I drew back, into the shadows, my heart pressing hot against my ribs.
He had come back.
He was real.
I was real.
I was real.
Dr. Sedwick’s office was above my favorite New Age shop and had the distinct smell of oils and burning incense that permeated the floors. It was a small office, with heavy leather furniture and enough books stuffed in glass-fronted cabinets to start a library.
I’d been to several therapists over the years, and Dr. Sedwick’s office was definitely my favorite. It was warm and cozy and felt like a father’s study, or at least what I imagined a father’s study to feel like.
Mine had never had one. In fact, my dad had never been around much at all. He and Mom had divorced when I was four, and then he dove into his work, traveling so much, I rarely saw him.
When I found out he’d killed himself while Mom and I had been held captive, I’d been numb to the news. I hadn’t seen Dad for months before I’d disappeared. It was like his death was a secondhand story I’d heard from a friend—the loss theirs, not mine.
I still felt guilty about not missing him.
“Good morning, Elizabeth,” Dr. Sedwick said when I stepped inside.
I’d been seeing Dr. Sedwick for over a year now, and though I always doubted the effectiveness of talking about my problems, I did feel lighter when I finished a session with him.
“Morning,” I replied, and made my way for the leather couch. I always sat on the right-hand side, wedged in the crook of the arm, the plaid throw draped over the couch a comforting warmth behind me.
“Give me one second.” He made a few more notes in his notebook before closing it and shutting the door. He came around the desk and sat in the leather chair across from me, a new notebook propped on his lap.
“How are you today?” he asked.
We started every session this way. My first time seeing him I’d said, “I’m fine.” I’d learned that when people asked me how I was, fine was what they wanted to hear.
Dr. Sedwick had seen straight through my BS, and asked me again, with a quirk of his eyebrow, a flicker of a smile. And he kept asking until I told him how I really was.
Now I cut straight to the truth.
“Confused. Happier. Hopeful.”
“Go on.”
I shrugged. “For the first time in a long time I feel like what happened in the past might finally start to make sense.”
He pursed his lips and nodded as he scribbled something in the notebook.
“So that’s where the hope comes from?” he asked. “And the happiness?”
“Yeah. I think so.”
“Hope is a powerful thing. It’s like…” He trailed off and stared out the window, eyes narrowed against the sunlight. “Well, it’s like the flame in the darkness. You know?”
“Yeah. I think so.”
“So where does the confusion come in?”
I raked my teeth over my bottom lip. Should I bring up Nick?
Dr. Sedwick beat me to it, though.
“Does this have anything to do with the boy staying at your house?”
I raised my brows. “Did Aggie call you already?”
He smiled. “You know how she is. She’s concerned.”
A clock ticked above the fireplace.
“Yes,” I answered. “All of the above has to do with him, actually.”
“He’s helping you figure out your past?”
“Yes.”
“Who is he, exactly?”
I swallowed, licked my lips. Dr. Sedwick knew parts of what had happened to me. But only parts. And none of the important ones.
“He… he’s from my past.”
The pen raced across the notebook.
“Does he know what happened to you?”
“Yes. I mean, somewhat.”
“How did you meet him?”
I shifted, tucking my feet beneath me. Should I tell him? Everything I said in here was supposed to be confidential, but secrets are powerful, and this was a pretty important one. The police had searched for clues to Nick’s identity when I’d arrived in the ER in his arms. And they’d found nothing.
Was Dr. Sedwick required to report who Nick was if I told him? Did the law trump patient confidentiality?
“I met him through a friend,” I answered.
“How do you feel about Nick now?”
“I want to be with him every second of the day. I can’t really explain why, though.”
“Does he feel the same way?”
“I don’t know.”
Dr. Sedwick scratched the back of his head as he thought, the pen still tucked between his index and middle finger. “Why has Nick reappeared in your life?”
“He’s just visiting.”
“Has he told you why he’s here?”
I frowned. Dr. Sedwick had never pried so much into one person’s place in my life. Never. And he knew how I felt about Evan, even.
“No,” I answered. “Can we talk about something else?”
He shrugged. “If you’d like.”
I did. I wanted to talk about anything other than Nick. But I also couldn’t think of anything to talk about but him.
“Why don’t you tell me what happened the other night. With Chloe and Evan.”
A painful memory. Still so sharp it chafed. “We were in the woods, and I think Evan was actually going to tell me he liked me, but then I flipped out. I had, like, a flashback or something.”
I explained how Evan had wandered off looking for cell reception, and what my mind had turned to in his absence, in the dark, how the pine trees had triggered the memory.
“Scent is a powerful trigger,” Dr. Sedwick said. “Have you ever considered working through the flashbacks in a controlled setting?”
“What do you mean?”
“Determine which scents trigger which memories and use those scents to experience the flashbacks in a place that’s safe, like your home. Once you’ve faced them, they’ll hold less power over you.”
I hadn’t considered that, though I had been doing it on my own the past few days, to an extent. Like with my mother’s bottle.
“I could try that,” I said.
Dr. Sedwick nodded and made another note. “Try it and let me know how it goes. Go slow, though.”
“I will.”
“So let’s get back to Evan. What was his reaction to your incident?”
“Well, he seemed okay with everything after, but now I’m worried I ruined any chance I had with him.”
Dr. Sedwick crossed one leg over the other knee and glanced at me. “If you had to pick between Evan and Nick, who would you pick?”
“I don’t know. I barely know Nick. I mean… I’ve spent more time with Evan, I guess. So it makes sense that I should pick him. But…”
A long, pregnant pause.
“But?” he coaxed.
“Evan’s like… well, if he’s a raindrop, then Nick is the sea.”
“Ahh.” Dr. Sedwick nodded emphatically.
“So… what do I do?”
He set the notebook down on the table next to him and leaned closer, his hands folded together. “Oceans are vast and almost bottomless. You play in the rain, Elizabeth. You drown in the sea.”
After my therapy session was up, I went down to the store below and bought three new bottles of scent: lavender, bergamot, and a fragrance oil called China Rain.
Back at home, in my room, I readied a new glass bottle. I started with a base of China Rain, then added cucumber, for its cool, crisp scent. A few drops of cyclamen. Musk. Vanilla. Mandarin. Pine. And last, the lavender.
Once it was stirred, I pressed my finger over the neck of the bottle and upended it. I rubbed the oil on the underside of my wrist and breathed in.
All the bottles I’d mixed until now could be definitively traced back to a subject or experience. Carnivals. Summer. Christmas. Mom. Nick.
But none of them had ever been mixed for a feeling.
Dr. Sedwick was right—scents were a strong trigger. And I needed something to keep me sane, to remind me of the flame in the darkness.
Hope.
And hope, if it had a scent, would smell like spring, like the sea, like something new and alive. Like Nick.
So I’d taken my favorite spring and water scents, and mixed them with some of Nick’s. Because if I was ever going to figure out what had happened to me, Nick was the path to it.
Nick was my flame in the darkness.
I grabbed a new label, and wrote hope in cursive letters.
Instead of putting the bottle with the others on the shelf, I set it on my bedside table so I could uncork it whenever I wanted.
Whenever I needed.
21
NICK
THE CLOCK ABOVE THE BED SAID IT WAS just after eleven in the morning, but it felt like six, like I’d gotten up too early. My eyes were burning. My head was pounding. And anytime I moved at a normal pace, my stomach seesawed and I had to clamp my mouth shut to stop from puking my guts out.
I hated puking.
Probably a lot of the suffering was due to the hangover, but I was blaming it on Trev’s head slam. Everything was his fault.
After crawling my ass out of bed, I went straight for the bathroom and scrubbed my face with icy-cold water. When I looked up in the mirror, I wasn’t surprised to see a massive black-and-purple bruise on my forehead.
In the kitchen, I found the fridge stocked with essentials. Some fruit. Milk. Bottles of water. Some lunch meat. A package of English muffins. And a bowl of leftovers.
Elizabeth must have come in after I went into town again yesterday.
I gave the apartment a quick glance, wondering if I’d left anything incriminating out in the open.
Didn’t look like it. I hadn’t had much on me to begin with.
After making my way back to town last night, I’d retrieved the truck with my bag inside it. At least now I had clean clothes.
I threw on a fresh T-shirt and a pair of jeans, and ran a hand through my hair. Good enough.
In the depths of a cupboard, I found a coffeemaker and then set out on the counter a bag of overpriced coffee. Hawaiian Sumatra, it was called. Whatever. Coffee was coffee, and it would do.
Once I had a fresh cup in hand, I sat at the squeaky kitchen table and pulled out my gun. I dropped out the clip, set it aside, and fieldstripped the rest.
Sam had taught me how to use a gun, back when I first joined the Branch. Those memories were still gone—the ones where I entered the Branch, the missions I’d gone on—but the one that had returned, and that stood out like a thumbprint on glass, was the memory of Sam giving me my first Glock.
Guns do funny things to people. They make the weak feel powerful and the powerful feel vulnerable. I was in the first group. When I’d first met Sam, I knew a thing or two about fighting with my hands, but I didn’t know shit about weapons. If I had, I probably would have put a bullet in my dad a long time ago.
With that Glock in my hand, I didn’t feel as worthless as my dad had made me feel. I felt like I finally had a sure way to defend myself.
Sam had taken me to do target practice in an abandoned train yard where we shot at empty pop cans. I was a crappy shot at first. I expected the gun to do everything for me. Point and shoot, kill whatever stands in your way. I was like a kid playing at being a thug.
After a while, after Sam showed me the technical side of aiming, the instinctual side of assessing your target, I hit every can I aimed at and the gun became a part of me, as deadly as my fists.
Sam’s number-one rule about owning a gun, besides the obvious “Respect the weapon,” was that you had to clean it after every firing.
I hadn’t fired my Glock in over a week, since Cas and I did some target practice, but cleaning my gun was familiar, and right now that’s what I needed. Something to keep my hands busy and my mind blank.
I was wiping down the recoil spring when a knock sounded on the door.
“Nick,” Elizabeth called. “It’s me.”
“Hold on.”
Shit.
I grabbed the frame, the clip, the barrel, and the slide and stuffed them in a drawer.
I still had oil on my hands and quickly wiped them on my black shirt before pulling open the door. “Hey,” I said, a second before I laid eyes on her.
In the hours since I’d seen her last, she’d somehow gotten hotter. Her hair was down, for one, when yesterday it’d been wound up in a ponytail. It was longer than I’d thought, reaching to the middle of her back. It hung around her face in loose waves, and I had the sudden urge to run my hands through it.
Short white shorts gave me a good look at her legs. A tight-fitting tank top showed off her chest. I could see the faint outline of her bra through the shirt and saw a flash of black lace in my head. There was no way I could know what kind of bra she was wearing, but apparently I wanted her in black lace. And that observation made my body do shit I didn’t want it to do. At least not right now at eleven in the fucking morning.
“What happened to you?” she asked, and gestured at the knot on my forehead, her eyes pinched with concern.
Without thinking, I ran a hand over the damage and winced in return. Dumbass.
“It’s nothing. Really.”
“Hmm.” She frowned and tilted her head, causing her bangs to slide forward and hide her eyes. “Do you want some aspirin for it? Does it hurt? I could—”
“No.” I shook my head. “I’m fine.”
“Okay.” She shuffled her feet, shifting her weight, her eyes doing the same noncommittal dance. Finally, she raised an arm to show me the deli bag clutched in her hand. “I brought you breakfast. Muffins. I hope you like muffins.”
I didn’t. I might have been borderline alcoholic, but I rarely ate shitty food. I liked my protein. A lot of it.
But I didn’t tell Elizabeth that. I couldn’t, not when she had that expectant look on her face. So instead I said, “Yeah, sure. I like muffins.”
“Good.” She stayed there at the top of the steps for several long seconds, until I realized she was waiting for an invitation.
“You can come in, you know.” I opened the door wider. Her lips turned up at the corners.
“Thanks.” She stepped over the threshold, her flip-flops slapping the hardwood. She brought with her a scent that was heavy on the flowers, but something clean, too, like rain. Smell was one of the senses I didn’t give much thought to. I had to rely a little more on gut instinct. But something about Elizabeth I’d noticed, something that stuck out, was that she always smelled different, and whatever she smelled like, it was strong, like it’d leached into her skin. Usually people have one specific scent that’s only theirs, sometimes diluted with perfume or cologne. Elizabeth didn’t.
“Did you sleep okay?” she asked.
I shut the door and followed her farther inside. “Not really.”
She glanced at me, mouth parted in an O. “Was it the bed? I keep telling Aggie she needs to replace the mattress in here. It’s super-old. I’m sorry if it was hard as a rock. I could get you some extra blankets for padding or—”
“It wasn’t the bed.” I cracked a knuckle. “It was probably the hangover.”
“Oh.” Her eyes scanned the room, as if searching for the evidence. When she found nothing, she flicked again to me. “You came home late.”
Her lips tightened with regret. She hadn’t meant to admit she’d noticed when I’d returned.
“I ran into an old friend,” I said.
“Who?”
“His name is Trev.”
“Is he still in town? You could invite him over for dinner tonight.”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “I’m not sure. I don’t think so.”
She gestured to the table. “Can I sit?”
“Sure.” I hurried to the table and swiped the recoil spring I’d forgotten to put away. “You want some coffee?”
“I can get it.”
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She set the bag of food on the table and went to the cupboard above the drawer with my hidden gun. She knew what I used to do, she knew about the Branch, but how would she feel if she knew I had a gun with me now?
When her cup was full, she took the chair directly across from me, her hair falling forward on her shoulders. The morning sunlight pouring through the window behind her lit her hair, turning it amber.
I looked down at my own cup.
Elizabeth handed me a napkin and then a blueberry muffin. I rocked back on the chair on two legs and tugged open the silverware drawer to grab a fork. She gave me an odd look.
“You’re going to eat a muffin with a fork?”
“Less mess,” I said, which made her smile. Which almost made me smile.
We ate in silence for a beat.
“Do you have any plans for today?” she asked.
I did. I had a lot of plans. Unfortunately, they all hinged on Trev not being an asshole. “Not yet.”
“I have to work, unfortunately.” She sipped from her coffee, holding the cup with both hands. There were rings on her middle and pointer fingers on one hand, and one on her thumb on the other. I wasn’t close enough to make out the details, but the ring on her pointer finger looked like a feather.
“What’s your shift?” I asked.
“Two to eight.”
I bit my bottom lip, debating. But the question came out before I could squash it. “Do you want to do something tonight? Together?”
She lifted her chin to look me straight on. The move elongated her neck, exposing the soft skin just below her ear. I thought about kissing her there. I thought about doing other things with her.
“Yeah,” she answered, and for a second, I totally forgot what I’d asked her. “Do you have anything in mind?”
I shrugged and tore my gaze away from her neck. “You’re the Trademarr expert. Have any suggestions?”
Hitting on girls was my superpower, but I was having one hell of a time sounding competent at it. It was probably my conscience telling me to back off. Not this girl. And definitely not right now.
“Let me think about it.” The corner of her mouth quirked into a half grin. “I’ll try to come up with something not totally lame. Though I’m not making any promises.”
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