50 Shades of Drake 3 and 4

Torn: Chapter Eight

    When Aubrey cracked his eyes open the following morning, he found Destiny staring at him. "Good morning," he greeted groggily.

    "Good morning," she returned.

    His brows furrowed at the intense look in her eyes. "Is something wrong?"

    "Your nightmares are getting worse," she told him.

    "Oh...I kept you awake? I'm sorry."

    "No, forget about me," she said, her eyes sympathetic. "I'm worried about you. You have to go in and get this checked out. There's medication that can help with this."

    He rolled onto his back and stared up at the ceiling. "I hate the idea of depending on medication," he muttered. "Most of them have side effects that would make the condition look like a cakewalk, anyway."

    "But maybe they can help you."

    "I've known people who had to depend on medication to survive," he said stubbornly.

    She cuddled close to him. "I'm worried about you. You were so scared, it was like...it was like you were back there, in Palmer's basement."

    "That's exactly how it feels," he admitted softly. "Like I'm re-living it all over again."

    "Don't you want the nightmares to stop?" she asked him, peering up at him. "At least hear what the doctor has to say about your condition and the options you have. There can't be any harm in that. I'll go with you. It's not like you have to go alone."

    He enveloped her in an embrace and rested his chin on top of her head. "Okay, okay, okay. I'll visit a doctor to see what my options are."

    "Good," she said against his chest. "I wonder what time it is. We should probably get up and get ready for work."

    He raised one of his arms and checked the watch he hadn't bothered to take off the previous night. "It's definitely time for us to start getting ready, yeah." He mentally kicked himself in the ass for working on the contract so late that he hadn't been able to wake up for his routine work out that morning. In the past, he hated working out, but once he'd started to make it a part of his daily regimen, the entire day felt thrown off if he missed it.

    Destiny hopped out of the bed and jogged into the bathroom. A moment later, he heard shower water running. She poked her head out of the bathroom door. "Are you coming?"

    He slowly sat up in bed. "I'll be right there." Scenes from his nightmare still played at the outer edges of his mind. Rubbing both of his temples, he closed his eyes and tried to banish those thoughts from his mind completely. It didn't work.

    Being kidnapped was enough to traumatize anyone, but Aubrey knew it especially struck a nerve with him, because he was so used to being in control. The control he'd mastered over his life wasn't something he'd obtained from his interest in BDSM. It wasn't even something he'd mastered from his days as an rapper, although it had certainly come in handy then. His capacity for the control that he had over his life started before Graham Enterprises and before the world knew him as a rapping/singing sensation. When he was acting, and helping provide for himself and his mother is when he started to develop a sense of control over his life that most other adolescents wouldn't know until they were well into adulthood. That wasn't to say that he controlled each and every factor in his life. That was impossible. But he had a significant amount of control over the direction that his life steered in.

    For more than a decade, he'd garnered and cultivated that sense of control. In the blink of an eye, though, he went from having nearly complete control over his life to having hardly any at all. He was a grown man - a grown Alpha male. Ask him what his list of fears was, and loss of control would be at the top of that list. When Palmer's associate took him from the parking garage of his condo, as easily as an adult would swipe a child, Aubrey had felt helpless. Completely, and totally helpless. In his early days of courting Destiny, he'd felt a touch of helplessness, especially the night she'd walked in on him with another woman...but aside from that, he hadn't felt helpless in years. He never cared to feel helpless again.

     Feeling helpless is feeling like you have absolutely no control over the situation, he thought as he stood up from the bed. And I think I keep having those nightmares because when I was being held in Palmer's basement, that was the most helpless I'd ever felt in my entire life. He threatened Destiny's life, and there was nothing I could do about it. My hands were literally tied. One of the people I treasure most in this world was in immediate danger, and even though my role is to protect her, I couldn't. Destiny thinks that I should consult with a doctor, and I probably should...but do I really expect medicine to cure me, when the problem is more mental than physical or biological?

    He walked into the bathroom, and saw Destiny's nude figure through the shower stall glass. Her long, curly hair was soaked with water and hung heavily down her back. Her face was tilted up, welcoming the streams of water that poured down upon it. A small smile curved her lips. Drops of water rolled across the planes and valleys of her body. He slowly shed his pajama pants and walked towards the shower stall door. In no rush, he pressed his hand to the shower stall glass.

    She wiped water out of her eyes and turned her head. Her eyes lowered down to the hand he had pressed to the glass. Her smile widened, and she raised a hand to the other side of the glass, her fingers significantly smaller than his.

    He opened the shower stall door and stepped inside without speaking a word. As his eyes traveled down her curves, all thoughts of Palmer and feeling helpless fled from his mind. One thought filled his mind, as he closed the distance between them and pinned her against the shower stall wall. Medicine isn't the cure. She is.