16. Demented
SIXTEEN
Demented
I slept in the trailer that night, ignoring the note that Duke had stuck to my screen door. It was folded on my kitchen table in the morning, still unread. I knew it was from him because it was a used envelope, folded in half. He'd written his message on the back of it and then spilled beer over the front of it. I could even see a tiny scrap of tissue stuck to the paper, where he had tried to mop up the spill. I swept it into the trash can with my banana peel from breakfast.
I avoided school that day, and the next. By the time I woke up on Friday, I had a few missed calls from Alicia, but she still hadn't replied to my text message.
There was also a message from Jean.
Mom said to give you some space. I say fuck mom. What are you doing?
I thought carefully about how to reply. Or … I tr ied to. The pros and cons and predictions kept slipping through my fingers, leaving a muddled, indecipherable mess behind. Instead of answering, I headed to the shower, staying in there for longer than usual. Afterwards, I wrapped myself up in an oversized t-shirt and carried my cell outside. There was a tiny square of concrete right outside the trailer, an awning stretching above and a small garden edging it. Upon further inspection, I found a fold-up chair tucked away in a compartment at the back of the trailer, along with a camping lamp and some mosquito repellent.
In the interest of doing things to avoid answering the message, I pulled back the awning a little so that the sun could hit the little concrete platform, and then I sat in the fold-up chair and waited for the sun to finish drying me off. Satan sprang out of the garden and flopped down beside my chair, stretching out to sunbathe with me. Gradually, my wet hair sprang up into a wild mess of curls, and I couldn't ignore the message anymore.
I dragged myself back inside and typed out a response.
Your mom was worried. Asked me to keep an eye on you. I didn't feel comfortable staying there anymore.
I sent the message and then stared at the screen before quickly typing out and sending another.
I'll still keep an eye on you, but not for her .
A few seconds later, the phone buzzed in my hand. Jean was calling. I continued staring at the screen, making no move to pick up the call. Another message flashed across the screen while it rang.
Jean: Pick up, asshole.
I accepted the call. "That was rude."
"You were sitting there staring at your phone, ignoring my call. That's rude."
"No, that's just indecisive."
"Why are you indecisive about talking to me?"
"I thought you might be angry," I admitted, an odd feeling starting to turn in my stomach.
"Well, I'm not. If I had been you, I would have done the same thing. I appreciate it. What are you doing today?"
"What day is it?"
"Friday."
"I'm not going to school."
On the other end of the phone, Jean scoffed. "Yeah, I get that, since I'm at school and you're not here. Again. Why are you skipping?"
Because I can—who the hell are the teachers going to call? "Because I have an appointment."
"Doctors? Are you sick?"
"In the head," I replied tonelessly.
"Me too. Maybe I should make an appointment. Who are you seeing? "
"Nic—Mr. Fell."
"But he's at school, and you're not at school."
"He quit."
"And you followed him?"
"I don't want to repeat all my shit to a whole new person." That feeling in my stomach was getting stronger, twisting and turning and becoming something else.
"That makes sense." Jean accepted my answer, thankfully dropping the subject. "Do you want to train after school? We could run to the beach? Do some drugs? Kidnap a baby? Experiment with grand larceny?"
"So many options."
"That's a yes, then?"
"Okay. I'll see you after school. You bring the net; I'll bring the baby food."
"I'll come to yours." She ended the call, leaving me to pick up right where I had left off: standing there staring at my phone.
Eventually, I set it aside and shuffled to my closet. I wanted to put on battle armour, but in the end, I settled for my bikini beneath running shorts and a loose black tank. It was my standard training attire, since I didn't like changing my clothes at the beach. The shorts were tight, short, and highly inappropriate for going to see Nicholai. The tank was just plain tacky. There was a small tear in the front, along the bottom hem.
I closed the closet door and combed out my hair with my fingers, pulling it into a high ponytail. It had dried curlier than usual, a little too wild for me to properly tame, but I did the best I could before stepping into my sneakers. After that, I declared myself ready.
And then I changed.
Suddenly, I was wearing a sundress. The straps were thin, stark white against my bronzed shoulders. I was halfway out the door—backpack slung over my shoulder—when I decided I was going to change again. I swapped the dress out for a pair of jeans, and there was a sweatshirt halfway over my head when my phone buzzed with another message from Jean, reminding me that I was supposed to be training later. I flicked the sweatshirt away and changed sluggishly back into my original outfit. If I changed one more time, I was going to be late, so I quickly grabbed my things and escaped the trailer.
I walked into town because I didn't have any other options. It was ten o'clock on a Friday, so the traffic had settled down, leaving some of the roads bare for me to meander on. Not that I was meandering. That would imply a lack of purpose when purpose was suddenly all I had. I walked with motive for nearly two hours, the sun beating down against my back and the road roasting up through my shoes. My motive was Nicholai Fell. The only undecided factor in my life, the only thing I was unsure about.
Duke was both a tool and a user—that, I knew.
Jean was a friend.
Marcus was a good person.
Smith was a kid.
Alicia was a mother.
My family was gone.
I was ticking away, nearing the end of something. Ready for the final hour, waiting for my time to finally come and for time itself to finally stop.
Nicholai was … here . I couldn't finish the thought, because his office building was suddenly looming before me. I approached the doors without a second's hesitation, pulling them open and climbing the stairs. I announced myself to the receptionist, took a seat, and waited.
I could feel the ticking again, those seconds passing with a foreboding that everyone around me seemed to be unaware of. Maybe it was just the way time passed and I had gotten confused along the way, too tainted by my experiences to count passing seconds without fear. Maybe I wasn't a time bomb after all. Maybe I was the fallout, already arrived, a mess to be sorted through. Maybe that was why I was there, in the waiting room with the lazy blades of a rotating fan collecting dust in the corner. I was waiting for Nicholai to sort through me, to salvage me from the rubble.
"Mika."
I glanced up toward the voice. He was wearing his professional face—no indication that he knew me outside of our current setting, no indication that he cared about me more than a passing hour before his lunch break. I wondered how he managed to hold down a job. He didn't exactly fill the room with empathy.
I stood without a word and his eyes flicked down to my feet for a moment. Heat flooded into me without warning, and I stopped moving. The moment confused me, so I rejected it. He seemed to reject it, too, turning and walking back down the corridor. I followed, already knowing the way to his office. I hesitated when he opened the door of the little room with the yellow couches, standing a few steps into the room to allow me to pass. I was nervous and I didn't want to be. I slipped past him and sat down, dropping my hands uselessly into my lap.
"How did you get here?" he asked me, moving to sit in the armchair facing my couch. He had pulled his phone out of his pocket, but his eyes were still on my face, waiting for an answer.
"I walked." My mouth was dry .
"From Summer Estate?"
I nodded, suddenly realising why I was nervous as he thumbed something into his phone and held it up to his ear.
I was waiting for retaliation.
I had done something wrong … something I hadn't yet wanted to admit to myself.
"Hi Abby, I need you to cancel my next appointment—it's my last for today." He paused, listening to whatever Abby had to say in return, his stare still fixed on me. His eyes were colder than usual, a starless night sky, darker than I was used to. "Yes, whoever is on call," he replied. "Personal emergency. Thanks, Abby. I'll email everything to Francene tomorrow morning. I'm going to need to leave after this appointment."
He hung up the call and seemed to send a quick message before slipping it back into his pocket. I didn't want to meet his stare anymore, but I forced my chin up.
I wasn't going to back down.
"Why did you use a fake name?" he finally asked, sitting back in his chair, laying his arms down the lengths of the armrests, his fingers splaying over the ends. He was too relaxed for the question.
I had done something wrong.
"I wasn't thinking. I was filling out the form online to get an appointment with you and … it just happened."
"You didn't think I would see you?" He was too blank, too expressionless. Far too relaxed.
I started to get angry, or maybe I was afraid—I didn't care which it was, I just needed him to show me something .
"You quit." I stood, shoving my hands against my hips, taking two quick steps closer and looking down at him in the chair, even though standing up had only gained me a couple of inches over him. "I thought … I thought you wanted to help me."
"I did quit," he admitted. "I was contracted to that school temporarily. I designed a new mental health scheme for my dissertation and for the last year I've been putting it into practise at that school. I was only contracted to work there for six months while they searched for a permanent counsellor."
He sounded so professional. So grown-up . "How old are you?" I asked.
I was starting to feel uncomfortable. Not because he had kissed me, but because being so close to him made me desperate for him to do it again. I loved the way he filled the armchair, half-sprawled, half alert, his body firm with easy athleticism, his tawny skin almost fully covered by his business attire.
"Twenty-seven." I could see him tense, could sense how even the air around us grew still, not daring to stir as I did the math in my head.
It wasn't a huge gap, not really, but I had lost a year of my life. I felt like the rest of it was lost, too. Not even the number of years between us would be able to carry me to where he was in life.
"How is that possible?" I asked. "You're …" I gestured around at his office. "All of this. Are other doctors as young as you?"
"Some, yes," he replied, a frown on his lips. He hadn't liked me calling him young . I was poking at one of his barriers. "I finished my doctorate a few months ago, and I'm able to practise as a licensed psychologist now. My supervisor at Stanford has organised for me to continue my work here."
"They offered you a job so soon after you finished your doctorate?" I knew that there was an arch to my brows, but I couldn't help my surprise.
He had the look of a man whose life and career had been handed to him on a silver platter, but I already knew that his memories were more agony than privilege. There was a storm inside him, a whirl of violence he kept bottled up tight. A ticking time bomb of his own.
Why had his trauma made a success of him, while mine had ruined me?
"I interned here." His expression shuttered, his voice growing a firm edge as he tried to shut down the conversation. "I've been working here for four years. I earned the damn office."
I didn't want him to close off, so I acted without thinking, taking the three remaining steps needed to reach his chair. His eyes flicked down to my knees and dragged slowly up, pupils expanding as he pulled in a deep breath. He was leaning forward, his hands falling to the arms of his chair, gripping them loosely as his head lowered toward me.
It was dangerous, this magnetism between us.
There was always an invisible force in the room with him, a kind of all-consuming energy that sparked in my blood, shortened my breath and heightened my awareness. It drew my eyes, made me track everything he did.
But since the kiss, that energy had changed. It had grown and festered and become a type of magic that pulled me physically toward him and him physically toward me. We were both leaning into each other, breaths shortening—until his eyes narrowed and he leaned back in his chair, away from me.
He was trying to break the spell.
I hated him for it.
I planted my right knee to the cushion outside his thigh, my hands falling to his shoulders, the muscles tensing beneath my fingers. His jaw flexed, his eyes flashing, but he only tipped his chin back, wordlessly daring me to try and test him again. I lifted my other knee to the other side of his lap. His entire body seemed to grow hard, a stillness seizing him.
"Do you deserve it?" I asked. My voice was gentle and cool, and I wondered if he was thinking of all the lines he had overstepped, all the rules he had broken, all the ways he had thrown his privilege back into the face of whoever had given it to him.
His hands tightened on the arms of the chair. He wasn't pushing me off, but he also wasn't pulling me closer. His body heat sank into me, warming me to the core, his scent clawing through my body and making saliva pool in my mouth. His hips shifted, just the slightest inch. His knuckles grew white, the armchair creaking in protest.
"Don't do this right now." The words were forced out through his teeth, his voice soft. "Not here. Not now." Not ever. The last words were unsaid, but his eyes spoke them all the same.
Rejection crashed through me. I made to move off the chair, but his arms moved suddenly, twisting around me, pulling me all the way against him.
It took me several stunned moments to realise what was happening.
He was …
Hugging me ?
I became as still as he had become only a minute earlier. My heartbeat was pounding, and some unnamed emotion was knocking on the closed door of my mind. It knocked and knocked, demanding entrance, until I softened against Nicholai. He was all hard angles and broad shoulders, but sinking into him felt like heaven.
It felt safe.
He was a complete psycho, and he was my safe place.
My body grew heavy, my head falling into the crook of his neck, his hands settling into the dip of my waist.
"It's okay." His lie was a sweet, gravelly whisper.
And it broke me, just like he knew it would.
I wrapped my arms tightly around his neck and began to cry. It was small and soft, at first, but quickly changed into a purging of my soul. I had cried a storm of tears over the past year, creating a flood to drown myself in, but this was different. I wasn't just crying. I was shedding fragments, too broken to feel the emotion attached to each piece as it fell away from me. This one glinted like anger—that one tasted like fear. I was pulling out shards and handing them to him with my eyes closed, and the miraculous thing was …
He was accepting them.
He held me tighter, one of his hands cupping the back of my head. We were so close I could barely breathe, but I felt like his hug was the only thing keeping me within my skin. His strong arms held me together, his large fingers rubbing up and down my spine stitching up the multitude of cracks I had just revealed. I was more cracks than colour—more dark space than person. I had become the gap between the sentences I spoke every single day.
I'm okay.
I'm okay.
I'm okay .
All of that unspoken space was leaking out of me now, flooding out through my tears and spilling over on every heaving breath.
I was definitely not okay .
"I don't deserve to be here," I choked out quietly, and Nicholai froze, his hand tangled in my hair. His breath halted in his chest.
"What do you mean?" he asked, his voice husky.
"I shouldn't be here. Shouldn't be alive. Shouldn't have been me. I should have died. Me. Not … not …"
I was losing coherency as quickly as it had arrived, and I was starting to spiral again. I welcomed it, diving into the heavy fog that settled through me. Maybe I had a disorder. Maybe I was still in shock. Maybe I was psychotic, demented, or damaged beyond repair. I didn't care. I needed to escape myself. I needed to push back all those truths that wanted to resurface.
As far as I was concerned, that girl had died.
She just needed to stay dead.
Nicholai held me as I calmed, but when the tears stopped, the heat between us returning, burning even hotter than before. His hands slipped over my back, brushing my sides, and his breathing grew unsteady. I lifted my head, my cheek brushing his, and felt him growing hard beneath me.
I pulled back to see his eyes, and his hands lifted away from my body, latching onto the armchair again. He was growing long and stiff against me, anger in his eyes. Anger at himself, at his lack of control, at our connection—I wasn't sure.
"Why didn't you tell me you were quitting?" I whispered. "I thought you left me."
"I needed a few days before I checked in on you." His eyes fell to my lips. He seemed unable to look away. "You test my control." He forced his gaze back to mine. "You know you do. You do it deliberately."
"You test my control," I fired back, my nails digging into his shoulders.
"You—" he began with a growl, but cut himself off, closing his eyes as he bit back whatever he had been about to say.
"I have no control?" I guessed .
His eyes flashed open, that tiny, firm little half smile reappearing. "I need you to get off me now, Mika."
"Gladly." I pushed off him, and he stood immediately, backing me into the wall like he couldn't stand the sudden distance between our bodies. There was that magnetism again, pushing us together.
"You're coming with me," he said.
I nodded, and he backed off me, leading me out to his car. He stopped at a café and disappeared inside, returning with a takeout bag, and then he drove me home. He parked and followed me quietly to my trailer. I hadn't invited him in. He hadn't asked.
I watched as he passed between the trees, the small pathway to Fred and Shel's lot barely able to contain him. I hadn't ever thought of him as huge , but that's exactly how he seemed to me now. He was big, and alone. His broad shoulders were brushed by the leaves in the same spots where I had soaked his shirt in tears. His hands were stuffed into the pockets of his pants, his suit jacket and the plastic handle for the bag of takeout clasped in his left hand. When he glanced at me, the shadow from the setting sun sent his features into darkness.
In that moment, I could pretend.
"What is it?" he asked, his voice low. He had stopped walking .
Probably because I had.
I stepped into his darkness, crossing my arms tightly over my chest so that I could tuck my hands in against my body. It was a physical effort not to reach out and touch him.
"I wish you were a stranger," I whispered. "I wish I didn't know you at all. I think you'd be perfect, then."
He laughed, but the sound was dry, tinged with some kind of dark emotion. Possibly anger. "Tell me why."
I slipped my arms around his waist, pressing my body to his. I couldn't help it. I needed to feel his warmth, I needed more than to simply stand in the shadow he created. I needed to crawl into that dark place where he held his heat, where I could look out at the world, feeling protective muscle at my back. It was some kind of sick fantasy that I couldn't shake.
His hand was in my hair again, like he couldn't help it either. He made a sound, lending an emotion to the stiffness of his body. Frustration.
"Tell me why," he repeated, his voice rougher this time.
I shook my head, pulling away from him. I was a coward. Whatever. "Thank you for today," I told him, moving away. "I know you need to lecture me about boundaries, so let's go inside and get it over and done with. "
He didn't reply, but I could hear him walking behind me. I opened the door and stepped inside, frowning when the light suddenly switched on.
"You didn't even jump." Duke's amused voice flashed through me like an unwelcome memory.
"What are you doing here?" I asked, refusing to take another step.
He was sitting in the bench seat just off from the kitchenette, his back up against the wall and his legs stretched out over the seat, his arms crossed over his wide chest. Despite the amusement in his voice, he didn't look very happy. He shifted, slid out from behind the table, and moved toward me.
"I came to talk about the other day …" He paused, only a step away from me, his eyes flicking over my head.
I felt panic and I wasn't sure why.
"Who the fuck is this?" Duke spat, his hand slamming down on my shoulder and spinning me around to face Nicholai.
Nicholai was still half in shadow. He wasn't moving, but I could make out his features. They were stone cold, his eyes fixed on the hand clamped over my shoulder.
"It's Nicholai Fell," I said calmly. "He's a Doctor of Deviance."
The change in Nicholai was instant. His blank expression cracked, his mouth hooking up slightly at the side. He stepped into the trailer, moving around Duke to put the bag of takeout on the table. He then shook out his jacket and laid it across the bench seat. Duke was tightening his hold on me, drawing me back, his other hand clamping down on my other shoulder. It wasn't exactly painful, but it was annoying. I usually didn't care what Duke did, but his touch was making my skin crawl. I still hadn't recovered from our encounter.
Hell … I was calling it an encounter . I wasn't even ready to think about it, to put a label to it and dig around for an appropriate response to it.
"What the fuck?" Duke finally spluttered out, his fingers digging inward. "Is that it? What the hell does that even mean? Who is he, Grey? Who are you, dipshit?"
Nicholai had turned around and was leaning back against the kitchen table, his arms crossed over his chest. At some point, he had rolled up the sleeves of his button-down. The lines of his tattoo were wrapping around his forearms, the promise of a rhythm laid out between those black bars, all the way down to his wrists. In his office, with the song playing from his laptop, I had been able to read that song as soft and slow, haunting as it strived to mean something. Now, it was different. His arms were tense, his muscles bunching. There was a small vein jumping in his wrist and I had the urge to open a window—his presence seemed too much, like my tiny trailer wouldn't be able to contain him. This time, the song seemed violent.
"This ends now," Nicholai ground out, without answering any of Duke's questions. "Let go of her. Leave. Don't come back. If you want a big macho speech to speed you up, you'd better imagine it, because I can't be bothered wasting the words. Understood?"
"No." I could hear the smirk in Duke's tone—the sharp edge that seemed to carry more than a threat. It was what came after the threat: danger itself. "I had my dick in this girl less than forty-eight hours ago, and now you're standing in her RV like you're next in line to get your tip wet. You're too late, man. I broke her in, so find somewhere else to stick it because if you step on my territory again, I will fucking kill you. Understood? "
Nicholai moved forward in a blur, shocking Duke into action. He shoved me out of the way, sending me onto the counter beside the kitchen sink. I steadied myself, watching as the two of them moved toe-to-toe. Nicholai looked both taller and stronger, and it finally hit me that his physique had an explanation after all. I had always thought it strange that Nicholai didn't seem to have even an inch of body fat, and that the golden tan never seemed to fade from his skin. He worked indoors constantly, he shouldn't have looked the way he did.
Nicholai was outrunning his demons the same way I was. He was trying to actively work them out of his system. I had seen him running on the beach myself.
"I doubt that." Nicholai answered Duke's threat calmly, but it only seemed to make Duke angrier.
Duke reached behind his back and I caught the flash of metal as his hand slipped beneath his tank. Time seemed to freeze as I battled with myself. He had a gun—whether he would actually use it or not was a different story, and whether Nicholai knew how to handle being at gunpoint didn't even seem to matter to me.
The only thing that mattered was that flash of silver. The smooth, clammy metal. The smell of sweat. The taste of my own tears. I could hear the sharp explosion before Duke had even lifted it from the back of his jeans. I knew that sound better than I knew myself.
I was battling the one memory I refused to let in, and I was battling it in the one moment that I really couldn't afford to spiral.
I needed to stay.
I needed to do something.