But I stay perfectly still.
Like stone.
He grabs for my wrist roughly, and when I feel his cock, I bite down on my tongue and allow him to manipulate my hand around it.
He guides my movements, but all I can think is it doesn’t feel right.
This doesn’t feel like it should be normal.
I wake with a jolt, slick with sweat, heart racing like it’s trying to outrun something I can’t see.
“Nell?” The voice slices through sleep—too familiar, too wrong. I lunge, refusing to freeze this time. Not again. I’ll fight.
“Whoa, calm down! It’s me!”
“Cam?” My breath stutters, my attack falters. I blink hard, adjusting to the dark.
Still night. Still safe.
“I’m here,” he murmurs, wrapping me up in his arms, chest firm and reassuring. “It was just a dream.”
But reality crashes into me like a wall of bricks.
“Did you get her? Kyla—did you bring her home?”
I let the steady rhythm of his heartbeat bleed into mine, anchoring me.
“Yeah. She’s in your old room, sleeping off the drugs.”
He did it. Relief unfurls—sharp and sudden—but it doesn’t last.
“She’s not the way I remembered,” he adds, voice strained and raw. “I don’t know how she’s going to cope.”
“Do you need to be with her?” I ask quietly, even though the thought of him leaving slices through me. I know what it’s like—coming back from hell, trying to claw through the aftershock.
And she lived it longer than I ever did.
“No,” he says softly. “Not tonight.”
Which meanseventually, just not yet.
“What were you dreaming about?”
“Nothing,” I lie.
I’m not even sure why. Fear, maybe. Or maybe it’s the creeping dread that he’ll see me differently once he knows the grotesque truth of my past. The parts I keep buried.
We’re both fractured, haunted—but we don’t have to be ruled by ghosts.
We can choose something else.
We can choose forward.
“You’re a terrible liar, Nell,” he murmurs, pulling me closer until my leg loops around his.
My nipple brushes his chest through the soft cling of my oversized t-shirt, sparking warmth in the chill that still clings to my bones.
“We don’t need to talk about it,” I whisper, curling into him. “Just hold me. I’m so glad you made it back safe.”
