Seconds passed. Then minutes.

Neither Morgan nor I moved. We were on our sides, facing each other. His eyes were closed, although I strongly doubted he was asleep. I watched his features and couldn’t help but see the tension in his face. After I’d seen him so happy, it was rather glaring how tense he was. Glaring, and more than a little bit heartbreaking. We’d connected tonight. Not just the sex, but everything—being together, talking, Morgan opening to me without being forced to but rather because he wanted to. Or at least, I’d thought we were connecting. Now I knew that something had passed between us, yes, but he’d still been holding back. I hadn’t made him as happy as he made me. It was not a pleasant realization.

“Now you can truly say you understand me,” he murmured, and as quiet as his words were, they startled me enough that I shivered. He opened his eyes; they were dark, lifeless. “Or don’t you?”

“I do, yes.” My voice sounded like I’d been shouting much too loudly for much too long. Maybe because I’d been trying so hard to reach him, and even when he was lying right next to me, he felt much too far. “I’m sorry you had to go through that.”

Even as I said it, it dawned on me. Three times. He’d gone through this ordeal—killing the woman he loved—three times. Twice Melody, once the other woman. And because he’d been compelled to forget about Melody, for him it had all basically happened at the same time. How painful had that been? I could take a much better guess than I wished I was able to. I’d seen his face at the moment when he remembered killing Melody and realized he’d killed… I didn’t even know her name. I wasn’t sure I did want to know. Regardless of her name, her death, on top of Melody’s, had shattered him.

Ever so gently, I reached out to him and laid my hand on his cheek. I stroked my thumb under his eye. He wasn’t crying, not now, but I remembered tears rolling down his face in his memory.

I slid my hand to his neck, then his back, and shifted closer to him, pressing my body alongside his. For a few seconds, he remained still against me, rigid and uncomfortable. Little by little, he started to relax. He even rested the lightest of hands at my waist.

“You’re not… scared?” he murmured.

I snuggled my head under his chin, pressing my face to his collarbone. He smelled good. Like sex. Like the two of us together.

“Scared of what?” I asked. “You? You wouldn’t hurt me.”

His fingers briefly tightened at my waist.

“I didn’t want to hurt them either, and—”

“Don’t.”

The pain and guilt in his voice felt like they reverberated through his entire body, causing it to tremble against mine. I held him a little closer.

“What happened to them…”

How could I word it? How could I touch such a delicate subject without being hurtful? Was that even possible? Never mind walking on eggshells; this was like unicycling on the rim of an active volcano. I didn’t feel like my balance was good enough.

“You’re not going to hurt me.” If I’d ever sounded entirely convinced of anything in my life, it was now. “I know you won’t. You don’t even want to bite me.”

His fingertips tingled up my back, ending at the crook of my neck. He caressed the skin there in slow spirals, and a frisson coursed down my spine.

“Who says I don’t want to?” he breathed. “I do. God, you have no idea how much I want to taste you. But I can’t. I can’t let myself do it. Not for a second. Because I don’t know what will happen if I do. Maybe I’d black out again. Drain you without meaning to. Kill you. You’re not scared, but you should be.”

He’d rolled onto his back as he spoke, ignoring my efforts to keep him against me. His eyes were closed again, and I couldn’t help but think back of the first time I’d been in his bed, when Miss Delilah had compelled me to sleep there. He’d been light years away from me that night. And tonight… maybe he wasn’t that far away anymore, but it was a close thing.

“Is that what this was all about?” I said as I slowly understood. “Scaring me so I won’t love you anymore? Pushing me away again? Well, tough luck. I’m not going to fall out of love with a snap of your fingers. So deal with it.”

I shifted closer to him again, lying against his side, resting my head on his shoulder. He let me and didn’t even try to argue anymore. Once again, however, he was tense, his muscles knotted and hard as a rock under me. I pretended I either didn’t notice or didn’t care, but I did. I noticed, and I cared. It was just more proof of how uncomfortable he could be around me.

If you’d asked me, I’d have said he wouldn’t fall asleep, not when he was so wound up. I’d have been wrong. It took a little while, but I guess the emotional roller coaster he’d subjected himself to in the fantasy-slash-memory finally took its toll on him. When I felt him relax against me, it was different from earlier, when he’d accepted my embrace. This time, his body was yielding to something much more primal: exhaustion.

I tried to tell myself that it was nice he could fall asleep in my arms, but the truth was, he didn’t seem aware of my presence. After a few minutes, he even rolled away from me and onto his stomach.

When he did, I started to shake.

I’d told him I wasn’t scared, and it was true when I said it, but something occurred to me out of the blue. Something that sent my heart to a gallop and threatened to take my breath away.

This was the very same bed Morgan had bought for his girlfriend’s birthday.

The very same bed where she had died.

And as my mind replayed that memory, more realizations burst into my mind like popped balloons. She’d probably never even known what was happening to her. She’d died when she was at her happiest, thinking that she’d spend the rest of eternity with the man she loved, a man who had showered her with thoughtful gifts on her birthday, proving how well he knew her, how much he loved her. Or had she realized something was wrong? Had she pleaded in her last moments, begged Morgan to snap out of it? Had she died cursing him with her last breath, or still in love until the very end?

And more realizations still.

Stephen had told me Morgan had spent twenty years without cultivating relationships other than for business. Twenty years sleeping in this room he had furnished for her, sleeping in the bed where she’d died. Twenty years looking at himself in the mirror in the bathroom and calling himself a monster—other than the one in my suite, it was the only mirror I’d seen in the mansion. Twenty years spending time up in the sun room, tending to the flowers that had been meant for her.

Twenty years since her death, and every moment of it had been spent taking a whip to his own back.

I understood now, like he’d said. I understood that he hadn’t been trying to scare me. No, it went deeper than that. He’d been showing me who he was under the masks and affectations. He’d been showing me that he truly believed what he’d said earlier that night: he didn’t think he deserved to be happy. He thought he deserved to be punished, over and over, for killing the two women he’d loved. He was, deep down, to a level I could barely comprehend, broken.

My plan to show him we could share something real, in retrospect, was laughable. Sleeping with me, in the real world or the dream one, wasn’t going to fix him, or heal him, or make him forgive himself. I didn’t know what I could do to help him—I didn’t even know if there was anything to do. Maybe it was something he had to do for himself. He’d talked of going to Hawaii; maybe that was what he needed to do to mourn properly, to let go of the girl, and I knew he wouldn’t go until I left the mansion.

Inch by inch, I slid to the side of the bed until I could sit up, then stand. I was afraid to wake him up, afraid that he’d believe I was scared after all—afraid that I’d have to explain and reopen his wounds. When I looked back and checked on him, however, he hadn’t moved, and although he was facing away, I was convinced he was still asleep. I picked up the blanket that had fallen to the floor, wrapped it around myself the best I could, and sneaked out of the room.

I was wrong about him being asleep. I wouldn’t know that for a little while, but I was wrong. He was awake, and he let me go. One more way he found of punishing himself.

I hurried back to my room, a little scared that I’d come across Stephen and have to explain myself, but I reached my suite without seeing him. I cleaned up first, hoping a nice shower would help me clear my head from too many conflicting thoughts. I can’t say it worked, and by the time I came out, wrapped in a robe, I had almost talked myself out of leaving.

My main issue was that I didn’t want Morgan to think he’d won. Wait, that sounds really childish when I say it that way. Let me correct that. I didn’t want him to think he’d succeeded in frightening me into leaving. I’ve said it already, but it bears repeating: I wasn’t afraid of him. I’d have done just about anything to prove it to him. And I’d have done a lot more to prove to him that I loved him.

And leaving, I tried to remind myself, was ultimately a proof of my love. By getting out of the mansion, I freed him to leave as well, with the hope that he’d let himself mourn.

A little voice asked why I thought he’d do it now when he hadn’t allowed himself to get over those two women’s deaths in two decades. The answer was that I didn’t know for sure, but I was beginning to understand the point of Irene’s game. She hadn’t been exactly subtle when she’d thrown me in his arms and told him to ‘get over it’ or even when she’d laid out his history with Melody in the open and basically dared him to set the record straight. I didn’t like her methods or being used as a pawn, but at least now I did get that she’d been playing therapist.

A really screwed up therapist, but it’s the intent that counts, isn’t it?

She’d made him take care of someone after he’d isolated himself for years. She’d made him open up after he’d been keeping everything bottled up. She’d done what she could, along with Miss Delilah, and I had helped, without realizing it. And now they’d set me free, so presumably they believed I’d done all I could for Morgan.

And that was a check mark in the ‘don’t leave’ column, because at this point I hardly wanted to do what the two of them expected of me.

Although Miss Delilah had given me a way not to leave if I didn’t want to by forbidding me from telling Morgan I was free…

And I was thinking in circles. That was not particularly helpful.

I lay down on the bed, still in my robe, and closed my eyes. I’d meant to clear my head for a moment, but I ended up falling asleep. Strangely enough, that turned out to be helpful. When I woke up at dawn, I didn’t allow myself to think. I just acted.

My feelings for Morgan hadn’t changed. Me leaving like this had nothing to do with what I felt for him. It had to do with what he didn’t feel for me, what, maybe, he wasn’t able to feel for anyone anymore. What he wouldn’t be able to feel until he faced his past for himself.

So, I dressed up in the warmest clothes I had. I packed up the rest of my things, including as many shoes as I could fit inside my suitcase. I ended up leaving most of them behind, as well as the two gowns I’d worn to Morgan’s parties. I gave a last look at the room, tried my very best not to let my mind drift toward Morgan, and I stepped out of my suite.

It was so early that it never crossed my mind that I might run into Stephen.

Of course, I did.

I don’t know if he heard me as I was walking past the kitchen or if it was a random happenstance, but the door opened, and there he was. I was startled enough that I paused, and I could see his gaze running over me, stopping on my suitcase. When his eyebrows twitched, for just a second, toward a frown, I knew that he’d guessed exactly what I was doing. He didn’t ask when I’d been released from the compulsion, or how. He also didn’t ask why I was leaving.

“Do you need a coat, Miss Angelina?” he asked instead in a perfectly emotionless voice. “It’s rather cold outside.”

I did my best to hide a wince. He didn’t sound like the man I’d started to consider my friend anymore. He sounded like the butler devoted to Morgan I’d met my first night in the mansion.

“No, I’ll… I’ll be fine.”

A coat would have been great, but I wanted to leave as soon as possible and avoid the chance of Morgan waking up. And also avoid having enough time to rethink my decision.

Stephen nodded once and said, “Do you need a cab? Or I can drive you wherever you’re going.”

Another offer I’d have liked to accept, but I couldn’t, not when I was scared Stephen would drop his calm demeanor and ask me point blank why I was running away.

“It’s not necessary,” I said. “But thank you. And goodbye.”

He didn’t reply. I started to walk away, and I could have sworn I could feel his eyes on me. Before I reached the end of the hallway, I had to turn back and ask, “Will you please tell him goodbye from me?”

I hadn’t meant to say it, but I couldn’t stop myself. Maybe I should have written a note for Morgan after all. Not even an explanation, just a goodbye. Something. Anything.

“So, he doesn’t know you’re leaving,” Stephen said, and now his voice was bursting with disapproval. “You were complaining about him leaving before the conversation is over. How is this any better?”

Insert knife. Twist.

“You don’t understand,” I heard myself say. I sounded like I was pleading, like I needed Stephen to get it when, in fact, the one person who mattered was Morgan. “It’s better this way. Easier for both of us.”

Easier…

Only when the word passed my lips did I realize what I was saying, and I was absolutely horrified.

How upset had I been when Morgan admitted to taking the easy way into fantasy-land? How many times had I thrown that word back in his face? And here I was, doing the same thing he’d done to me, taking a step back because I didn’t know what else to do, didn’t know how to help him. Like Stephen had pointed out, I was pulling away from the conversation without caring what Morgan still had to say.

Could I do that?

Well, yes, I certainly could. I was packed and ready to go, so it wasn’t a matter of being able to.

Could I do that and live with myself? Or was I going to regret it as soon as I stepped into the street?

Maybe… maybe I owed Morgan more than that. More than a shameful, wordless sneaking away the morning after. Maybe I owed him a goodbye. Maybe even an explanation. But if I talked to him, would I be able to leave? Would he let me leave? Would I even still want to?

Maybe I could give him a call later. Or write him a letter, a real one, put everything I felt and thought on paper, all the things I wasn’t sure I’d be able to say aloud. It was always easier for me to write things down, so I could go back, pick the best words, add in things or delete other parts. I had a tendency to ramble at times—I’m sure you’ve noticed by now—but on paper I always managed to say what it was that I meant to say, even when I wasn’t sure what that could possibly be when I first put pen to paper. When I talked to Morgan, on the other hand, I always seemed to get derailed before I could get to the important part.

I stood there, in the hallway, watching Stephen without really seeing him, biting my lips as I tried to figure out whether I’d made the right decision or whether I was acting too fast.

In the end, the question was whether I was going to take the coward’s way out or not.

I’d been scared quite a few times since coming to the mansion. But I’d never been scared of Morgan. And I’d never thought of myself as a coward.