Asking for Trouble - Leslie Kelly [1]
Shifting around on the tired leather couch, Simon lay back, leaning his head against the arm and closing his eyes. He needed to relax. To let go of his anger and his concern that it was starting all over again.
Hopefully the subtle throbbing meant nothing. It would pass. It had to pass.
The doctors had said the migraines would eventually go away, as, hopefully, would the memories of what had happened that June night in Charleston. Since the pain was often severe, he sincerely hoped the experts were right.
But in his darkest nighttime hours, when the cloying weight of the hotel and the vivid images in his brain pressed down on him with unbearable pressure, he knew he’d rather live with the headaches than with the memories. If he could banish one or the other forever, he would choose to endure the physical agony and end the still-frame snapshots of memory that tormented him.
The images replayed night after night in his head like a never-ending horror movie. The fear. The pain. The screams. The blood.
The crushed and broken body.
He tried deep-breathing and focused relaxation techniques. Clench, then release, he reminded himself. The fingers—tight, then limp. The wrists—flaccid. Every muscle in the arm going slack, then the shoulders, the neck.
Calm. Breathe. Float over the waves of memory crashing in your skull rather than letting them wash over you.
Amazingly it began to work. The pulse slowed. The throbbing dulled. Eventually, after a few long moments, he felt confident of his success in battling off one of the headaches that, at times, left him nearly incapacitated. So confident, he opened his eyes and slowly sat up, almost smiling at that small victory. One he hadn’t even been able to imagine when last in the grip of the demonizing pain.
His triumph didn’t last for long, because when he caught sight of his computer screen, he knew he had not won the battle at all. He’d merely fallen asleep again. Fallen into that strange place where his dreams and his memories met up and tortured him.
Shaking his head, Simon silently yelled at himself to wake up and end this nightmare. Yes, it was only a nightmare. It couldn’t be real—he could not be seeing what he thought he was seeing.
On the laptop screen where only letters, words and paragraphs had existed a few minutes before, there was now one large, horrifying, bloody image. An image he saw in his mind every single day…but one he’d certainly never expected to see on his computer screen.
He reached toward the horrible picture, covering it with his palm, spreading his fingers apart in an effort to block it out of sight—out of existence. But despite the size of his hand, it could not hide everything. Especially not when each brutal detail was so very, very familiar.
“Wake up, man,” he told himself. In his dream, he leaned back on the couch and closed his eyes as he felt that throbbing begin again.
Remembering his therapy, he counted backwards from ten, willing himself to rise toward consciousness as if ascending a long flight of stairs. Going from darkness into light. From nightmare into reality.
When he reached one, he slowly opened his eyes and looked around.
“Thank God,” he murmured. Because on the screen in front of him he saw letters. And words. And paragraphs. “A dream. Just a dream,” he whispered.
Then he saw something else and his heart clenched tight in his chest. Slowly fading from sight on the screen of his laptop was a shape…the shape of a hand.
His hand.
It hadn’t been a dream. A hallucination? Christ, was he doomed to be reminded of his past by everything—even his computer, his only connection with the outside world?
He wouldn’t be able to stand it. He couldn’t live like this, with the pain and the solitude and the grief coming at him from every angle. He’d lose his mind, if he hadn’t already.
Because, Simon knew he would go insane if everywhere he looked he saw the image of her.
The woman he’d killed.
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Lottie
THE NEXT PERSON who tells me how great it must be to have five older brothers is going to