Page 16

Olivia’s having a dream and it’s not a good one.

He heard her whimpering pitifully before, but never this loudly or for this long.

He wouldn’t want to be stuck in a nightmare and hates the idea of leaving her trapped, but Cole fears spooking her by waking her up.

So, he stays on his makeshift floor bed with the cat purring at his side, useless and silent.

He’s prone to lashing out with a reflexive right hook in that situation, but something tells him she isn’t that type.

He still hesitates, questioning both his right and ability to free her from the clutches of an awful dream.

Surprisingly, Lucy has slept soundly through it until Olivia’s cries grow more desperate, and then the baby squeaks awake.

He has to do something, he just isn’t sure what yet.

Gets off the floor and hovers at the edge of the bed as she twitches in her sleep.

His fingers twitch in response against his thigh with the desire to reach out.

Cole dips the mattress with his weight and reaches a gentle hand into the bassinet to soothe Lucy instead. “It’s alright. Your momma’s having a dream, but it’s okay.”

At first, it works. She hears his voice and quiets down, but then Olivia lets out a piercing scream and Lucy does, too.

Enough is enough. He can’t sit here while she suffers because he’s too afraid to overstep his bounds, but he waited too long and she wakes on her own before he can give her shoulder a nudge.

She scrambles away from him faster than she did in the subway bathroom, disoriented and overcome, almost falling off the bed in her haste to escape.

“It’s just me.” He still sounds like he smokes a pack a day even after trying to quit and doubts his voice does much to calm her. “Only a nightmare. Wasn’t real.”

They’re useless words, pointless and common, but she relaxes as quickly as Lucy did, her shoulders sagging and body unsticking from the headboard.

She wipes wet eyes with the back of her hand, releasing a stressed exhale.

For a moment, he wants to hug her. It’s a foolish idea that might get him banished to a separate bedroom from here on out, so he doesn’t try.

She has an odd habit of making him consider things that have never been an option before. He’d rather walk through a herd of the dead than hug anyone and yet…if they were close enough for something like that, he might force himself to push his own boundaries.

They are not.

“I’m sorry. Did I wake you?” She sniffles, hiking the rumpled blanket up her body.

“No, don’t worry about it.”

“I woke her, though.” Olivia scoops the baby into her arms, pressing a wet cheek to soft blonde hair and inhaling deep. “Have I done this before? Made noise in my sleep?”

“Not much.”

“I’ve been having nightmares, but don’t remember waking up. I keep hoping they’ll stop. Every time I close my eyes, I see…”

“You see what?”

“It doesn’t matter anymore. It is what it is.”

“Try me.”

“You don’t wanna hear about that.” She sighs when he only raises a silent brow, waiting for her to continue. “Him. I see him. In that bathroom coming at us, or before, when she wasn’t even here yet, the virus hadn’t happened, and he was coming at me anyway.”

She’s right. He doesn’t want to think about that.

The mental image of her being attacked by her dead husband isn’t a thought he wants in his head.

There’s nothing he can do about it now except let it enrage him, but she needs to talk and he’s a decent listener.

That doesn’t mean he’s got any useful suggestions for her, though.

He’s failed to get rid of his own nightmares after all these years.

“Maybe it’ll just take time, like you said before,” she continues. “He’s dead. I know he’s not coming back. I have plenty of other things now to replace him with in these nightmares.”

“He’s not coming back, but sometimes that logical shit doesn’t matter. I still have dreams, too.”

“About what? Or who?”

It was forever ago. Doesn’t matter now and he’ll only seem like a loser who can’t let go of the past, but she’s watching him with such open honesty, so hopeful that he may offer her validation that he can’t ignore it.

So, he tells her what he’s never told anyone.

Not even Wade, though he suspects he knows anyway since he suffered a similar fate.

“One of my foster parents. He wasn’t winning any father of year awards back in the day.

” Is all he says, but her face goes soft like she wants to reach out across this bed and touch him, though her hand never moves.

“Got moved a lot. Most of them didn’t care enough to bother me.

Some were in it for the checks, a few were kind and decent.

A lot were indifferent. He was indifferent too until one day he wasn’t. ”

He’s barely said more than a full sentence and it still feels like too much.

The itch to escape pushes him off the bed and to the window, where peeking through the blinds feels safer.

Memories of that man bring back the sting of water in his lungs.

Finding the cat at the pond the other day was only another nudge.

Cole’s surprised he wasn’t caught in his own nightmare tonight.

“I’m sorry you had to live through that,” she says softly.

“Sorry you did, too.” He chews on his bottom lip a moment, fighting an internal battle to keep every awful detail a coveted secret. “The thing I have about water…it’s because of him.”

“Oh.” There’s no pity in her tone, only the desire to understand. He expects she might pry deeper and his grip on the windowsill clenches hard enough that his knuckles whiten.

He is thankful when she grants him the gift of keeping the majority of this secret, at least for now.

“So they never really go away? The nightmares?”

He shrugs. “They’ve faded. I don’t wake up yelling as much anymore but they never disappeared. I hope they will for you, though. Could be I’m just extra fucked in the head.”

No sense in sugarcoating it. Some things creep into your soul and make a home there. He’s no expert at making peace with what’s happened to him. He’s only tried to forget.

“Well, if I do it again, you can shake me. I’ll wake up,” she says .

“Shake you?”

“Yeah.”

“Not gonna do that, and fair warning if you shake me when I’m having one, I’ll come up swinging without knowing what the fuck I’m doing. So don’t do that, okay? I don’t wanna hurt you.”

“Okay.”

“Maybe I’ll nudge you next time. A little bit.”

“That works.” Her lips curve into a gentle smile, fingers playing with Lucy’s tiny fabric-covered hands.

For the first time, someone’s caught a glimpse of the part of himself he hides with every ounce of effort he can manage, and she hasn’t turned away in disgust. That’s throwing him off by a mile.

Then, the crash of broken glass shifts both of their attention.

Urging Olivia and the baby into a closet, he hears other doors down the hall creak open and the rustling of rooms being ransacked reverberating off the walls.

She wants to help, but Lucy needs her mother more. Hiding is the only option.

Cole flattens against the wall beside the door, waiting as the hinges rattle before it pops open with brute force. The moment he sees the back of another man’s head, he shoves the gun against it and catches an elbow to the face a second later, scrambling and wrestling with a stranger.

He learned street fighting from Wade and the kids at school long before the army taught him anything.

There is a bulk to him that makes overpowering someone easier, and he uses his weight, the heft in his biceps and chest, to hold his own.

At least, until his attacker pushes in close, reaches around, and slashes a knife across his back, ripping open an old scar that healed years ago.

A kick lands him flat on the floor, shock dragging up long-buried memories, while thick hands wring his neck and squeeze hard. He digs his thumbs into soft eyeballs and cracks a fist across a strong jaw, earning a left hook to the chin that mirrors the one he threw.

He’s left dazed, but the sight of someone rushing to the closet at the sound of Lucy crying is better than a shot of adrenaline to the heart.

Fear for their safety shoves him forward to grab a handful of the man’s shirt collar, yanking him off his feet in what feels like slow motion to toss him onto the bed.

Grabbing the fallen gun, Cole wastes no time in firing a bullet into his opponent’s forehead.

His knees slam into the rough carpet as the closet door creaks open, his lungs burning and his throat aching from attempted strangulation.

“Are you okay? Both of you?” He can see with his own eyes that they’re fine, but he’s having a hard time convincing himself that he wasn’t too late. That some stranger didn’t get to them and do god knows what before he could stop it. That he wasn’t strong enough to save them.

Olivia nods. “We’re good, but you’re bleeding.”

The moment she points it out, the pain is ten times worse, flaring to life like a fire poker dug deep into his skin.

He twists around like a crazy person trying to look at his back and shrugs off Olivia’s attempts to help. “Don’t touch it. I got it. I can handle it.”

The only option is to put a door between them so he can lick his wounds alone, so that’s exactly what he does. Falls back on old habits and escapes to the bathroom after pushing a dresser in front of the main door to keep them safe .

He leaves her out there with a baby and a dead body and he’s gonna feel like shit about that later, but right now he’s too busy panicking.

Rips his shirt off and twists around to get a good look in the mirror, freezing solid at the sight of a firm lash across the middle.

His fingers shake as he tries to reach, only brushing the edges where blood runs warm.