“Get some rest,” he says. “You’ve earned it.”
His voice is completely level; I have no idea how. I feel like hyperventilating.
I nod because I don’t trust my voice.
He holds my gaze one beat past the point of ordinary reassurance—long enough to let me know that the conversation exists, that he knows it exists, but he’s choosing to wait and take our son to go swimming while I get some rest first. I watch them walk down the hall together and cannot get a full breath into my lungs until they turn the corner.
Then I make it to the guest bedroom, collapse onto the mattress, and slam my eyes shut.
The dream arriveslike a monster that’s been crouched, waiting.
I’m not in my body. I’m watching her—well, it’sme—but I’m so young and terrified-small in the way I spent years learning not to be.
The girl is in a hotel room that smells like mildew and cheap whiskey.
Z is feeding the girl shots.
She keeps saying no, she’s a lightweight.
She’s laughing because she’s already past the point where laughing and not-laughing are barely different. And he keeps refilling the plastic cup.
She keeps taking it because it’sZ. And because this is the first real roof they’ve had over them in days, and because he’s her oldest friend and she trusts him implicitly.
I try to scream at her from wherever I am in this dream. But the sound doesn’t come out.
I try to yank the bottle away, but I’m just fog here. Just a witness. All I can do is watch.
The girl passes out.
Z calls her name. Once. Twice to check that she’s passed out.
Then he peels off her jeans.
I’ve had versions of this dream before. Foggy, blurred versions where I woke up with a bad feeling I couldn’t locate the source of. I told myself it was just the general residue of survival from those years in Darlene’s trailer. Nothing specific and certainly nothing with edges that still had the power to cut me.
But this version has edges.
And a face.
Z.
I watch the whole thing and can’t look away as Z climbs over my unconscious body and makes sloppy sucking noises at my neck. His hands wander down my body.
He’s violating me in the one way I never believed he was capable of, even if he doesn’t penetrate me.
I finally wrench myself awake, covered in sweat, with my hand pressed over my mouth and my heart hammering against my ribs.
Oh God!
The certainty of what actually happened that night sits in my chest as if it’s always been there, waiting ten years for a moment to surface. Waiting until I was finally truly safe, maybe.
I look around the bedroom with its tasteful luxury, a jewel-toned couch underneath the reinforced windows and matching curtains drawn shut.
Down the hall, I can hear Caleb’s voice, low and steady. He’s putting Bruiser to bed. I can hear the particular cadence of it—not words, but the gentle rhythm and lilt of his voice necessary to do the specific work of making a child feel safe at the end of afrightening day—and the sound of it cracks me open in a way the nightmare didn’t.
Because here is the thing I can’t put back now that the dream has shown it to me with edges:
I know what happened in that hotel room.