Chapter 12

Twelve

D ahlia

I have no idea what’s going on, only that I can’t control the bone-deep cold pressing against my chest as Blake carries me up the stairs.

He kicks open the door to the hall, but I don’t even hear the doorjamb splinter. All I hear are my teeth chattering and a wind like a blizzard rushing around my ears. But why isn’t my hair moving if I feel like I’m in the middle of a windstorm at the North Pole?

“Change of plans. We’re getting out of here,” he says when he reaches the hallway.

He has me halfway to the front door when I try to pull away.

“Stop, D, I’m going to drop you.”

“P-put me down.”

“No,” he says, charging the door.

With all my might, I struggle against his grip.

Gruffly he gives in and sets me down gently on my feet. His hands never leave my hips while he questions me.

“All right, I put you down but now you gotta tell me what’s going on.”

I shake my head. “We’re close.”

He nods. “Yeah, close to you completely losing your mind because somebody is playing tricks on you. Let’s go. This sleepover is cancelled.”

I shake my head more emphatically, but it only causes my whole body to erupt in a fresh bout of intense trembling. My breathing is shallow, and a feeling of dread seems to be pouring out of the walls the closer we get to the door to leave.

“She doesn’t want me to leave. I can’t leave,” I plead with him.

“I’m putting my foot down. This is enough, D.”

I grab his shirt. “It’s n-not about the bet anymore. S-something really bad happened here. The c-closer we get to leaving the house, the more it feels like…like I might d-die, Blake. P-please.”

He wraps his arms around me, pinning my arms to my sides to still my tremors. “You’re having a panic attack. Come on, let’s go to the kitchen door and try to go out that way. One step at a time.”

He holds my hand and guides me to the kitchen. But as soon as we’re within a few feet of the kitchen door, same thing. The trembling spikes, my guts feel like I’m riding a plummeting elevator, and my air passageways feel half blocked.

“I’m so cold, I can’t stop shaking,” I squeak through my constricted throat. “And I can barely breathe.”

Blake tries to still me by putting his big arms around me, telling me to breathe in slowly with him.

“This is not a p-panic attack. This house is h-h-haunted,” I whimper.

Blake runs one hand through his hair and mutters. “Fuck. Come here, D.”

He scoops me up and carries me up the staircase. “Wh-where…?” I start to say, but he has no more patience for me and my full-body shakes.

“As far away from the basement as possible without leaving,” he says.

Inside the guest room, Blake sets me down on the end of the bed. I watch curiously as he unzips my sleeping bag to make a blanket on the bare mattress.

He begins to undress me and my panic rises in my throat. But, I remind myself, this is Blake. He wouldn’t… “Blake, w-what…?”

“I don’t know if this is what I’m supposed to do for…whatever the hell is going on with you…but this is what we’re doing.”

I acquiesce but only because I trust him completely. He would never purposefully do anything to hurt me.

He tosses my trench coat to the floor and helps me slip out of my boots and my dress. Now only in my underwear, he helps me lie face down on the bed.

I’m still trembling, but not as intensely as I was downstairs. I turn my head on the sleeping bag to look at his reflection in the window. Everything looks wild and eerie in the lantern glow. I watch him take off his jacket and shirt and undress himself down to his boxer briefs. It’s then I realize what he’s doing—he’s taking care of me the way he used to do when we were dating. The idea of it nudges my heart. The memory of it would make me full-out cry but I’m so scared and cold and freaked out, no other emotions can take hold.

Whenever I’d get so stressed and overwhelmed about my grades or work myself up into a ball of nerves over my term papers to the point of not sleeping or eating, Blake would convince me to take a break and lie down on my bed for non-sexual “skin on skin time.”

“B-Blake, this isn’t term paper stress. This is s-something else.”

But in the next second he’s hovering over me, his palms running the lengths of my arms and legs, gradually pressing his weight down on top of my back.

“Let me know when it’s too much and I’ll back off,” he whispers in my ear, brushing my hair away from my neck.

“You must be freezing,” I say as the trembling beginning to subside.

“Kinda,” he says. Blake grudgingly gets off me for a second to grab his flannel-lined sleeping bag. He unzips it and covers the both of us with it. My skin misses him in the few seconds it takes for him to do this, and I realize my heart is at risk of getting attached to him again.

Trapped body heat combined with skin on skin contact is actually working. His big chest blankets me and I can feel his chest muscles ripple against my shoulder blades while he warms my arms. The smell from the flannel lining of his sleeping bag hits me. Oh boy, do I remember what we used to do in the woods inside this exact sleeping bag. He adds a little more of his weight and I sigh.

“Am I too heavy? Just say so.”

I close my eyes. His stubble warms my cheek.

“Too heavy? God no. Don’t hold back.”

“If you’re sure,” he says. Blake’s voice vibrates all through me; it’s the sweetest feeling in the whole world. Oh yeah, I’m definitely in danger of getting hurt all over again. But I’m under this crazy spell of not just attraction but of affection. His need to take care of me was one of the most endearing things about him, back when we were together.

I feel a connection with him on every inch of my exposed skin. Even his toes are linked up with mine. Something about it not only calms me down but squeezes my heart. It’s so heavy and comforting and loving, it’s making even more happy memories of our time together two years ago come flooding back.

Blake’s covered dick is wedged between my ass cheeks in the most innocent way possible, as much as it can be while I’m wearing cheeky undies. There seems to be no sexual end goal to what he’s doing; it’s just comfort. He knows how to block out the world for me. He silences all my racing thoughts.

The trembling has finally stopped. My breathing normalizes. My skin warms. The hideous feeling of dread in my guts evaporates. I find myself on the verge of plummeting into blissful sleep.

My voice cracks as I whisper, “Thank you.”