I’d been silly to think all his issues would disappear overnight.
Nodding slowly, I smiled. “I’ll see you in the morning.” I said it like a promise and a threat. “Don’t go outside until I’m with you, okay? I want to be with you when you explore your new home.”
I also, selfishly, didn’t want him seeing trees in the distance and running.
I didn’t fully trust that Kas was adaptable to suburban life. The call to return to the wild might be too great, and the urge to lock all my doors and trap him inside made me just as bad as the monsters who’d captured him in his youth.
“I won’t.” He looked at me one last time, his gaze still heated from our mutual orgasm and weary from our journey. “Good night, Gem.”
He closed the door before I could blow him a kiss goodbye.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I CLUTCHED THE PILLOW I’d stolen from Gemma’s bed.
Her scent covered it, making my cock twitch for a second round. I hadn’t meant to pounce on her like that. I hadn’t asked if she was okay with it. I hadn’t even looked around her home before the urge to be inside her undid me.
I’d needed her, not because I wanted her to soothe the aches in my chest and the splinters in my head, nor because I was at the point of complete oversaturation thanks to all this goddamn newness. I’d needed her because she was my link between this world and my old one.
She was my one constant—the girl who kept me grounded enough to accept what was happening and to have faith that I’d still be standing when the dust settled. If I was totally honest with myself, I’d needed her to remind myself that I was still me.
Still a man.
Still worthy of her even if I currently had nothing to my name. I no longer had a valley, a way of growing food, or the monotony of daily survival tasks, and that left me with a very uncomfortable question.
Who the fuck am I?
And who did I want to become?
In reality, that question was simple.
I was free.
Free.
And for the first time, I was afraid of that word.
Afraid of the sheer size of it. The weight of it. The overwhelming shock that I was free, but I had no idea how to be free.
I pinched my brow, squeezing my eyes closed while standing silently in Gemma’s corridor. A white flash blinded me—the tenth one today.
I’d been able to hide the majority from Gem while she was driving. The ones in the car had come and gone as we’d driven farther from the valley, and each time, the whiteness had tormented me with instability. The newness of everything hurt—using pain against me as if seeking a cure by forcing me to forget.
It didn’t like that I wasn’t on board with chosen amnesia anymore. My mind couldn’t understand why I refused to let the whiteness sweep everything away. Luckily, the blankness only managed to steal a few seconds here and there.
I wouldn’t let them take any more than that from me. I still cursed the loss of the night I’d shared a bath with Gemma. For her to have a memory that I had no recollection of fucking killed me. And who knew? Perhaps, if I’d actually been able to remember that night, I might’ve already healed in so many ways.
My nostrils flared as I blinked back the worst of the whiteness and opened my eyes. Inhaling hard, I brushed aside the rest of the haze and focused on Gem’s corridor. I knew where I was. I knew what’d happened up to this point. My mind was intact even though it didn’t want to be.
The doctor, back at the hospital, had described my micro blackouts as my brain misfiring. That it was a healing process that some concussed patients had to go through.
He’d told me to brace through them but not fight them. To pretend each attack was just heavy whitewash from a wave crashing upon a rock. The only difference from being washed away and forgetting like I had at Fables was to hold on to that rock until the wave passed.
And it would pass.
They would stop, eventually.
I just had to hold on until then.
Looking back at Gem’s closed door, I moved away.
I hadn’t been lying that I didn’t trust myself around her. I’d snuck one of the pills the doctor had given me and would commit to taking a medicine I didn’t understand if it made me sane, but I didn’t know how powerful they were in preventing night terrors so soon.
Therefore, I would sleep alone.
Like usual.
Miles and miles away from the place I used to call home. Far, far away from Jareth and his party with alcohol and fire, and I was still seeking a dormitory in which to barricade myself inside.