Tabula Rasa(47)

In some ways, I was grateful things had moved forward with Shannon before I was in possession of my memories. After, I’m not sure I would have had the courage for it.

I got up and slipped out of the room. Down the hall, the white cat lay just outside Shannon’s door. She hissed at me as I got close. I couldn’t bring myself to open the door. I was afraid of how he might react to me barging into his private space.

If I didn’t want him, would that change anything? Would he just do the same as my professor had and f*ck me for being that kind of girl in the first place?

But hypotheticals hardly mattered. The fact was that I did want him. I wanted him so much it made my teeth hurt. I’d never wanted another human being the way I’d wanted Shannon. And now that I had my history back, I could say that with some authority.

I thought back to our last time together earlier in the night. I tried to determine if his body inside of mine had created any lasting trauma... in light of my new memories. But I couldn’t find any. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to go in there. Shannon hadn’t invited me to start sleeping in his bed like his girlfriend or anything. Whatever thing he felt for me, it was something new to him, and visiting him with my problems would likely only push him further away. After all, feelings were only really desirable if they were good, and Shannon was still so new at any feelings at all. Maybe he would determine human entanglements were far too much trouble—that I was too much trouble—and just shut the whole thing down.

Finally, the white cat became annoyed with my pacing back and forth in indecision to the point that she was ready to do something about it. She stood up and let out that long, insane Emergency Broadcast Meow—the one that could probably wake the dead with its length, volume, and insistence.

Shannon stomped over to the door and ripped it open. “What!?”

I jumped, and the cat fled.

His tone softened. “Oh. What is it, Elodie?”

I shook my head and turned to go back to my room. “Nothing. It’s... it’s nothing.” What the hell was I going to say to him? I didn’t know even now the full extent of what he wanted from me. But I was pretty sure what he wanted wasn’t to have to become my therapist. He wouldn’t know what to do... how to erase this, fix this, make it all go away. Assuming he wanted to.

As far as I was concerned, losing my memory was perhaps the best thing that had ever happened to me, and even the ugliness of the theme park months with Trevor didn’t erase the soundness of that basic principle.

Shannon caught my hand and pulled me back. “What is it?”

Could there really be concern in his eyes? Concern for my welfare? Or did I just want it to be there? Was it a fake emotion he’d practiced with the dedication of a theatre major, or was there the kernel of something genuine behind it? Weren’t even actors so good at faking an emotion because they understood how it felt to begin with?

“Nothing,” I said. “Just... I’m going back to sleep.”

But Shannon wasn’t having it. He pulled me into the bedroom with him and nudged the door shut behind us, which set off shrill outrage from the white cat, who by this point had come back only to realize I was being allowed into the one room in the house she was consistently barred from.

“Shut the hell up!” Shannon barked at the closed door.

The cat made one last angry snippy yowl, then shut up.

Without another word, he guided me to the bed and pulled back the blankets. He wrapped his body around mine like a guy who understood how comfort worked.

And in that moment, I believed him.

He didn’t push or pry or ask for anything, either physically or emotionally, from me. He just held me and let me sleep. In his arms, I didn’t worry about Professor Stevens coming back, not even in dreams. Because if he did, I knew Shannon would f*cking kill him without a second thought.





Chapter Eight





I woke the next morning to a tray of coffee and toast in bed. This might seem like the most mundane and bland thing. For a normal man in a normal household, this would be just something moderately nice and considerate that nearly anyone would do for someone they cared about if they were sick or had a bad night. But Shannon wasn’t exactly normal by anybody’s metric. It was huge that he’d broken his no food outside the kitchen rule for me. At least I thought it was. If I hadn’t been sure before that he truly did feel something toward me, I was sure now.

I was beginning to see sociopathy as not a black or white—either you are or you aren’t—kind of deal, but rather a spectrum. On one end were your serial killers who didn’t have a single thing in their life that wasn’t entirely for show—every displayed emotion carefully calculated for the maximum socially appropriate impact. Then on the other extreme were the people so empathetic that they were too sensitive to ever watch even a single bit of news on TV without bursting into tears and being depressed for the rest of the day.

Most of us lived somewhere in the middle of all this. We didn’t cry when random people got swept away in a tsunami on the other end of the world, but we’d be upset if our neighbor’s kid skinned his knee in our backyard. In a way, human nature seemed to have designed us for sociopathic indifference toward distant strangers from other tribes and caring empathy toward our own small group. Toward that end, Shannon was just extremely fine-tuned for survival.