Nash only glanced at the girl, then back at me. “Seems okay to me. Assuming she has a ride home …”
“Yeah, I guess.” But then the current song ended, and the girl stumbled—looking somehow graceful, even when obviously intoxicated—off the dance floor and toward the bar. Headed right for us.
My heart beat harder with every step she took. My hand curled around my glass until my knuckles went white. And that familiar sense of melancholy swelled into an overwhelming feeling of grief. Of dark foreboding.
I gasped, startled by a sudden, gruesome certainty.
Not again. Not with Nash Hudson there to watch me completely freak out. My breakdown would be all over the school on Monday, and I could kiss goodbye what little social standing I’d gained.
Nash set his glass down and peered into my face. “Kaylee? You okay?” But I could only shake my head, incapable of answering. I was far from okay, but couldn’t articulate the problem in any way resembling coherence. And suddenly the potentially devastating rumors looked like minor blips on my disaster meter compared to the panic growing inside me.
Each breath came faster than the last, and a scream built deep within my chest. I clamped my mouth shut to hold it back, grinding my teeth painfully. The strawberry blonde stepped up to the bar on my left, and only a single stool and its occupant stood between us. The male bartender took her order and she turned sideways to wait for her drink. Her eyes met mine. She smiled briefly, then stared out onto the dance floor.
Horror washed over me in a devastating wave of intuition. My throat closed. I choked on a scream of terror. My glass slipped from my hand and shattered on the floor. The redheaded dancer squealed and jumped back as ice-cold soda splattered her, me, Nash, and the man on the stool to my left. But I barely noticed the frigid liquid, or the people staring at me.
I saw only the girl, and the dark, translucent shadow that had enveloped her.
“Kaylee?” Nash tilted my face up so that our eyes met. His were full of concern, the colors swirling almost out of control now in the flashing lights. Watching them made me dizzy.
I wanted to tell him … something. Anything. But if I opened my mouth, the scream would rip free, and then anyone who wasn’t already looking at me would turn to stare. They’d think I’d lost my mind.
Maybe they’d be right.
“What’s wrong?” Nash demanded, stepping closer to me now, heedless of the glass and the wet floor. “Do you have seizures?” But I could only shake my head at him, refusing passage to the wail trying to claw its way out of me, denying the existence of a narrow bed in a sterile white room, awaiting my return.
And suddenly Emma was there. Emma, with her perfect body, beautiful face and heart the size of an elephant’s. “She’ll be fine.” Emma pulled me away from the bar as the male bartender came forward with a mop and bucket. “She just needs some air.” She waved off Traci’s worried look and frantic hand gestures, then tugged me through the crowd by one arm.
I clamped my free palm over my mouth and shook my head furiously when Nash tried to take that hand in his. I should have been worried about what he would think. That he would want nothing else to do with me now that I’d publicly embarrassed him. But I couldn’t concentrate long enough to worry about anything but the redhead at the bar. The one who’d watched us leave through a shadow-shroud only I could see.
Emma led me past the bathrooms and into the back hall, Nash close on my heels. “What’s wrong with her?” he asked.
“Nothing.” Emma paused to turn and smile at us both, and gratitude broke through my dark terror for just an instant. “It’s a panic attack. She just needs some fresh air and time to calm down.”
But that’s where she was wrong. It wasn’t time I needed, so much as space. Distance, between me and the source of the panic. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough room in the whole club to get me far enough away from the girl at the bar. Even with me standing by the back door, the panic was as strong as ever. The unspoken shriek burned my throat, and if I unclenched my jaws—if I lost control—my scream would shatter eardrums all over Taboo. It would put the thumping dance beat to shame, and possibly blow out the speakers—if not the windows.
All because of some redhead I didn’t even know.
Just thinking about her sent a fresh wave of devastation through me, and my knees collapsed. My fall caught Emma off guard, and I would have pulled her down if Nash hadn’t caught me.
He lifted me completely off the ground, cradling me like a child, and followed Emma out the back door with me secure in his arms. The club had been dim, but the alley was dark, and it went quiet once the door thumped shut behind us, Emma’s bank card keeping the latch from sliding home. The frigid near-silence should have calmed me, but the racket in my head had reached its zenith. The scream I refused to release slammed around in my brain, reverberating, echoing, punctuating the grief still thick in my heart.
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
