body and feel the ache in my muscles, I drag in a breath...and smell smoke.
My eyes fly open to find Ari sitting in his usual spot on the floor against the wall.
He’s only wearing loose pants, his muscular shoulders and chest bare to my gaze, his abdomen with so many ridges, I curl my fingers into my palms with the need to trace them.
Legs bent and slightly apart in front of him, he leans his head back against the wall, his forearms balanced on his knees, a cigarette clutched between his fingers with wisps of white smoke swirling up like snakes.
His mouth opens and smoke slowly pours over his lips.
But his eyes are closed, so he doesn’t know I’m watching him.
“Since when do you smoke?” I ask, forgetting that I’ve sworn not to speak to him while he keeps me trapped.
The corner of his mouth curls, and I realize I still have never seen him smile.
“It’s a nasty habit,” he says, his deep voice edged with exhaustion. “One I partake in rarely.”
He drags in another puff, blows it out as those grey eyes that see everything open and turn my way.
“You fuck in your sleep.”
My eyes round wider, lips parting. And then I feel the evidence of what he said, the soreness, the moisture, the way my thighs stick together as if I’d been rode hard and put away wet.
He must see the anger in my expression, but he only grins, leans his head against the wall again and says, “I’m not apologizing for what I did.”
“You did that without permission.”
“And you haven’t slept that soundly since the second I dragged you into this place.”
Another drag, the smoke floating over his lips as he looks at me again. “Every night you scream and fight and cry. It’s been like that for years. I find it seriously interesting that after you get fucked well enough, you sleep like the dead. Maybe that’s what you’ve always needed.”
Years?
I mean, yes, he’s right about that, but how the hell would he know?
There are so many things wrong with what he just said that I don’t know where to start.
“I have a sleep disorder.”
“I know. Trust me,” he laughs, the sound dark and tired, “I fucking know.”
Wishing I could be angry, or at least deny the truth of what he told me, I know I can’t. I do a lot of things in my sleep. But that still doesn’t give him the right to take advantage.
Opening my mouth to say so, my words are cut off when he speaks again.
“What is it like? What do you see when you’re sleeping? Do you even know I’m there?”
Shocked by the questions, I close my mouth, stare at him with the answers sitting on the tip of my tongue.
Nobody has ever asked me that before. They never see past how my problem affects them to find out what I’m experiencing when it happens.
Allowing myself to think about how to answer him, a moment comes back to me, a vision that’s never happened before.
The shadow took form for the first time last night, my hands grasping him, finally catching that diaphanous shape and making it real.
And God, the joy that bloomed inside me, the memory of it filling me now. It was heat and sunlight and a weightlessness. It was destiny and triumph and lust.
Pure. Unbridled. Like finding the second half of my soul and finally making myself whole again.
What do I see? I’ve never mentioned it to anybody. Not even to my neurologist. At the time, I was too embarrassed to admit the truth.
I admit it now, maybe to shock Ari or to run him off.
To show him how messed up I am.
“I see something or someone I can’t touch. A shadow. It’s there, always there. Standing above me just daring me to reach out. Sometimes it has a face, but I can’t remember it. It has a voice, but its words fade when I wake up. I dream while I’m awake, and that must be what it is, but the dream is always the same. And it devastates me when I can’t hold onto it.”
His eyes move as he searches my face, but his expression is a blank mask.
I’m waiting for the typical response, the hint that I’m a nutjob that needs medication. Poor Little Adeline, she’s not just reckless with her stupid decisions, she’s certifiable on top of it.
When he doesn’t respond, I keep talking, only because the silence makes me tense.
“I feel like I live