Blindsided

by Sayer Adams

  On top of that she missed Nate in a way she’d never missed anyone. It actually hurt, physically. Taking off from Seattle, there was relief mixed with her sadness. Yes, she would be leaving Nate, but she would be getting back to her real life after far too long away. Finally, all the demons could be shoved back in the closet where they belonged. Unfortunately, it wasn’t working. She was still panicking and she didn’t have Nate. Even with the frenetic pace, the things that drove her hadn’t stopped coming.

  And so she’d tried to run harder. She hadn’t even bothered to try to sleep except on planes, hadn’t even tried to sleep at night. Her original plan for the trip was to do three stories, but she had taken side trips in both Geneva and Marrakech and written short pieces on both. Since Seoul was her last stop, she was here for two weeks and she had planned three new stories.

  Her body was protesting the work, the pace. Chelsea could feel her health slipping, her wellness running off her like water in a shower. It had started even before she left Morocco, and by the time she landed in Seoul, the back of her throat constantly tickled like she had a low grade cold. She felt, if not tired all the time, then at least unenergized. So far, the world had only started swimming and sliding away once. It had been in a club and she had rationalized it away as drunkenness.

  She had to rationalize it away, because frankly, she didn’t know what else to do. Her old methods of coping weren’t working anymore. The memories and panic had found a way through. But she was out of ideas, had no Plan B and she was too drained to dream one up.

  Standing in front of an enormous gold stature of Buddha at Bongwon-sa Temple, Chelsea stumbled while scribbling about the sound of the birds in her notebook. The stumble seemed to snowball and her feet refused to come back under her. Her body weaving perilously, her vision developing black spots. The world seemed to set her loose and she drifted perilously before a fellow tourist grabbed her arm, righting her and providing support until she could balance again.

  She glanced up at him to thank him, and for a beautiful moment, she saw Nate. The man looked nothing like him, but her thoughts were one tracked and stuck on Nate. Her smile and thank you were weak, and she moved away quickly before she burst into tears over the letdown.

  Nate had taken her leaving personally. Before she had left, she’d told him over and over again that she wasn’t leaving him, but he didn’t seem to understand the difference between leaving him and just leaving. She didn’t know how to tell him that he wasn’t enough to stop the panic, the fear. That was simply too ego-busting to break out on someone you loved.

  Maybe if she had told him that, he would have understood, but she just couldn’t bring herself to say it. I love you. So simple, in theory. But to her, it was absolutely horrific. Love required giving up control, and she couldn’t do that. Not now, not ever. Even though she trusted him now, trusted him more than she would have ever believed possible to trust someone who looked every inch the bad boy, she couldn’t bring herself to give up any amount of control. Besides, what was the point of telling someone you loved them if your life was just going to keep you apart?

  Now, two weeks into this trip, she was seriously questioning her sanity. She could have tried telling him she loved him, maybe that would have rid her of her panic. Isn’t that how it worked in the fairy tales, in the movies? I love you was a panacea, curing all ills. Her old tactics weren’t working, maybe she should have given the fairy tale standard a try.

  She had to focus. She focused on the giant gold Buddha, on the tourists in their standard garb of shorts, sandals and socks. Focused on the resident monks in their gray and maroon robes. This was what she needed to do. Lose herself in the details that made her stories so rich. Her narrowed focus pushed away the black spots and finally, she was able to function without panic, the exhaustion becoming merely a minor annoyance.

  ###

  “Another month?” Nate asked.

  Had the woman absolutely lost her fucking mind? Every time she called him, she sounded worse. It was terrible to not be able to see her face. Unlike her face, her voice could hide so much, but even without visuals, Nate could tell she was going from bad to worse. Every day, her voice got brighter and brighter. Today she sounded chirpy. Chelsea was not chirpy by nature. She sounded like someone trying to keep herself from going under.

  Underneath the chirpiness, her exhaustion showed. She searched for words far longer than she should, her thoughts were jumbled and disorganized. A pang of fear spiked through him. She was beginning to sound a hell of a lot like she had when she was telling him about the Australian Incident. Sensations and emotions were the only things she had a grasp on now. Great. That was just great.

  “Yeah, there are some really fun stories I can do in Thailand,” she said.

  “Another month,” Nate said again, “In Thailand.”

  Anger was fighting concern for prevailing emotion, and unfortunately, it was winning.

  “Another month of not sleeping, not eating, just generally running yourself into the ground. Chelsea, you can’t do this!”

  Okay, so that sounded a little caveman, even to him. He couldn’t forbid her to go, for heaven’s sake. He was her boyfriend, at best. Their relationship had been a bit up in the air when she left. He hadn’t been able to tell her he loved her, still couldn’t, even with her thousands of miles away. Now he wished to hell he had. It probably would have made this easier. Hell, maybe she wouldn’t have gone if he’d gotten up the balls to tell her how he felt. Now that was a lovely, gut gnawing thought. One for the regrets record books.

  “Nate, you can’t tell me what to do. I’m not about to give up my job and cook and clean for you like some housewife. That’s not who I am,” she said.

  Clearly, she had thought his last comment a bit cavemannish as well.

  “Give me a break, Chelsea. That is not what this is about and you know it. I don’t want you to give up your job, and I certainly don’t want you to cook and clean for me. Don’t try to make this into some sort of equality thing. I don’t want to find out from Tony or your mother that you’ve had another goddam break down in some remote part of the world.”

  He was nearly shouting now. He had no idea how else to get his point across.

  “I’m resting, Nate,” she said, “I am.”

  “No, you’re not. The stuff you’ve told me you’ve been doing, you haven’t had time to rest. I don’t think you’ll survive another breakdown. You’re still running Chelsea. When are you going to see that?”

  He’d gone too far. He knew it the second the phone line went dead.

  “Fuck,” he screamed to the empty house as he threw the phone across the kitchen.

  ###

  Chelsea sipped at her tea and tried to fight back her nausea. Nothing she had done today made any sense, and she was beginning to feel as if she was looking at the world through a fishbowl. Colors and shapes swirled around her without resolving into people or things and the constant movement made her head hurt. All of this was sickeningly familiar, but she just couldn’t stop. She didn’t know how and things were getting worse, not better.

  The near constant sound of cards being slapped down on surrounding tables by people playing a card game called go-stop echoed the throbbing in her head. The rhythmic noise was punctuated by the shrill sound of people rapidly speaking a language she didn’t understand. Despite her grasp of European languages, Chelsea had only ever managed to pick up enough of the Asian languages to make her way around. Usually, she found the sing song quality soothing, transfixing. Today it just grated.

  On the outskirts of her attention, her uneasiness lingered. She’d made plans to extend her trip by another month. She had to work harder, longer, if she was going to get rid of these feelings.

  Nate had not been happy with that news, and she had hung up on him yesterday. She didn’t have the energy to deal with him being a chauvinistic pig. Somewhere, deep down, she knew that he wasn’t, knew he was only thinking of her best interests. Just as it had
been easier to clump him in with the bad boys, it was easier now to clump him in with all the men who didn’t think women should work. It compartmentalized him nicely.

  She had a job to do, and she forged on. She had three more places she had to go before she could consider the day done and she was still struggling to write up her notes on her morning.

  Taking a deep breath, Chelsea tried to arrange her thoughts in some way that approached logical. That morning she had been to a bull fight in the truest sense of the word. It had been bull against bull, the two butting heads and shoving at each other. There was something so innately male about the way the bulls fought. Women, she had jotted down, even those considered aggressive by their peers, were very rarely so impassioned, so arbitrary in their aggression. Men were really little more than animals, she’d thought while watching and getting caught up in the fevered excitement of the crowd.

  Halfway through the second match up, Chelsea had felt light, as if her body were made of nothing more than skin. She’d left shortly thereafter, coming to this tea shop to regroup.

  A few deep breaths seemed to help the worst of the nausea and Chelsea looked around for some inspiration, some details of the large square to give her readers a taste of what it was like to sit outside a tea shop in Seoul. Small children were playing in a nearby fountain, their voices rising high and clear above the general din. The air smelled sweet, yet pungent, the smell of the teahouse combining with the more acrid scent of the kimchi being sold on the street.

  She glanced over her shoulder at the bustling market behind her and felt her stomach lurch. A huge man, white amid a sea of Asian people, towered over the crowd. He wore a black t-shirt, threads of color winding their way up his neck. Nate? She felt saved, a damsel in distress being scooped up by her knight in shining armor. He drew closer and she began to rise out of her chair to wave at him, but he was gone. Replaced by a normal looking Western tourist. The man didn’t even have tattoos.

  Oh boy, Chelsea thought, I’m losing it. And then the blackness won again.

  ###

  She was dreaming. She was in her Seoul hotel room, chilled to the bone by the overzealous air conditioning. An overhead fan was creating too much of a breeze, and her arms were cold. Nate was lying next to her, leaning on his elbow and looking down at her, great concern etched on his face.

  She blinked a few times and tried to smile at him and the concern eased a little.

  “That’s it,” he said, a smile of his own cocking his irresistible mouth, “I’m officially changing your name to Sleeping Beauty. You just can’t seem to stay awake when I’m around.”

  “What happened? What are you doing here?”

  She slowly realized that she wasn’t dreaming. Nate was here, in her hotel room. He was wearing a black shirt, his tattoos rising up his neck from beneath his collar. She had seen him.

  “You fainted in a tea shop and I carried you back here,” Nate said.

  He brushed a piece of hair out of her eyes. She had forgotten how much she liked it when he did that.

  “But, why are you here?” she asked weakly, “And how did you find me? Did you just wander around Seoul looking for me?”

  Her head still felt fuzzy and too light. She took a sip of the water sitting on the table next to her. It didn’t help her head, but it kept her from seeing the anger and frustration in Nate’s eyes.

  “The manager of the hotel said you liked this tea shop. As I got closer, I called you and heard the 1812 overture. Your phone led me right to you,” he said with a grin, “I was going to just wait in the lobby for you, but I got lucky.”

  “The manager told you where I was?” Chelsea asked. That was scary enough that it broke through the fog in her brain. What if he’d been a stalker? “That’s not very safe.”

  Nate nodded. “I know. But he was a Blindside fan.”

  “Wow,” Chelsea said, impressed.

  This whole trip, she’d been noticing people wearing Blindside t-shirts, stores carrying their albums. Nate, Bill and Sean really were huge worldwide.

  Chelsea reeled herself back from her sidetrack.

  “But why are you here? Why did you come here?” she asked.

  “I’m here because when I talked to you yesterday, you couldn’t complete a sentence without a minute long pause, Chelsea. You couldn’t even put two words together half the time. I could tell you were running yourself down again, and I didn’t want to have to come and get you out of a hospital. And it’s clearly a good thing I did.”

  His voice had taken on a stern edge that grated on Chelsea’s very frayed nerves. Pushing herself up onto her elbows, she looked at Nate with as serious a look as she could manage.

  “I’m an adult, Nate Stone,” she said angrily, “And don’t you forget it.”

  She stood up, needing to get away from him, from the way he was making her feel, but her dramatic exit was ruined when she fell on the floor in a heap. Her legs had turned to oatmeal and she was unable to move. So instead she cried, leaning her head against the bed and beating the mattress with her fists.

  “What was that about being an adult?” Nate said.

  It could have been mean, but he was picking her up and putting her back into bed with such tenderness that Chelsea couldn’t see it that way. She snuggled against him and took a deep breath. The wonderful smell of him chased away her tears and she started kissing his neck, wanting to get at all of him, wanting to taste him, let him seep through her pores.

  “Chelsea,” he said, his voice struggling to maintain composure under her onslaught.

  “Shhh,” she said as she explored him.

  Feverish, near blinded by the sudden, fierce need to be possessed by him, Chelsea yanked at his shirt, pulling it free from the waistband of his jeans. If she couldn’t feel in control, she could at least be controlled by someone she loved.

  “Chelsea, we need to talk about this,” he said, “We need to talk about what you’re doing to yourself and why.”

  He grabbed her hands and held them fast against his firm chest.

  “You’re so fond of deals, I’ll make you one. We can talk all you want. After you fuck me senseless.”

  He raised his eyebrow at her.

  “I’m serious Nate. You want to do what’s best for me, do that. I want you now, no games, no fooling around. I just want you inside me. Please.”

  She swallowed hard. She didn’t want him to know how close she was to tears again. Everything was closing in on her. Her panic swelling, threatening to overturn her and pull her under. Her body was rebelling against a hard work schedule that no longer seemed to be doing its job and she was so confused about the man lying next to her she could barely keep her feelings straight.

  But she wasn’t confused about how he affected her body. Two minutes in the same room with him his smell had gone straight to her sex. She was open, warm, she could feel it. She needed him so badly it went beyond the physical. If he took her now, it would push all the rest to the sidelines.

  His jaw worked and Chelsea knew his lust, anger and frustration were battling for control. She wiggled her hips up against his groin and he squeezed his eyes shut.

  “Fine,” he said.

  Then he was on top of her, pinning her hands over her head as he kissed her savagely, his hands wandering roughly over her body. He pulled her shirt off, her bra, her jeans, then stood and yanked off his own clothes.

  Ferociously, he pulled her body down to the end of the bed and spread her legs wide. He stood between them and stared at her darkly.

  “You’re sure this is what you want?” he asked, his voice rough.

  She nodded, her breath ragged, her body feeling alive. She’d never been more sure of anything in her life. Nate, rough, no pretenses, no reservations. It felt like only that would save her.

  Hooking his elbows under her knees, he pulled her towards him and thrust into her in one slick movement. He teased her, thrusting in to the hilt before drawing all the way back out, just resting his head against
her opening. She surged her hips forward, embracing the mindlessness of pure, physical need.

  For what seemed like an eternity, he kept up the tortuously slow pace, intensity strengthening each thrust. Finally, when she was panting and writhing on the bed, her body thrumming with the need for release, he began a constant, driving rhythm that quickly urged her to the brink of orgasm.

  His final thrust sent them both over the edge and he toppled down on top of her, chest heaving. Digging her nails into his painted skin, she mixed her screams with his primal growls.

  ###

  “Okay, let’s talk,” Nate said when his breath returned to normal.

  Jesus, that had been intense. He’d forgotten what they were like together, how each touch spiraled out of control until they were frenzied, bodies heaving together. It had seemed so fantastically right that he had convinced himself he’d been making it up. But he hadn’t been. Every time their bodies connected, energy zinged between them, their souls touching. It was an intensity that went beyond the physical. Three weeks ago, it had scared the shit out of him. Now that he’d been without it, he would do anything to hold on to it.

  “Do we have to?” she asked lazily.

  Chelsea lay on top of him, her little body sprawled across his.

  He liked looking down, seeing her white skin against the colors of his, her curves against his muscle.

  “Oh, come on. We had a deal. We have a good track record with deals,” he said.

  He jiggled his leg a little to rock her from her complacency.

  “Mmmmm,” she muttered sleepily and burrowed her head against his chest.

  “Come on Sleeping Beauty, you promised,” he said.