Page 87 of Angel

Chapter Twenty-Seven - Angelo

Sweet darkness wrapped around me. I turned my cheek into the pillow and pulled the blankets up tighter around me. This was the best part of any morning: those few moments right before you fully woke up, right before thoughts of the day snuck in.

Paige squirmed next to me and kicked my leg. I edged over towards the side of the bed to get out of her way.

The bed began shaking.

“Wh-what?” I groggily asked, sitting up and reaching for the table lamp.

A high, piercing scream filled the room at the same moment light flooded it.

“Paige!”

She bolted upright, gasping for air.

I grabbed her shoulders. “Paige! Are you awake?”

Her wide eyes stared at me, but whether they really saw me or not was a mystery.

“Do you need your inhaler?” I asked.

“My… my...” She looked around the bed in confusion, and then she shook her head.

“All right.” I relaxed my hold on her shoulders. “Are you okay?”

“I...” Her bottom lip trembled. “My parents. I saw them.”

I smoothed down her hair. “It was just a dream. It’s fine now.”

Her eyes still frantically scanned the room. A shiver ran down my back.

“Lay down,” I said, half because I needed to appease myself. “Come here.”

She let me put my arm around her shoulders and bring her back down into the pillows to nuzzle against my chest.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No,” she whispered.

“Okay,” I soothingly said, rubbing her shoulder. I could make a pretty educated guess on the content of the dream. “Let’s go back to sleep.”

Gray light poked in through the space between the curtains, making it way too early an hour to be up during a vacation.

“I can’t,” she woefully said.

“Okay.” I wrapped both arms around her and held her so tight I thought she might tell me to stop. Instead she locked one arm across my chest and turned herself to face into me.

“It’s the same dream I always have,” she softly whispered.

I gritted my teeth. She woke from bad dreams every once in a while, but the way she talked suggested the nightmares were more common that I thought.

I carefully selected my words. “Maybe it’s time you thought about going back to therapy.”

She tensed a bit. “No.”

I bit back a curse. At this point her resistance to getting professional help bordered on childish. “I really think it’s time Paige.”

Paige pulled away and sat up, long streams of hair falling around her face. “I went to therapy. I spent years there. And I saw, like, three different therapists. There’s nothing else it can do for me, Angelo?”