I woke up in a tangle of sheets, thrashing and crying, only for my nightmare to actualize.
Someone was standing in the doorway.
I shrieked and kicked.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. I escaped in time. I kicked him in the groin and ran away, and when I finally found my phone I called Will, and Will made it stop.
Calvin wasn’t supposed to be here anymore, not unless Will or Linda or Dad was home.
“Sophie?”
“Hey Evan,” I groaned.
“You’ve been…uh, screaming. Are you okay? Did you have a nightmare or something?”
“Can you turn on the light?” I croaked. I needed to see that Evan wasn’t Calvin.
I knew it from the voice and the silhouette, but my stupid little brain wouldn’t settle down until I could see him.
Light filled the apartment, and I breathed a sigh of relief. “Carry on…” I forced out.
“Do you need anything? Water?” Evan offered.
“No, all good. I’ll just go back to sleep,” I said as calmly as possible.
If this were the movies or a romance novel, I’d have confided my secrets in the man I had jerked off earlier.
He would have understood on a deep level, and we would have made sweet, passionate love all night. Unfortunately, this was real. Evan wasn’t going to understand, and I didn’t want to make him understand.
I just wanted to sleep.
“Okay. Let me know if you need anything,” he said softly.
“Thanks, Evan. Will do,” I replied, even though I had absolutely no intention of doing that.
Evan asked me in the morning how I was doing, but I didn’t want to talk about it. Flashbacks were normal for me, visiting me in my sleep a couple of times a week. Waking up screaming was rare, though. I won’t lie, I was embarrassed.
Evan didn’t seem to judge me, but it must have been obvious to him I had been through some shit, based on my reaction when he had asked if I was alright, and that wasn’t exactly something I wanted him to know or speculate about.
He just kind of blinked and asked again if I was okay, and when I said yes his eyes creased in sadness. Maybe pity.
I made it through five chapters before the thoughts started zipping around in my head, interrupting each sentence I would attempt to read. I was running away. By avoiding Evan, I was proving that I was fragile, that something was wrong with me.
I was letting Noah win because I was isolating myself. That was what he wanted. He wanted to be more powerful than me, to push me down to rock-bottom level.
Fuck Noah!
Maybe I deserved someone to care about me.
Maybe I should tell someone besides Will what happened. Not Evan, obviously. I didn’t know him well enough, though I did owe him an explanation for interrupting his sleep.
Someone like Sarah. Even Courtney. She and Will were the only people in my quarantine bubble for a year, so we had become pretty close.
I brushed off my shorts and tee, dropped Mr. Gatsby into my bag, and went back to the Airbnb.
I smelled the burned cheese before I even stepped inside. The high-tech apartment door had transformed into the gates of Hell during my time at the park, and when I swung it open I unleashed toxic, hellish fumes.
I coughed and stuck my face into my elbow like it was 2015 and I was trying to dab. Before I could even get a word out, Evan was apologizing over and over.
“I tried to make mac and cheese, but we didn’t have milk, so I thought I could use more cheese instead, and that doesn’t work, apparently!” he burst out.
I surveyed the damage, trying to smother laughter.
A chunk of lava, formerly cheese, clung to the bottom of a warped pan soaking in the sink. The batteries, until recently driving the smoke alarm, now lay scattered on the counter. Half of what had been a spatula rested beside the batteries. Its other half stuck out of a burner like a leaning tower of molten plastic.
“I know you had a bad night, so I wanted to surprise you with my dad’s recipe…but I think I lost your security deposit instead,” Evan sighed.
“I’ll message the host and buy new pans and spatulas and stuff,” I reassured him, trying not to think about how difficult my soon-to-be awful Airbnb guest rating would make finding accommodation for the next year.
One thing at a time.
Before I could lose my nerve, I gave Evan the explanation I owed him.
“First, I wanted to tell you that I went through a lot of bad things when I was a kid and a teenager, and that’s why I had a nightmare. I usually don’t scream, so I’m sorry that I woke you up.”
“Don’t be sorry,” Evan said quickly. “Please don’t say sorry for that. Jeez, Sophie, I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Thanks. Yeah, it sucked.” I rolled my shoulders back. “Want to go to the Pinnacles tomorrow?” I said.
The Pinnacles are rock formations in the Western Australian desert.
There are thousands of natural limestone pillars sticking out of the ground in Nambung National Park, striking similar power poses as my late lamented spatula poking up from the stovetop after the mac and cheese fiasco.
The limestone rocks are a long drive from Perth, but luckily plenty of tourists like Evan and me have an interest in abnormal rocks, so we were able to choose from a bunch of different tours that left from the city.
Also along for the ride were a Chinese-American family from Alabama, all decked out in Auburn University orange, as well as a few solo travelers from Europe who seemed to have befriended each other somewhere on the Australian travel trail.
We all introduced ourselves, and then our tour guide Tony said we’d drive for an hour before we got this thing going.
We had the world’s most comfortable van as our tour bus.
Rug-like covers were draped over every seat, which might not have been sanitary, but I didn’t care. It was seven in the morning, with the instant coffee not working as well as I needed it to, and the seats were cozy.
I closed my eyes and immediately zonked out. I never had a hard time falling asleep on drives because my subconscious assumed, I suppose, that no one was going to hurt me in a car, or in this case a van.
I wasn’t vulnerable, not unless I snored and someone made fun of me, but that was a risk I was willing to take.
My eyes fluttered open when Tony clapped his hands and announced that he had some local history to teach us about. As I came to, I realized I was slumped against Evan, my head resting on his shoulder.
I opened my mouth to apologize in case I was a deadweight keeping him from napping; but then I noticed that Evan was staring at me.
No, not staring.
He was gazing at me.
I met his eyes, and they didn’t flit away like I had expected them to. His lips twisted into a small smile. He wasn’t embarrassed, maybe because I had clearly been awake for long enough to remove my head from his shoulder.
I looked down as I slowly lifted my head and saw that our fingers were intertwined. Maybe because of that new development.
“Did I do that?” I asked, raising our conjoined hands.
Evan bit his lip, as if stifling a laugh, and nodded.
“Oh!” I murmured. I wasn’t sure if I should apologize or remove my hand. I decided not to, and Evan didn’t say sorry or yank his hand out of my grasp either.
In fact, we didn’t let go until it was time to get off the van.
After we stepped outside, I waited until the Alabama family were out of earshot before turning to Evan, dying as I was to get a decidedly immature observation off my chest.
“It’s like we’re in a field of dicks,” I commented.
Evan pointed at a particularly phallic pinnacle. “That one even has balls,” he observed. Two round boulders flanked the limestone column, which stuck straight up at the sky like it were sunscreen time and its name was Evan.
We spent the next forty-five minutes identifying the most phallic limestone structures, and I loved every second of it. I wheezed and giggled and laughed in all sorts of ridiculous ways because Evan cracked me the fuck up.
It was effortless. That was what I liked the most about Evan, at least so far. Being with him was easy. I didn’t long for time by myself.
I wanted to be with him, to spend hours upon hours laughing and talking and relaxing. I wanted to go on adventures like this one, and I wanted to lounge in the sun, and I wanted to do everything in between.
Evan sighed when we entered the apartment. “So, my money came through.”
Not going to lie. I was a little disappointed, I liked being Evan’s roommate.
Of course now I could move into a cheaper Airbnb, provided my guest rating wasn’t rock-bottom; there was no need for a separate bedroom when a studio apartment worked just fine for me on my own.
“Great,” I said as enthusiastically as I could manage, because I’d much rather not have saved cash, if it meant more time with Evan.
“This is a prime moment for me,” Evan said.
“Because you got your money back?”
He chuckled, shaking his head.
“Because I can tell you that I have feelings for you and that you’re a mystery I’d like to solve, Sophie Callahan, and if you don’t reciprocate my feelings, I can fuck right off to a hostel and not have to sleep on the street.”
I kissed him. I wrapped my arms around his neck and kissed him full on the mouth.
He kissed me back. Sparks ignited as Evan’s tongue moved into my mouth, massaging mine, claiming me as his own.
The way he kissed me was outrageous, as if he were signaling that I was his. I was. It had been four days, and I was his. I had fallen for Evan Flaherty. Hard and fast.
We stayed up until three in the morning, talking and stealing kisses. Some kisses were sweet, others passionate and hungry. I loved it. We didn’t even talk about anything deep, really. We just chatted and got to know each other.
We exchanged favorites and least favorites. We told stories from college. Even though I was a mystery he wanted to solve, he didn’t press.
I think he had already solved a lot more than he gave himself credit for, because he knew not to press.
We learned. We got to know everything about each other; all of the surface-level stuff, at least.
It was almost like we dedicated the night to getting all that out of the way so we could jump into a full-fledged, unofficial relationship.
Not that I realized it at the time.
Not that I realized much of anything at the time.
