40

Emma woke up from a nightmare and wasn’t sure for a moment where exactly she was. It wasn’t really “a nightmare” as if from time to time her dreams were happy, but rather The Nightmare. The only dream she’s had in the two long years since The Accident. The squish of blood in the carpet under her sneakers, the metallic smell of blood mixing with other bodily matter that most people never see or smell in a normal lifetime, and the horrible images that haunted her whether awake or unconscious. It wasn’t a dream so much as a flashback, but she didn’t like the term flashback for one reason or another and that left her calling those images a dream or a nightmare. Flashback, dream or nightmare though, what she saw was real. Staying up too late eating spicy food while reading horror novels didn’t cause it. It was her life. The blood was real, the images were real, and her indescribable pain was real.

Waking up startled she sat up in bed and looked around as it sunk in, once again, that two years had passed since she’d actually been there in the situation that she relived in the nightmare each night. She was instead in a fancy hotel room in Vegas with a nearly naked blonde sleeping next to her. It had been a long time since The Accident, and yet she still couldn’t help but look at her hands to check for blood. There wasn’t any blood there, of course, only the tremble that always ran through her body after flashing back to the day that her life changed forever.

Leaning across Nick, she found her cigarettes on the table next to the bed. She lit one quickly and held the smoke in her lungs for as long as she could. The cigarettes had been the only things she’d found that made the sensory memory of the smell of The Accident fade. Drinking, drugs, cutting, anti-depression meds… she’d tried nearly everything before picking up a cigarette and realizing that the smoke kept her from gagging and vomiting each time her memories flooded over her.

After a few drags the smells and images began to slowly drift away. She got out of the bed and walked to the window of the suite pushing open the curtains a bit.

It was bright outside. Not the neon-flashing-bright that Vegas had even in the middle of the darkest part of the evening, but the natural brightness of the sun blazing in the cloudless blue sky over the desert kind of bright. Emma squinted but didn’t look away, the stinging in her eyes from the bright light would help her focus on something other than her life and her past. Anything else was better than that.

She watched people moving up and down the strip between casinos and wondered how many of them ever made it to bed that night before. She’d never been to Vegas before then but was quickly getting the impression that sleep was pretty low on the priority list of most of the adult visitors of the city. Glancing back to the bed where Nick was sleeping she decided that pop stars basking in the afterglow of a great concert and fabulous sex were exempt from that group.

She wrapped her arm around her body and looked down at the shirt covering half of her body. At some point in the night, probably in a groggy trip to the bathroom, she’d put Nick’s shirt on. Call it weird, but she wasn’t a lay-around-naked-after-sex kind of girl. She was more than happy being gloriously nude all throughout the sex-capades, but afterward she wanted clothes, at least a long shirt. Emma smiled at how their clothes were strewn about the room. The two of them weren’t exactly patient people when it came to sex. They’d managed to have dinner and play Keno before heading back to Nick’s room. Aside from the fact that they were both exhausted, the sexual part of their friendship took over for a while before they passed out for the evening. Great sex always managed to give Emma at least a few hours of uninterrupted sleep, she was well aware of that fact when she’d told Nick the night before that she’d be his Fuck Buddy.

Focusing again on the view from the window she kept working on her cigarette silently and felt herself slip back into the flashback. She was so lost in the memories that she didn’t hear Nick wake up or cross the room to join her. When he placed a kiss on her neck she snapped back to reality and jumped. He chuckled and kissed her neck again, “Sorry… I thought you heard me.”

She shook her head and took a drag of her cigarette and blew out the smoke before speaking quietly, “No, I didn’t hear you…”

“I woke up and thought for a minute you’d left me again. Today makes three times in a row I’ve gone to sleep with you and woke up alone. At least this time you’re still in the room.”

“If you’d slept much longer you probably would have woke up to an empty room.”

“You don’t sleep enough…”

Emma shrugged, “Yeah.”

Nick frowned at the sadness in Emma’s voice and then bent to kiss the top of her head gently. He wrapped his arms around her from behind and looked out the window with her. He could feel the tremble that ran through her and he held her a little tighter, “You’re shaking like crazy, Em...”

She didn’t say anything because she knew she’d start crying if she tried to talk. Crying in front of Nick certainly wasn’t on her to do list for the day. He knew from talking to AJ about Emma that when she got quiet like this, that the last thing to do is to try to her to make her talk. He didn’t want to scare her away so he didn’t say another word. Instead he held her and looked out of the window with her until he couldn’t feel her trembling anymore. Much to his and Emma’s surprise, she let him.