Nash set me down in the alley, but by then my thoughts had lost all semblance of logic or comprehension. I felt something smooth and dry beneath me, and only later would I realize Emma had found a collapsed box for him to set me on.
My jeans had ridden up on my legs when Nash carried me, and the cardboard was cold and gritty with grime against my calves.
“Kaylee?” Emma knelt in front of me, her face inches from mine, but I couldn’t make sense of a word she said after my name. I heard only my own thoughts. Just one thought, actually. A paranoid delusion, according to my former therapist, which presented itself with the absolute authority of long-held fact.
Then Emma’s face disappeared and I was staring at her knees. Nash said something I couldn’t make out. Something about a drink…
Music swelled back to life, then Emma was gone. She’d left me alone with the hottest guy I’d ever danced with—the last person in the world I wanted to witness my total break with reality.
Nash dropped onto his knees and looked into my eyes, the greens and browns in his still churning frantically somehow, though there were no lights overhead now.
I was imagining it. I had to be. I’d seen them dance with the light earlier, and now my traumatized mind had seized upon Nash’s eyes as a focal point of my delusion. Just like the strawberry blonde. Right?
But there was no time to think through my theory. I was losing control. Successive waves of grief threatened to flatten me, crushing me into the wall with an invisible pressure, as if Nash weren’t even there. I couldn’t suck in a deep breath, yet a high-pitched keening leaked from my throat now, even with my lips sealed shut. My vision began to go even darker than the alley—though I wouldn’t have thought that possible—like the whole world had been overlaid with an odd gray filter.
Nash frowned, still watching me, then twisted to sit beside me, his back against the wall too. On the edges of my graying vision, something scuttled past soundlessly. A rat, or some other scavenger attracted by the club’s garbage bin? No. Whatever I’d glimpsed was too big to be a rodent—unless we’d stepped into Buttercup’s fire swamp—and too indistinct for my shattered focus to settle on.
Nash took my free hand in his, and I forgot whatever I’d seen. He pushed my hair back from my right ear. I couldn’t understand most of what he whispered to me, but I gradually came to realize that his actual words weren’t important. What mattered was his proximity. His breath on my neck. His warmth melting into mine. His scent surrounding me. His voice swirling in my head, insulating me from the scream still ricocheting against my skull.
He was calming me with nothing more than his presence, his patience and whispered words of what sounded like a child’s rhyme, based on what little I caught.
And it was working. My anxiety gradually faded, and dim, gritty color leaked back into the world. My fingers relaxed around his hand. My lungs expanded fully, and I sucked in a sharp, frigid breath, suddenly freezing as sweat from the club dried on my skin.
The panic was still there, in the shadowed corners of my mind, in the dark spots on the edge of my vision. But I could handle it now. Thanks to Nash.
“You okay?” he asked when I turned my head to face him, the bricks cold and rough against my cheek.
I nodded. And that’s when a new horror descended: utter, consuming, inescapable mortification, most awful in its longevity. The panic attack was all but over, but humiliation would last a lifetime.
I’d completely lost it in front of Nash Hudson. My life was over; even my friendship with Emma wouldn’t be enough to repair the damage from such a nasty wound.
Nash stretched his legs out. “Wanna talk about it?”
No. I wanted to go hide in a hole, or stick my head in a bag, or change my name and move to Peru.
But then suddenly, I did want to talk about it. With Nash’s voice still echoing softly in my head, his words whispering faintly over my skin, I wanted to tell him what had happened. It made no sense. After knowing me for eight years and helping me through at least half a dozen previous panic attacks, Emma still had no idea what caused them. I couldn’t tell her. It would scare her. Or worse, finally convince her I really was crazy.
So why did I want to tell Nash? I had no answer for that, but the urge was undeniable.
“…the strawberry blonde.” There, I’d said it out loud, and committed myself to some sort of explanation.
Nash’s brow furrowed in confusion. “You know her?”
“No.” Fortunately. Merely sharing oxygen with her had nearly driven me out of my mind. “But something’s wrong with her, Nash. She’s…dark.”
Kaylee, shut up! If he wasn’t already convinced I was certifiable, he would be soon….
“What?” His frown deepened, but rather than bewildered or skeptical, he looked surprised. Then came vague comprehension. Comprehension, and…dread. He might not know exactly what I meant, but he didn’t look completely clueless either. “What do you mean, ‘dark’?”
I closed my eyes, hesitating at the last second. What if I’d misread him? What if he did think I was crazy?
Worse yet, what if he was right?
But in the end, I opened my eyes and met his gaze frankly, because I had to tell him something, and surely I couldn’t damage his opinion of me much more than I already had. Right?
“Okay, this is going to sound weird,” I began, “but something’s wrong with that girl at the bar. When I looked at her, she was…shadowed.” I hesitated, scrounging up the courage to finish what I’d started. “She’s going to die, Nash. That girl is going to die very, very soon.”
CHAPTER 2
“What?” Nash’s eyebrows rose, but he didn’t roll his eyes, or laugh, or pat my head and call for the men in white coats. In fact, he looked like he almost believed me. “How do you know she’s gonna die?”
I rubbed both temples, trying to wipe away a familiar frustration rearing inside me. He might not be laughing on the outside, but surely he was cracking up on the inside. How could he not be? What the hell was I thinking?
“I don’t know how I know. I don’t even know that I’m right. But when I look at her, she’s…darker than everyone around her. Like she’s standing in the shadow of something I can’t see. And I know she’s going to die.”
Nash frowned in concern, and I closed my eyes, barely noticing the sudden swell of music from the club. I knew that look. It was the one mothers give their kids when they fall off the slide and sit up talking about purple ponies and dancing squirrels.
“I know it sounds—” crazy “—weird, but…”
He took both of my hands, twisting to face me more fully on the flattened box beneath us, and again the colors in his irises seemed to pulse with my heartbeat. His mouth opened, and I held my breath, awaiting my verdict. Had I lost him with talk of creepy black shadows, or did my mistakes start all the way back with the spilled drink?
“Sounds pretty weird to me.”
We both glanced up to find Emma watching us, a chilled bottle of water in one hand, dripping condensation on the grimy concrete, and I almost groaned in frustration. Whatever Nash had been about to say was gone now; I could see that in the cautious smile he shot at me, before redirecting toward Emma.
She twisted open the lid and handed me the bottle. “But then, you wouldn’t be Kaylee if you didn’t weird-out on me every now and then.” She shrugged amiably and hauled me to my feet as Nash stood to join us. “So you had a panic attack because you think some girl in the club is going to die?”