Page 22 of Until You Found Me

She doesn’t want to fall asleep in his shitty little trailer, and he isn’t sure why he thought she might. Or, why that would be a valid option, but he imagines her in the dome awake the rest of the day and struggling to sleep at night. He knows from experience that harnessing that exhaustion when it’s ready and eager is the only way to beat insomnia before that window of opportunity passes.

She looks past him into the open space of his bedroom, her reply tentative. “Maybe just for twenty minutes? It might help not to be alone.”

“Go on. Take as long as you need.”

“Twenty minutes. Wake me up after that if I actually manage to fall asleep, okay?”

“Okay.”

“And Logan?” She pauses at the threshold with her hand on the doorframe. “If I have a nightmare, please pretend I’mnot.”

He nods, not liking the idea of allowing her to suffer in some terrible dream, but if she wants him to leave her be, then he will. He watches her sit on the bed and take her shoes off before curling up on top of the covers and somehow resists the urge to blanket her with a throw. Turns away instead and focuses on whittling at the next batch of arrows, careful to keep quiet.

It doesn’t take long for her hand to hang limp off the edge and her breathing to calm. A whole three minutes at most to drift off. That’s gotta be some kind of record, he thinks, pleased that she actually took him up on this offer.

The last time there was a woman in his bed, he couldn’t get out of it fast enough. This is definitely an improvement.

He’s ten arrows in when she starts to stir, making the most pitiful noises in the back of her throat like she’s choking. For a moment he fears she might be, but then she gasps out a few garbled words he can’t decipher and he realizes it’s all part of a nightmare. The clock tells him twenty minutes are creeping up fast and while he planned to give her a little extra time, he’s only too eager to use that as an excuse for waking her. Can’t handle seeing the fear on her face or the tears streaming down her cheeks when there’s something he can do right now to fix it.

He’s heading her way when she wakes with a start, sitting up with wide, wet eyes that land on him. “Logan?”

“It’s me, I’m here.”

Her exhale is heavy with relief. “What time is it?”

“Almost twenty minutes in.”

“Good. Okay, good. I’m going to…” She gets up, wary of looking him in the eye, a familiar cloudof shame he knows all too well hanging over her as she brushes past him toward the exit. “I’m gonna go. Thank you for letting me rest here.”

“Any time.”

She only nods, looking down instead of at him except for the slight moment of eye contact he’s granted before she disappears out the door.

He made her uncomfortable. The last thing he wants or needs is anyone near him when he’s having a nightmare, but he forced her to have an audience, anyway.

Logan spots her across the field from the window. She pauses at the dome, looking back with an unreadable flicker of emotion on her face. Then she disappears from sight, tucked inside once more.

It’s fine. It’s nothing. Everything will look better tomorrow, he tells himself, only half believing it and wishing he wasn’t so easily worried by the smallest missteps.

He never worried about anyone like this before. Never tried to calculate his next move to be certain it won’t burst some imaginary bubble. Always assumed that if he drove someone away, and that’s a skill he has in spades, then he was better off for it. For the most part, that’s remained true his whole life. He still felt like a failure when Lydia left, but there was relief in being alone, safe in his own space. Then again, he has plenty of faults. She had a point about him being hard to love, hard to handle, and even harder to get along with.

‘Selfish, neglectful, arrogant. I never see you. You never touch me.’

This isn’t the same. He and Tessa aren’t together and he can’t make her run as easily.

He ponders his many mistakes until nightfall and then climbs into bed, catching a whiff of the strawberry shampooTessa must have used, and sure enough, when he turns his head and inhales, the pillow smells like her.

“Fuck,” he curses sadly, missing her already while knowing he should focus on staying detached instead.

“Are you there? Over.”

He eagerly reaches for the radio on the side table. “I’m here. Everything okay?”

“Mhmm. Just checking the range on these things.”

He can hear the smile in her voice and that’s all it takes to forget his earlier mistake. “A football field, at least. We’re good.”

“You owe me two questions, you know?”

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