Emma was doing everything she could to avoid running into Nick. It wasn’t so much that she didn’t want to see him, but more that she didn’t want to deal with the feelings that came up when she saw him. It was bad enough that each night on the tour while she was doing her job she had to listen to him and the other guys singing all night. She’d gone from barely being able to tell whose voice belonged to whom, to knowing distinctively when Nick was singing and could even tell if he was playing the guitar or the drums usually.
The closer the tour got to Texas, the more she questioned whether or not she could stay with them. She’d already broken a ton of her attachment rules as it was and in any other situation she would’ve been long gone. But on this tour she’d stayed in a job for over a month, made friends with people, slept with the same guy several times, and she could even say that there were things about the tour that she’d enjoyed… everything about the tour was going against the life she’d created for herself since The Accident. The nightmares, flashbacks, and the pain of it all was still there, but the isolation she once clung to seemed to be going away despite her best efforts to keep it in place. It was also getting harder to keep her secrets secret from the people in her life.
Two days before they were meant to head for Texas, the tour was on a short road trip from one Californian city to the next. Emma hitched a ride in AJ’s bus and because the road trip was in the middle of the night after a concert, they were both exhausted and quickly passed out in the bed that took up the rear room of the bus.
The Nightmare had always been horrible, but with the prospect of being closer to Texas than she had been in over a year, it seemed to grow in intensity. Where she’d generally been able to hide it from anyone who happened to be sleeping in the room with her, it was now much harder to do.
On the bus that evening with AJ though, she wasn’t so lucky. The Nightmare began the way it always did. She walked into the house with a smile on her face, love in her heart, and then everything changed forever. The blood, the bodies, and the stench of it all hitting her like a semi. Her eyes darted from one lifeless body to the next trying to make sense of what she saw but none of it computed. This wasn’t her house, or her family… it couldn’t be. She wasn’t really seeing what she saw and yet, there she was. The blood was under her feet seeping into the carpet and the people she’d loved the most were dead. Then the screaming began, the screaming in the nightmare and much to her dismay, the screaming in her waking world too.
“Whoa… what? Are you okay?” AJ said frantically trying to find the switch to turn the light on. “What happened?” He found the light and squinted at her, “Are you okay?” She shook her head and fought the tears that were welling up in her eyes as she looked at him. Her whole body was trembling and the sights and smells of the nightmare were still fresh in her mind. Confused as ever AJ looked around the room, they were still on the bus and still alone in the bed, the door to the bedroom closed off to the rest of the bus. “What the hell happened?” He noticed her shaking and immediately pulled her into his arms holding her tight to his body. “Was it a nightmare?” Not able to talk yet she nodded her head as she held onto him with a vice grip. “Oh, baby…” he sighed and practically wrapped his whole body around hers as she balled up into him and began to cry. It was the first time in two years she’d let anyone even attempt to comfort her after having The Nightmare. Part of her wanted to pull away and not let AJ help her, but she was so exhausted both physically and emotionally that all she could do was cry.
