Page 58 of Into the Fire: After

Twenty-four

Taryn

Hadthatdreamagain.Caine didn’t catch me. I wobbled and then falling and then dark. Pain. Like when my heat pains took over everything, only more final, somehow.

Writing to keep writing. Writing to try to spin this to something better to write about.

At least when I hit the ground and the pain explodes, I always wake up. That’s a win, right?

Wakingupfromnightmareswasn’t as dramatic as TV made it out to seem. No gasping or shooting up in bed, no calling out the last words my dream-self had tried to scream. Usually, the black of my dream-death just clicked into the black of myclosed eyelids and the awareness that I was back to the reality I hadn’t realized I left.

I rubbed my burning eyes and opened them up, checking on the others asleep around me. Caine and Brea sandwiched me—he on his back with his face turned so he could almost kiss my shoulder, and she on her side with her leg thrown over mine and her nose grazing my cheek. Lin and Brooks had fallen asleep in their room down the hall.

A sweat droplet tickled its way down my arm, another one over the curve of my waist.

One thing that the movies got right: waking up covered in anxiety sweats.

Need air. Need sky.

I held my breath as I sat up as slowly as I could, trying not to jar either of the alphas in bed with me. Brea stirred as I pried my arm—gently!—from her grasp, but Caine didn’t so much as twitch. With the agility and stealth of a ninja, I crawled to the foot of the bed and stepped off. I grabbed a robe off the wall hook to cover my thin sleep shirt before easing through the bedroom door, down the quiet hall, and out of the apartment.

Chest tight like hide on a drum. Lungs itchy.

I quickened my pace, heading toward the staircase at the end of the hall and skipping up them until I could burst through the rooftop door that gave me the sky.

I inhaled.

My chest expanded. My skin pebbled.

My ghosts thinned and vanished.

The nightmares always ended on the ground. Maybe that was why I needed to see the sky. I gazed up toward it now, imagining millions of dots of starlight to fill in the largely blank canvas above me.

Light pollution, even in a small city, was a bitch.

I drifted across the patio, bare feet vaguely chilled against the concrete. We were thoroughly mid-autumn now. Faint city sounds whispered to me: distant airplanes, the whirring of electric lines, a few lonely cars rumbling down side streets.

I bypassed the chic patio furniture where’d we’d first sat with Brooks and Lin and flirted our way into a date, and where we’d returnedaftersaid date.

Instead, like every other night I’d ended up out here, I wandered toward the brick wall that stood at the roof’s edge. I crossed my arms and leaned my elbows onto it, eyes still cast upward.

Not downward. Never downward.

Two months we’d been home, and everything felt so…artificial. I tried to pretend it was normal, but the incongruences sometimes demanded to be known.

My job, gone.

Bags under Lin’s eyes.

The missing fourth bond.

Nightmares.

Memories.

I huffed a breath through my nostrils, eyes latched onto the navy sky above me, willing it closer. I needed to feel that velvet on my fingers.

Instead, rough concrete scratched at my hands.