by Nina Lane
I tried, wanting to anchor myself, but I couldn’t focus on his face, couldn’t suppress the urge to run. I lowered my head. The world spun. I tightened my fingers on Dean’s arm, overwhelmed by the horrible feeling that I was about to lose my grip on reality.
“Talk… talk to me,” I gasped. “C-count.”
“Take a deep breath in. Nice and slow.” He sat beside me on the bench. He pulled my scarf away from my throat, the rush of air a welcome relief on my hot skin. “One. Two. Three.”
I managed to pull a breath into my lungs. A new, different fear arose that Dean’s proximity would intensify my panic, but instead the pressure of his hand and the rumble of his voice loosened the constriction in my chest.
“Again,” he ordered, tilting my chin toward him. “Another breath on the count of three, okay?”
I stared at his serious expression, his unwavering gaze, and nodded. He counted. I inhaled. Again and again until the tension began to seep away with every exhale. My heartbeat steadied. I kept my hand curled around Dean’s arm, finding comfort in the solid feel of his muscles beneath his sweatshirt.
He counted. I breathed. Over and over until air filled my chest without hurting, and the sharp pain in my throat dissipated.
When I finally felt more in control, I swiped at my damp forehead and rested my elbows on my knees. My heartbeat still pounded in my head, but it no longer felt as if it was about to burst.
I stared at the ground. Embarrassment, shame, began to fill the empty space inside me.
“Drink some water, Liv.”
I accepted the bottle Dean extended and took a small sip. Slowly the world around me came into focus again. A few people still milled around, but the last of the crowd was disappearing through the entrance. A raucous cheer came from inside the stadium like steam billowing from an enormous pot.
I clenched my fists to hide the lingering trembles. I couldn’t look at Dean.
“Better?” he asked.
I nodded. “S-sorry.” I rubbed a hand over my face and looked toward the stadium. “The game’s about to start.”
“I don’t care about the game. Can you walk home or should I call us a cab?”
“I want to walk.” Grateful that he no longer expected us to go to the game, I stood on shaky legs. “But you don’t have to…”
“Come on.” He slipped his hand beneath my elbow again as we headed back toward Dayton Street. I kept my scarf loose and unfastened the ties of my sweatshirt to feel the cold air. Exhaustion swamped me.
We walked the length of Dayton Street in silence. The movement felt good, dispelling the threads of anxiety and tension. I shoved my hands into my pockets and hunched my shoulders as we rounded Marion Street to my apartment building.
“You don’t have to come up,” I said, the words sticking in my throat as I fumbled to find my key.
“I need to know you’re okay.”
I let him follow me inside and up the elevator. Once in the safety of my apartment, I sank into a chair and rested my head against the back.
Tears stung my eyes. I tried not to think. I heard Dean rustling around, and then the scent of peppermint tea filled my nose.
“Found it in the kitchen,” he said, placing a cup on the table beside me.
I sat up slowly, too exhausted to hide my dismay. “I’m… I’m so sorry.”
“I’m not a fan of peppermint tea, but you don’t need to apologize for it.”
I managed to crack a smile and looked up. He stood right in front of me, not too close, his hands loose on his hips. Despite the wry tone of his voice, his eyes were dark with concern.
My heart hurt with a different kind of ache. The threat of a panic attack always hovered at the edges of my consciousness, but I hadn’t experienced one in over three years. The fact that I just had reminded me with the force of a blow of my damaged psyche. And the fact that Dean had witnessed it…
God in heaven.
“I’m… they don’t happen often,” I finally stammered. “I… I almost forgot how to deal with them.”
“How long have you had them?” he asked.
“They started when I was eighteen. I went to a therapist and learned behavioral and breathing techniques, but even then they didn’t happen often. I know the triggers, so I’ve managed to avoid situations that might cause them.”
Dean frowned. “Crowds?”
“Sometimes,” I said vaguely. “I haven’t… haven’t been around people much in the past few years.”
I couldn’t get into this. Not now. Maybe not ever.
I put a hand over my eyes. “I’m sorry, Dean. I’m exhausted.”
I couldn’t muster the courage to ask, but I wished he would stay. Though I’d never panicked before without the specific trigger of feeling trapped, the threat of another attack was still there. As much as I didn’t want Dean to witness my panic again, I was more scared of being alone.
“I hate to leave you, Liv.”
I lowered my hand to look at him. The tender concern in his expression eased my anxiety. “I’m really not a total basket case.”
“I know. How about I sleep on the sofa tonight?”
“You wouldn’t mind?”
“I want to.” He drew a few strands of my hair between his fingers, looking as if he were studying them in the light.
Relieved and glad to have something to do besides sit there trembling, I went into my bedroom to get him a clean towel and washcloth. I found an unopened toothbrush in the bathroom cabinet and a fresh bar of soap, which I put on top of the folded towel.
“I keep extra quilts in here.” I took a few magazines and books off the storage chest that served as a coffee table. “Hold on, I’ll get you a pillow too.”
Apparently sensing my surge of jittery energy, Dean stayed out of the way while I bustled around getting a quilt spread out and the pillows fluffed.
“Here’s a clock if you want to keep it beside the sofa.” I put a battery-powered digital clock on a small table. “Do you want the remote control too?”
“Liv.” Dean put a gentle hand on my shoulder. Affection and something else, something more somber, filled his eyes. “Everything’s fine.”
“Okay.” I ran my damp palms over my thighs. “Sorry… sorry again for…”
Shit. My throat jammed up.
“Stop apologizing, Liv. Go get some sleep.”
Rather than try and speak, I just nodded and went into my room. I slipped into a T-shirt and pajama bottoms and managed to brush my teeth and hair before falling into bed.The one blessing of a panic attack, if one could call it a blessing, was that I always slept hard for a few hours afterward. It was one of the few times I was able to sleep well.
I woke to the reddish glow of my clock. One thirty-two. Pushing aside the covers, I went into the kitchen for a glass of water. The living room curtains were partly open, allowing a thin stream of moonlight to illuminate Dean stretched out on the sofa. Clutching the glass, I moved closer to look at him.
It should have been strange to me that his presence was a comfort rather than cause for apprehension, but it felt entirely… normal.
I put the glass down, then sat on a chair by the sofa and looked at him. He seemed younger in sleep, the lines of his face eased, his closed eyes concealing the flashes of darkness whose source I still didn’t know.
I could almost see him as he might have been as a boy—full of youthful energy and confidence, knowing he would blaze a trail through the world, surrounded by people who admired him.
A band tightened around my heart. How different from my own wariness, my inability to envision my own future beyond the tangled, dark forest of my childhood where an oppressive queen ruled.
Dean opened his eyes. We looked at each other for a moment before he pushed up to sitting. He drag
ged a hand through his hair, over his rough jaw.
“Hi,” he said, his voice hoarse with sleep.
“Hi. Thanks for staying.”
I couldn’t believe how comforting it was to have him here, how grateful I was to wake up and not be alone. Even when I was at Twelve Oaks… I’d never felt so warmed by the presence of another person.
I have been so fucking lonely.
My throat tightened.
“You okay?” Dean asked.
“Can I get you anything?” I whispered. “Something to drink?”
He shook his head. Moonlight slanted through the curtains, a stripe of it cutting across the shadows on his face.
I owed him an explanation. I knew that.
I took a breath. “Dean, I’m… I need to tell you some things about me.”
Faint wariness flashed in his eyes. “Okay.”
“When I said I traveled a lot as a kid, it was because of my mother,” I explained, resisting the memories pushing at the back of my head. “Crystal. She was very self-centered. Controlling. She’d been a spoiled, coddled child… actually had a successful career as a child model for a couple of years and was in a national commercial.
“But the career offers waned when her mother got a reputation for being unreasonable and demanding, a typical stage mother. No one wanted to work with Crystal anymore. She was in some beauty pageants and talent shows, but then she got pregnant with me when she was seventeen. Changed her whole life. She never stopped resenting me for that.”
I reached for my water and took a sip. “Her parents disowned her because of the pregnancy. She had to drop out of high school and move in with my father. They never got along. They fought a lot about money… or lack thereof. They broke up when I was seven.
“I found out later that my father was having an affair.” The word lodged in my throat. “He was going to leave my mother to be with the other woman. My aunt Stella, my father’s sister, once told me he’d still wanted to have a relationship with me, you know, still be my father. But my mother said she’d never let him near me again.
“So she packed up her car and we took off. She was restless, always wanting to be somewhere else, always wanting to find the attention she’d had as a child. We moved a lot. I lost track of the number of cities and towns we stayed in.”
“How long did you and your mother live like that?” Dean asked.
“Until I was thirteen. I finally told my mother I was going to live with Aunt Stella up in Pepin County. I wanted to have a normal life. My mother and I had a huge fight about it.
“We were in Dubuque. I woke up one morning and she was gone. She’d taken the car, most of our stuff. I had just enough money for a bus ride to Madison, where I called Stella to come and pick me up. I didn’t hear from my mother for years.”
“You lived with your aunt after that?”
“Yes. Through high school.”
“When did you see your mother again?”
An ache crawled over my heart. “When she came to visit right before my senior year. She wanted me to come with her again, but I refused. She’ll never forgive me for leaving her.”
And in some ways, I would never forgive myself.
“Did you ever see your dad again?” Dean asked.
“No. I guess Aunt Stella heard from him a few times when he was looking for me, but she didn’t often know where we were either so she couldn’t tell him anything. Then when I was eleven, we got word that he’d died.”
“How did your mother manage to support you?”
“She hooked up with a lot of men,” I said. An unwelcome barrage of male faces and voices went through my brain. “That was how she found places to stay. She’d convince a guy to let us live with him for a while with the understanding that she’d share his bed. Most of the time, she waited until they agreed… or sometimes after she’d moved in… before telling them she had a daughter.”
“What the—”
“She told me to hide a lot,” I explained. “To wait in the car while she spent a few hours at a bar. Sometimes she left me at a public library, then came back to get me after she’d found a guy. Sometimes she made an effort to earn money by selling jewelry that she made, but I think she found it easier to rely on men to support her.”
I stared at my hands clutched around the glass of water.
“She was quite beautiful,” I said. “That was part of the reason she never had trouble finding a man. She had long blond hair and green eyes. A great figure. And she was confident as a woman, secure in her sexuality. Even if she wasn’t looking for someone, men were attracted to her. The problem was that it was rarely the right kind of man.”
My voice faded. There had been good men in the six years we were on the road. A karate instructor who gave me forms lessons and talked to me about things like respect, focus, and self-discipline. An insurance salesman who built model airplanes as a hobby. A camera-shop owner who taught me the basics of photo composition.
An MIT-graduate-turned-hippie named Northern Star who convinced me I was worth something.
I pushed the thought of him aside. That one hurt too much.
“Through men and sex, my mother found the attention she’d lost when she was younger,” I said. “It seemed so… easy for her.”
“But it was horrible for you.”
“I hated every minute of it,” I admitted. “When she left me alone, I was so scared she’d never come back. And I couldn’t stand having to live with men I didn’t know, sleeping on dirty sofas or on the floor. I’d often hear my mother having sex in the next room. A few times I walked in on her and some strange man. It doesn’t take a genius to understand why I’m still a virgin at twenty-four.”
Finally I looked up at Dean. He was watching me, wary, tense, as if steeling himself against what I hadn’t yet confessed.
“I was… I’d always tried hard to be invisible so no one would notice me,” I said. “And for a while it worked. My mother was so stunning, so forceful, that no one paid attention to her quiet, mousy daughter. I’d also learned there was safety in hiding, that if people didn’t know you were there, they couldn’t bother you. That was exactly how I wanted it.”
I drew in a breath. “But my luck ran out when… when one of the men messed with me.” I spoke in a hard rush, desperate to finally get it out. “Another one tried a year later, but I got away from him in time.”
Dean swore—a violent, cutting sound—and shoved to his feet.
“The guy was… he masturbated in front of me,” I said, bile rising in my chest as the memory stabbed the back of my head. “First when I was asleep. I was nine. I woke up once in the middle of the night and saw him standing beside my bed. I didn’t know at the time what he was doing, but I knew it was wrong. I… I didn’t know what to do, so I pretended I was still asleep.”
“Jesus, Liv.”
“My mother… she knew about it.” I could hardly speak past the tightness in my throat. “I saw the door open one night, Dean. There was… there was no lock on the door, and I saw her look in when he was doing it. I thought for sure she would stop him, that she’d protect me, that she’d do something, but…”
“She didn’t?” His voice was strangled.
I shook my head, the harshness of the betrayal splitting open inside me. “I watched her close the door. I didn’t move. Couldn’t. She’d left me alone with the sick bastard.”
“Liv, I—”
I held up my hand. “She wouldn’t listen when I told her we had to leave. All I could do was avoid the guy as much as possible and pray he didn’t do anything else. Then one day he brought me a cake for my tenth birthday. Told me he’d only let me have a piece if I touched his penis. He took it out and started to… and before I could get away from him, my mother walked in.”
“What… what did sh
e do?”
Old, raw anger and fear pierced my heart. My vision blurred.
“She blamed me for exciting him,” I confessed. “Said if I’d been wearing a looser T-shirt, he wouldn’t have been tempted.” I hugged my arms around myself. “It wasn’t the last time I’d hear some version of that accusation.”
“What the hell, Liv?” Rage flared through Dean, his fists clenching. “What kind of mother says that to her daughter?”
“She had problems of her own.” Sensing his anger about to explode, I rose to approach him. “I’ve tried to accept that, but it takes work. A couple of weeks later, we finally left the guy’s house. I’d never been so thankful to move. God knows what else he would have done.”
Dean swore again and pressed his palms to his eyes. “I’m so fucking sorry, Liv. I suspected something had happened to you, but I hoped to hell I was wrong.”
Oh, there’s more.
I couldn’t tell him all of it, though. Not now. Too soon.
“Is that the cause of your panic attacks?” he asked.
“Some, yes,” I admitted. “I’ve been through a lot of therapy. Learned how to deal with it. But I want you to know before…” …this goes any farther.
He lowered his hands to look at me. “Before what?”
“I don’t… I don’t expect you to stick around and try to deal with my issues.” My chest hurt as I forced the words out.
Dean looked at me for a minute before he cupped my face in his warm hands.
“I meant what I said the other night, Liv,” he told me. “If you don’t want to do anything, we won’t. If you want to go slow, we’ll go slow. If you want to end this right now, I’ll walk away from you. It’ll kill me to do it, but if you want me to, I will.”
The choice is yours, Liv.
He didn’t have to say it. His gift of a choice was a balm to my cracked heart.
“I don’t want you to walk away,” I said.
“Good.” The lines between his eyes eased with relief.
I gripped his wrists, a knot of fear binding my throat. “But you… you might want to go,” I warned.
Darkness flashed in his expression. “Why?”