I know I fall asleep with a smile on my face, because when the alarm rings a few hours later, blaring and unwelcoming in the dawn, I’m still smiling.

CHAPTER TEN

Lachlan

In the dream I’m five years old again. Walking down Princess Street in Edinburgh, alone, naked in the falling snow. Everything is the same and everything is different. The junkies I pass on the street are my friends. I see Eddie with his fingerless gloves, nails thick and yellow with nicotine. I see Thomas and his sobriety bracelets he never takes off, even though he’s too drunk to stand. I see Jenny with her peeling skin and matted hair held back with a plaid headband.

And they see me. But they don’t wave, they don’t smile. They scream as I pass them, until the noise is too loud, until their screams wrap their hands around my head and squeeze.

“Where’s Charlie?” Eddie yells, spit flying out of his decaying mouth. “Where is he? What did you do to him?”

I don’t answer. I run through the snow and then I’m back at the old flat.

I’m no longer five.

I’m thirteen. Tall, skinny, underdeveloped. My anger has just started to eat at me, and the world is poison. Mr. Arnold has me cornered in my mother’s old bedroom. She’s lying on the bed, staring up at the ceiling like I’m not there.

She didn’t save me when I was five. She wouldn’t save me now.

I face the wall, too afraid, too disgusted to look at my foster parent as he approaches with greedy hands.

“Don’t tell Pamela,” he says to me, voice dripping with lust. “It’s our secret.”

His hands close over my throat but I don’t turn around.

I cry.

I haven’t learned to hit back yet.

When I do learn, he’s sent to the hospital.

His wife Pamela says I’m a black seed. That I made her husband do it to me.

And I’m sent away again.

Now I’m at the Hillside Orphanage.

I’m twenty years old.

My bony arms are covered with scratches.

I scratch them some more.

I’m dying on the inside.

My teeth are being ground away, falling out of my mouth like sugar.

In front of me, at the headmaster’s desk, sits Charlie.

His back is to me.

He’s not twitching.

He is deadly still.

Charlie is never ever still.

“Charlie,” I hiss at him. “Charlie, do you have any?”

But Charlie doesn’t move.

I step toward him, my limbs jerking, uncontrollable.

Charlie has what I need to make it stop.

The craving.

The ache.

The emptiness.

Everything that resides deep in my bones.

I put my hand—ghostly white and peppered with bruises—on his shoulder and spin him around in the chair.

He stares at me with dead, glassy eyes, blood running from his nose.

It drips onto the stuffed lion he holds in his hand.

In a flash, he moves. Charlie is in my face. Empty eyes. Bared, rotting teeth.

“You’re not just going to leave me here,” he utters, sounding like a child. “You cannae do that, Lachlan.”

The next moment I’m lying in an alley.

Charlie is crumpled beside me. One of the dogs is sniffing his face. Gives him a tentative lick. Charlie doesn’t stir.

Charlie is dead.

I close my eyes.

And I am dead too.

***

When I wake up, I’m drenched in sweat and clawing at my sheets. My breathing is shallow, and I’m hungry and desperate for air, as if it could clean out all the dirt inside.

I smell urine. For a moment I think I’ve pissed myself—how about that for regression—but then I remember the dogs. I remember last night. I remember where I am.

Who I am.

I sit up and try to get a hold of myself. I haven’t dreamed like that for months and its return unhinges me.

Inhaling deeply, I swing my feet out of bed and wince when they land in something wet. I groan and look down to see a faint yellow puddle. I wonder which one of them did it. I’d told Kayla that they must have had homes at some point, but that doesn’t mean they are housebroken.

“Hello,” I call out softly, walking to the door and peering out into the living room. There’s a pile of shit on the carpet and another in the kitchen.

Both dogs are sleeping on the couch, entwined with each other. That sight alone makes up for the fact that I’m going to be in shit myself if I continue to let them destroy the place.

I put on a pot of coffee and absently scratch at my arm, a bad leftover from the dream. I pull my hand away and force my brain into a better place. I saved those dogs last night. There is hope for them, hope that I’ve given them.

But, of course, that’s not the only thing that happened last night.

Kayla.

That tiny sprite.

I kissed her.

I fought and I fought and I fought against it.

But there was nothing I could do.

She’s a riptide.

I’m just a man without oars.

And she…bloody hell, she had started to get under my skin far before last night. I’ve been thinking about her ever since the impromptu rugby match, ever since she left my flat in my clothes, ever since I saw her at the bar. The way she looks at me…it’s not just that she wants me, because I know she does. It’s that…I feel she might see me, too. Beneath the layers.

Not that she ever could, ever would, see all. But just to have someone scratch the surface—to want to see me for more than me, is enough.

Scary as fuck. But enough.

Then there’s the fact that she’s this gorgeous wild little thing. Those eyes that implore me to tell her all my secrets, that beg me to have my way with her. Those eyes that promise I’ll never forget her, if I just give her a second, give her a chance.

I gave her a chance last night.

But I didn’t do it for her.

I did it for me.

Because I fucking needed it. I needed that touch, that comfort.

Hope. Somewhere in there was hope.

I felt it when I put my arm around her, like I was containing it against me.

Hope before death.

It’s tattooed on my side.

I got that a few years after Charlie, to remind me of why I cleaned up and how I moved on.

Or, at least, tried to.

Kayla felt like that hope, even though I know how foolish it is to even think like that over a girl I barely know. But just for that moment, it felt good to have even a glimpse of it.

Of course, when that damn song came on, it threw me back into reality. Of who I was and the parts that made me. The events. The battles. The ugly fucking truth.

That didn’t mesh very well with the here and now.

I panicked. I got up and left—to escape the song, escape the past that liked to show itself on lonely nights. Which is every night. But it had no place right then, not with her there.

I had no idea she would follow me, and when I first heard her call my name, my stomach did a backflip. And then she was there, by my side, her hair messy from running through the crowds, face beautifully flushed.

She came after me.

She worried about me.

I can’t remember the last time someone worried about me. Everyone by now knows not to bother, knows not to ask. Lachlan is a lone soldier, they say. He’s survived. He’ll be fine.

But this girl, this woman with the smiling eyes and the teasing lips, she knew I wasn’t fine.

And when she wanted to come with me, after the dogs, into the dark woods, well fuck. She wasn’t afraid of anything. We share the same tenacity.

And with that same resolve, I could have kissed her all night. Her lips, her mouth, the warmth of her tongue—we fit together like a lock and key. I wanted nothing more than to lay her on her back in the dirt and leaves, explore her body with my hands, my teeth, my tongue, and feel all of her in the dark. Her body promised to take me far away. I wanted to fuck the war out of me.

I had to admit that I wanted Kayla more than anything.