A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [600]
“What is it?” she whispered back, and leaned toward him by instinct. She reached again, touched his head, smoothed his hair—all the things she had waked prepared to do. She felt her hand rest on him and thought to stop, but did not. It was as though the spurt of maternal comfort, once called forth, could not be pressed back into her, no more than the spurt of breast milk summoned by an infant’s cry could be recalled to its source.
“Are you all right?” She kept her voice low, and as impersonal as the words allowed. She lifted her hand, and he moved, rolling toward her, pressing his head hard against the curve of her thigh.
“Don’t go,” he said again, and caught his breath in what might have been a sob. His voice was low and rough, but not as she had ever heard it before.
“I’m here.” Her trapped wrist was growing numb. She laid her free hand on his shoulder, hoping he would let go if she seemed willing to stay.
He did relax his grip, but only to reach out and seize her by the waist, pulling her back into bed. She went, because there was no choice, and lay in silence, Bonnet’s breathing harsh and warm on the back of her neck.
At length, he let go and rolled onto his back with a sigh, allowing her to move. She rolled onto her own back, cautious, trying to keep a few inches between them. Moonlight came through the stern windows in a silver flood, and she could see the silhouette of his face, catch the glint of light from forehead and cheek as he turned his head.
“Bad dream?” she ventured. She’d meant to sound sarcastic, but her own heart was still tripping fast from the alarm of the awakening, and the words had a tentative sound.
“Aye, aye,” he said with a shuddering sigh. “The same. It comes to me over and over again, see? Ye’d think I’d know what it was about and wake, but I never do. Not ’til the waters close over my head.” He rubbed a hand under his nose, sniffing like a child.
“Oh.” She didn’t want to ask for details, didn’t want to encourage any further sense of intimacy. What she wanted, though, had nothing much to do with things anymore.
“Since I was a lad, I’ve dreamed of drowning,” he said, and his voice, normally so assured, was unsteady. “The sea comes in, and I cannot move—not at all. The tide’s risin’, and I know it will kill me, but there’s no way to move.” His hand clutched the sheet convulsively, pulling it away from her.
“It’s gray water, full of mud, and there are blind things swimmin’ in it. They’re waitin’ on the sea to finish its business wit’ me, see—and then they’ve business of their own.”
She could hear the horror of it in his voice, and was torn between wanting to edge farther away from him and the ingrained habit of offering comfort.
“It was only a dream,” she said at last, staring up at the boards of the deck, no more than three feet above her head. If only this were a dream!
“Ah, no,” he said, and his voice had dropped to little more than a whisper in the darkness beside her. “Ah, no. It’s the sea herself. Callin’ me, see?”
Quite suddenly, he rolled toward her, seizing her and pressing her hard against him. She gasped, stiffening, and he pressed harder, responding, sharklike, to her struggles.
To her own horror, she felt LeRoi rising, and forced herself to be still. Panic and the need to escape his dream might all too easily make him forget his aversion to having sex with pregnant women, and that was the very last thing, the very last thing . . .
“Sshh,” she said firmly, and clutched him round the head, forcing his face down into her shoulder, patting him, stroking his back. “Shh. It will be all right. It was only a dream. I won’t let it hurt you—I won’t let anything hurt you. Hush, hush now.”
She went on patting him, her eyes closed, trying to imagine herself holding Jemmy after such a nightmare, quiet in their cabin, the hearth fire low, Jem’s little body relaxing in trust, the sweet little-boy smell of his hair near her face. . . .
“I won’t let you drown,