to… you know. To save my mother and… and me. But it didn’t do any good. They took the impact head-on.”
“Oh, Sebastian.”
Her voice is so soft, and normally I would love to hear her speak with such tenderness, but right now, it might make me fucking cry. She doesn’t say she’s sorry, or try to placate me, or any of the things other people have done when they’ve heard this story. She just keeps looking at me, stroking my knuckles. Letting me set the pace of our conversation. I could stop here, and she’d roll with it.
But I keep going. I’ve never felt the urge to share all the details of this story with anyone, but it feels important, somehow, that I get to the end. I want her to know it. I trust her with it. With each stroke of her thumb against my skin, my panic fades a little more.
“So sometimes I just… dream of it again. I’m trapped in the backseat, and people I love die in front of me, and there’s nothing I can do but watch.”
I bite the inside of my cheek, staring at the hazy outline of our evening together: the empty tray that we’d eaten the pasta from, my beer bottle and her bourbon glass. My laptop, decorated with an OBX sticker, on my nightstand next to the Anthony Bourdain memoir I’m reading. After the mess with the photographer earlier, my evening ended up being perfect—because any time spent with Mia is perfect—but that didn’t matter once I fell asleep.
“I wish I could have helped them. I just froze. I don’t even think I screamed. I froze, and I stared at them, and eventually a passing car called in the accident. I didn’t even think to find one of their cell phones.”
“You were just a kid,” she says. “No one expected you to.”
“Still.” My voice cracks on the word. “Maybe if I actually thought, I could have avoided losing them both.”
By the end of the sentence, my voice is loud enough that it echoes in the air.
I’ve thought about it ever since that moment, but I’ve never said it aloud.
Most likely, nothing I could’ve done would have changed the outcome.
But I don’t know, because I didn’t act, and I lost them.
And tonight, in my fucking nightmare, I didn’t act, and I lost my family and Mia, one after the other.
She scoots closer, cupping the back of my head. Her fingers curl in my hair. When her lips press against mine, I feel a tear slip down my cheek. I squeeze my eyelids shut. I hold my breath, trying to stifle the sob that wants to work its way out of my throat.
“Breathe,” she whispers. “We’ll do it together. Hold it and count to five.”
It takes a couple tries, but I manage it. Three seconds. Four seconds. Five seconds, then a breath out.
“You’re not there,” she says. She presses another kiss to my mouth, hard enough that our teeth mash together. The sensation tethers me to her. To reality. “You’re here with me.”
She tugs on my arm until I fall back into bed with her. I end up with my head pillowed on her stomach, feeling the gentle rise and fall of it as she breathes. She runs her fingers through my hair. More quiet, ordinary comfort. It feels like we’re in a little bubble, separate from the rest of the world. It’s warm and safe in here, and memories are just memories, no matter how much they try to snap and bite.
Usually, after a nightmare, I stay awake the rest of the night, but my eyelids are heavy, and at least tonight, I don’t have to face it alone.
Sleep comes again, and this time, it’s deep and dreamless.
