Instinct

24. Expect the Unexpected

Stephanie’s head ached something vicious as she came to. She was so tired that she was sure it would split in half, but she could sleep no longer. It was too quiet, unoccupied in her room. The stretch of mattress beside her was inhabited by rumpled blankets rather than the warm body that had been there previously.

Rubbing the sleep out of her eyes and shivering against the cooling air around her, she set her feet on the floor. It had been a relatively long time since she’d been plagued intermittently by nightmares, but last night they had returned full force. There was a tension in her muscles, an ache in her bones that betrayed something hovering uncomfortably at the edge of her existence. A deep-seated, malevolent hint at something beyond her control.

Stephanie knew that feeling enough to know it went far beyond paranoia.

She wrapped a dressing gown around her, toes curling against the unpleasant temperature of the wooden floorboards. Downstairs she could hear the television on, the way too familiar intonation of a news broadcast. It seemed that it was all they watched recently.

In the living room, the lowlight of the morning casting weak shadows over everything, Liam lay sprawled on the couch, a remote held loosely in his hand. Stephanie didn’t miss the dark smudges under his eyes, blemishes on an otherwise smooth face, and felt guilty for causing them. Her unease, twisting in her stomach and wreaking havoc on her mind, had probably translated and bled into his subconscious, disallowing him sleep just as much as it barred her from the depths of rest.

Not even knowing that he was there, right beside her all night as always, had soothed her. Stephanie had never known that to happen.

His eyes caught her hanging in the doorway, stuck deep in her musings, and he gave her a small smile that did little to relax the tension in her shoulders, but just enough that she was grateful.

“Rough night?” he asked, though she was certain he knew the answer to that.

“You could say that,” she replied.

Settling down on the sofa beside him, she sighed. She felt chilled in a way she hadn’t felt for a long time, not since the Facility. The word didn’t inspire mind-numbing horror in her anymore – more a distant, dampened shadow of the emotion. It was like someone else had lived through that, and she was content to let it continue that way.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Stephanie just shook her head.

Liam didn’t even have the gall to act surprised anymore. He just let it be. Stephanie knew that he hoped she’d one day open up to him about her last great secret, but she wasn’t sure that she ever would. As the months progressed, she found herself less often trapped in the steel box of memories from the Facility, as vivid as life around her, and more frequently living solely in the present.

It was strange, as so many things in her life had been and still were, but a good strange. Refreshing.

For that reason only, she kept her recollections of the Facility bolted down where they were supposed to be: in the past. Liam was not a part of that equation. Stephanie trusted him as much as she had in her childhood. That was not the problem.

The past two months had been an insane rollercoaster of surrealism, from being interviewed, which was an event in itself, to chatting with A-list celebrities that she’d never imagined she’d meet. And yeah, to some people that was great, but with lurking anxieties pressing in at the back of her mind every time she was in a room too empty or too full, it was just flat out wearisome.

Liam’s hand in hers kept her grounded when she felt like her head might float away, or when it all just became too much. It hadn’t been hard to pretend to be together. The ease with which they existed around each other was enough for the public most times.