But I knew such an answer was bordering on cliché and not what she wanted.
“Yeah,” I replied. “I love it how a person like me can love something so ugly, twisted and maddening.”
“I don’t know what that feels like,” she said. The abrupt loss of the aggression so pungent jarred me. She sounded smaller. Weaker. A stranger.
“Love? Or madness?” I asked, half-joking, uncomfortable with the turn of the conversation.
“Either of them,” she said. “I don’t really know what deep emotion feels like. Maybe apart from exhaustion. I’ve worked so hard, and on such little sleep for as long as I can remember, I’ve morphed a physical manifestation into an emotional feeling. My only one at that. I get about four hours of sleep a night. All I think about is the next patient, the next rung in the ladder, the next challenge.”
This description suited my friend pretty darn well.
This self-reflection did not suit her. I never thought of her having these cliché kinds of thoughts and needs. Or at least, I didn’t ever think she’d be the kind of person to share such things.
“Katy?” I asked, suddenly concerned about my seemingly iron-skinned, coldhearted friend.
“It’s nothing,” she said. I could hear her shaking herself out of whatever that was, even over the phone. “I’m just overtired and under caffeinated. I need to release some sexual energy. I’ll call a number in my book. Drink a latte. Operate on someone’s frontal cortex. Everything will be fine.”
Katy was the one woman I knew of who successfully had sex like a man. Better than a man. She didn’t learn their names. She ranked them by looks, efficiency and sexual prowess. She didn’t bother with occupation, or financial status, not in that book. Yeah, she had two books. Sex and dating were transactional to her. I was halfway sure she had a mild form of Asperger’s, because she was so uninterested in human emotional connections. But this little outburst had me wondering.
“Okay, well, if you don’t get your usual satisfaction from each of those things, give me a call. I’m an expert in mental breakdowns.” What I wasn’t, was an expert in talking about feelings or giving emotional advice, or even being a shoulder to cry on. Though I’d believe Katy was capable of performing brain surgery on herself before I’d believe she’d cry on anyone’s shoulder.
“I’m nowhere near a mental breakdown,” she snapped. “That’s your area. I’ll get your scripts ready and sent this afternoon. Just don’t become addicted. I don’t want to have a friend in rehab. Too messy.”
She clicked off without a goodbye.
As expected.
I stayed in the bath until the water turned cold and the whisky disappeared.
Getting out of the bath with a generous amount of whisky in me and no food wasn’t ideal, but I managed to get to my bed, soaking wet, naked and exhausted.
I almost didn’t have any nightmares.
Almost.
Chapter 7
“It was getting harder to find them. The first one was easy. Like fate. It was meant to be. But it was harder now. I expected more from them. Pretty, but not beautiful. Quiet. Until I made them scream.”
I woke up covered in sweat.
This was not a new occurrence.
In fact, I’d started sleeping in just my underwear to stop myself from ruining expensive silks from La Perla. My vivid nightmares were really fucking with my lingerie collection.
I’d tried every sleeping pill known to woman, and every combination of that sleeping pill with hard liquor. None had yielded results. It turned out my demons were stronger than Ambien and meaner than Jack.
Obviously I kept up with the hard liquor, for at least the dulling quality, but I didn’t take the sleeping pills. They made me groggy and affected my ability to write. That was when I was churning out books like nobody’s business. As it was, I couldn’t even churn out a fucking sentence, so no way was I putting more chemicals in my body.
Hence waking up at the witching hour, covered in sweat, freezing, head pounding, ankle pulsating and brain slamming the last images of my nightmare into my mind.
I’d had vivid dreams since I was a kid. Most of them were bad; a few good, but good dreams were useless. They helped you sleep better but they didn’t do shit for creation.
I started drinking coffee at twelve years old. Around the same time I started writing about my nightmares.
Eventually, that turned into a million-dollar day job. The more traumas I collected, the more money I put in the bank, the more followers I gained, the more fame I accumulated.
This nightmare was a bad one.
It was bad because it was not about demons possessing people, about planes crashing in front of me, showing me the death of hundreds of people. It wasn’t about anything supernatural, as my nightmares often were.
No, this one was real.
It was blood staining the crotch of my pants, it was the loss of something I didn’t even want, it was about dead dreams and stolen innocence.
So of course, I managed to get a few words down. Some snippets of something. A story. Maybe. Just maybe. But I couldn’t call it that right now. It wasn’t the streak I usually found myself on in the middle of the night and in the midst of a nightmare. For one book, I’d lost track of the night itself, the morning coming and the day disappearing. I’d write for twelve straight hours. Drinking and using the bathroom on autopilot. That book remains one of my bestselling, most famous and most hated. Because it was me. It was my nightmares, uncensored. It was also months after one of my most terrible events of my life.
But I did not think about that.
Especially not now, in the darkness, the quiet that welcomed bad memories and past trauma.
I closed my laptop so hard I figured there was a fifty-fifty chance I had cracked the screen. It wouldn’t be the first time. Which was why I saved everything to the cloud, even if it was only two hundred measly words I’d managed to spew onto the screen.
I hadn’t seen the cottage in the darkness before. These past nights had been peaceful, for me at least. Which meant violent nightmares but somehow sleeping through the night. That also meant no words.
But some things had changed.
Like almost dying in the woods.
Like being saved—maybe damned—by a man who found his way into my nightmares when I thought I’d banished him from my nightmares.
I fumbled with the light switch, which pissed me off. I had a talent, born from a childhood of moving, from a career that demanded hotel rooms—I could find a light switch, no matter what. I guessed it was a survival instinct, because no matter how much I thrived in the darkness, how I made my living in the darkness, I always needed just a little bit of light.
My body protested with the stretch I put it through to push over a wine glass, a pill bottle and a book in my search for the light.
Once I found it, the room illuminated a book covered in wine, a glass somehow still intact and the pill bottle that this whole foray had been about, nowhere to be found.
I sighed, glancing around the room, sucking in the quiet; the absolute, utter silence. It was chilling. The lack of noise was a roar.
A childhood spent in small towns should’ve insulated me to this. But I’d spent a long time repressing my childhood and I welcomed the noise of New York, of the sounds of the people I’d chosen to sleep with.