“Lars.” I grin, chasing away the remnants of those images. “He’s the one who wakes me every morning. I always ignore my alarms.”
She glares up at me. “Stop doing that.”
“Doing what?”
“Smiling while you’re saying painful things. You shouldn’t be smiling about that.”
“Well, some philosopher Cole reads about says you can fight pain with smiles.”
“You can’t. You’re only camouflaging it, and sooner or later it’ll come back and bite you.” Her teeth sink into her bottom lip. “I don’t like it when you put a mask on in front of me, Ronan. In fact, I hate it, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Yeah, okay — what do you want? Some sort of a contract?” I tease.
She huffs. “You don’t have to be a smartarse.”
“Your turn, belle.”
A long sigh slips through her lips. “My nightmares also start like yours.”
“Like mine?”
“In the dark. It’s always so black. Everything is.” She stops and doesn’t seem to plan on going on.
“And?”
“It’s just that, dark. I can’t move or speak, and sometimes, I wish I couldn’t feel either. If I didn’t, it’d just go away, you know?”
“But it never goes away.”
“It never does,” she murmurs in reply, even though it wasn’t a question.
We share something, a feeling, a trauma. It’s there in the way she shakes but tries to smother it, the way she bites her lower lip so she doesn’t blurt it out.
One day she will, and one day, I’ll be there to hear it all.
“Does your nightmare have something to do with how you like hurting me?” she asks, her huge eyes staring up at me as if I hold the answers to the world’s problems in the palm of my hands.
I never thought I would want someon
e to look at me like that until her.
“What makes you think that?” I ask.
“You said you won’t make love to me, won’t whisper French words as you do with the other girls.”
I raise an eyebrow. “You want me to whisper French words to you?”
“That’s not the point.” Her cheeks flush. “Just answer my question. Does it have something to do with your reoccurring nightmare?”
“Maybe.” I pause. “Do you like being hurt because of your nightmare?”
She juts her chin. “Maybe.”
The stubborn damn girl.