Page 96 of Shattered Veil

What did remain was water.

Water.

Covering me. Choking me. Drowning me.

It was new. It was terrifying. And I had no idea why.

“James?!” Cassie’s alarmed voice rang through the haze, and I felt my body flinch in response, but my mind was not yet willing. “Wake up!”

I attempted to speak, but it came out garbled. I only managed to groan a nasty, guttural noise as I remained caught between two worlds. Oxygen ran through my lungs, but it seemingly did no good as I was starved for air, and I gasped desperately for its relief.

“Jay? Fuck…James!” Cassie’s tone turned raspy. “Baby, please.”

It was on her plea that my eyes were able to snap open. The ceiling of my room came into view. My breathing slowed to a normal rate. I slowly removed my right hand from my chest, finding my palm sticky with cold sweat, flexed my fingers into a fist and then released them, and rolled my head on my pillow to see her.

The moment that I was able to register her appearance through the dark, I inhaled sharply, sitting up so quickly that it dizzied me. The lamp on my side table was on in a flash, and the room lit up in an ambient glow.

Dark eyes red-rimmed, face damp, her tears were hot on my palms and continuing to fall down her cheeks as I rapidly swiped them away.

“Shhh-shh, what is it?”

She scanned me up and down, looking as if she had deduced that I was fully awake before hesitantly touching my upper arms. Cassie’s breath caught in a quiet sob that eviscerated me, and she rushed out:

“Are you okay?”

“Am I okay? Cassie…”

I was certain that my expression was telling. That my nightmares had caused my heart to race—my skin to perspire in panic—my muscles to clench as if I were prepared to scream. I had woken immersed in them. Drenched in them. Yet the moment that I saw her, I attempted to whisk away the thought of being lost in my mind. The feeling wasn’t gone, of course. The tremor of anxiety that followed my typical waking at two in the morning remained deep in my muscle tissue, but it didn’t matter.

Well…it did matter.

But I was trying with all my might to push it to the back of my brain because the visions weren’t real. Not at this exact moment of my life, anyway. And seeing Cassie with tears streaming down her face—whether or not she was trying to stem the flow of them with sniffles and rapid blinking—was nothing less than startling.

I had never seen her really cry. A tightening of her throat here or there, I had heard, sure. But crying—actual tears paired with a single sob—no.

“What is it?” I asked her again in a whisper. “Is—” My head whipped away from her and to the side table behind her where her cell was charging. “Shit, did something happen?” I looked back to her, assuming aloud, “Sky? Fuck—Liam? What’s wro—”

“Jesus—no, nothing. Nothing happened.” Cassie moved one of her hands to the left side of my chest as I sighed in relief, settling it in the exact spot that she does when she’s seemingly trying to sense my anxiety level through her palm. More calmly this time, she inquired, “Are you good?”

“Nightmare. I’m fine, Cas. Are you?”

My thumbs brushed at the areas that had begun to dry, and she murmured, “Fine.”

I shook my head. “Why are you crying?”

Cassie released me, reaching to usher my touch away from her cheeks. I let my hands fall to the little mattress space between us while she rubbed at her eyes.

“This is fuckin’ backwards,” she grumbled. “I’m good.”

“Cassie.”

“You just scared me, okay?” she blurted as she removed her palms from her face. “You looked like you were in pain, and I just…” Cassie looked to the left and right before landing on me and exhaling softly through her nose. “I didn’t like that.”

I nodded, gently replying, “Okay, okay.” Shimmying back down into bed, she followed me, and I muttered, “Come here.”

Despite my cool sheen of sweat, she obliged, tightly holding me around my waist as she rested her head on me. It took quite some time for her grasp to soften—so long that my unease from my dreams had fully passed—so long that she could have gone back to sleep, though I knew that she hadn’t.

Cassie eventually spoke into my pectorals, “What were they about?”

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