Lovegame(79)

But I am worried about those things so I keep talking to her, keep trying to get her to match my breathing. It only takes ninety seconds or so before she manages to take that one deep breath, but it’s the longest ninety seconds of my life.

“Okay, baby, hold it in while I count to twenty. Can you do that? Can you hold your breath for me?”

She doesn’t nod or give me any other form of acknowledgment, but I’m watching her closely enough that I can see her chest still as she follows my instructions.

“Okay, good,” I tell her after I count out loud to twenty. “Now let it out slowly. That’s it, baby. That’s it. Perfect. Can you do it again for me?” I take a deep breath to demonstrate and hold it for several long seconds as she does the same.

We do this half a dozen times or so until I feel like she’s steady enough to listen to a shade more complicated commands. “Okay, Veronica. Now I want you to cup your hands over your mouth and try to breathe normally. Not slow, not fast. Just normally. Like this.” I demonstrate a few times, then wait to see if she’s going to follow my instructions.

After a few, nerve-wracking seconds, she does.

“That’s it, baby. What you’re doing now is breathing back in some of the carbon dioxide you expel when you exhale. This is going to help balance out your oxygen levels and get that wooziness to go away. It should also help the tightness in your chest and the tingling in your extremities.”

I pause for a few seconds, let her take a few more breaths. “How’s that?” I ask eventually. “Are you starting to feel better?”

She nods, but doesn’t take her cupped hands away from her face. All I can see of her face are her eyes, and they’re huge and bruised looking as they stare back at me.

“I’m sorry,” I tell her once it becomes obvious that she’s calming down. “Whatever it is I did to scare you, I’m so, so sorry. But now that you’re all right, I’m going do what I promised and leave. Okay?” Once again, I hold my hands up and keep them in front of me so she can see them. “I swear, I’m not going to hurt you.”

I don’t turn my back on her as I make my way to the front door, as I’m not quite ready to trust that she won’t grab the nearest thing and fire it at my head. But now that the crisis is over, I’m a little weak in the knees myself. The idea that I somehow did something to traumatize Veronica that badly tears me up inside. And since I can’t think of anything I did in the kitchen tonight to set her off, I’m afraid it was memories of what I did last night that caused everything.

Fuck. I feel like a total and complete bastard. I knew she was fragile going into this, knew that Vargas had had her at his mercy for almost three years. And still I was rough with her. Still I tied her to that goddamn bed and took her places she had no business going. If I could kick my own ass, I would do it in a heartbeat.

“I’m sorry,” I tell her again as I reach for the door handle. “I’m so, so sorry, Veronica.”

I pull open the door, start to leave, but at the last second Veronica’s voice—low and thin and hoarse—cuts through the tense silence and my own self-flagellation. “Where did you get that brooch? The one you handed me in the kitchen?”

I turn to look at her, confused. “It was in your hair. It’s been in your hair all night.”

She makes a wounded sound, like I just reached across the room and slapped her. Then she whispers, barely loud enough for me to hear. “I think I’m losing my mind.”





Chapter 22


Once I finally get the words out, they hang between us like a slowly deflating balloon.

It’s strange. I thought I’d be relieved when I finally told someone—told Ian—my biggest fear. Or at least, I thought I’d feel something. Horrified, maybe. Or humiliated. Devastated, even.

But I don’t. I don’t feel any of those things. I don’t feel anything, and somehow that’s so much worse than any of the emotions I’ve gone through in the last twenty-four hours, and in the months since the movie wrapped. Any of those emotions—or even all of them—have to be better than this terrible numbness that currently has me in its grip.

It’s funny how these things work, though. I’ve spent so much of my life trying to be numb, trying not to feel, that now that it’s finally happened, you’d think I’d be glad to have what I’ve always wanted. Turns out, all I want is the pain back. At least then I know what to expect.

Being weak is humiliating, but being numb is absolutely terrifying.

It’d be so much easier if I still believed that Ian might have been behind everything that had happened. Because if he had brought the brooch here, if he had somehow gotten my phone number and credit card and hired the gardener while I was practically passed out in his room from the best sex of my life, then I could go back to pretending that I’m okay. Or even better, I could go back to a time when I wasn’t letting a role get inside my head, when I wasn’t letting it make me lose time…and maybe even my mind.

But Ian didn’t do this, didn’t do any of it. I know that now. He was astonished by my freak-out—even in the middle of my panic attack I could see that much. And then he helped me—not just with the breathing but by keeping me from running through the streets of L.A. all but nude.