“No,” I answered. “Can we talk about something else?”
He shrugged. “If you’d like.”
I did. I wanted to talk about anything other than Nick. But I also couldn’t think of anything to talk about but him.
“Why don’t you tell me what happened the other night. With Chloe and Evan.”
A painful memory. Still so sharp it chafed. “We were in the woods, and I think Evan was actually going to tell me he liked me, but then I flipped out. I had, like, a flashback or something.”
I explained how Evan had wandered off looking for cell reception, and what my mind had turned to in his absence, in the dark, how the pine trees had triggered the memory.
“Scent is a powerful trigger,” Dr. Sedwick said. “Have you ever considered working through the flashbacks in a controlled setting?”
“What do you mean?”
“Determine which scents trigger which memories and use those scents to experience the flashbacks in a place that’s safe, like your home. Once you’ve faced them, they’ll hold less power over you.”
I hadn’t considered that, though I had been doing it on my own the past few days, to an extent. Like with my mother’s bottle.
“I could try that,” I said.
Dr. Sedwick nodded and made another note. “Try it and let me know how it goes. Go slow, though.”
“I will.”
“So let’s get back to Evan. What was his reaction to your incident?”
“Well, he seemed okay with everything after, but now I’m worried I ruined any chance I had with him.”
Dr. Sedwick crossed one leg over the other knee and glanced at me. “If you had to pick between Evan and Nick, who would you pick?”
“I don’t know. I barely know Nick. I mean… I’ve spent more time with Evan, I guess. So it makes sense that I should pick him. But…”
A long, pregnant pause.
“But?” he coaxed.
“Evan’s like… well, if he’s a raindrop, then Nick is the sea.”
“Ahh.” Dr. Sedwick nodded emphatically.
“So… what do I do?”
He set the notebook down on the table next to him and leaned closer, his hands folded together. “Oceans are vast and almost bottomless. You play in the rain, Elizabeth. You drown in the sea.”
After my therapy session was up, I went down to the store below and bought three new bottles of scent: lavender, bergamot, and a fragrance oil called China Rain.
Back at home, in my room, I readied a new glass bottle. I started with a base of China Rain, then added cucumber, for its cool, crisp scent. A few drops of cyclamen. Musk. Vanilla. Mandarin. Pine. And last, the lavender.
Once it was stirred, I pressed my finger over the neck of the bottle and upended it. I rubbed the oil on the underside of my wrist and breathed in.
All the bottles I’d mixed until now could be definitively traced back to a subject or experience. Carnivals. Summer. Christmas. Mom. Nick.
But none of them had ever been mixed for a feeling.
Dr. Sedwick was right—scents were a strong trigger. And I needed something to keep me sane, to remind me of the flame in the darkness.
Hope.
And hope, if it had a scent, would smell like spring, like the sea, like something new and alive. Like Nick.
So I’d taken my favorite spring and water scents, and mixed them with some of Nick’s. Because if I was ever going to figure out what had happened to me, Nick was the path to it.
Nick was my flame in the darkness.
I grabbed a new label, and wrote hope in cursive letters.
Instead of putting the bottle with the others on the shelf, I set it on my bedside table so I could uncork it whenever I wanted.
Whenever I needed.
21
NICK
THE CLOCK ABOVE THE BED SAID IT WAS just after eleven in the morning, but it felt like six, like I’d gotten up too early. My eyes were burning. My head was pounding. And anytime I moved at a normal pace, my stomach seesawed and I had to clamp my mouth shut to stop from puking my guts out.
I hated puking.
Probably a lot of the suffering was due to the hangover, but I was blaming it on Trev’s head slam. Everything was his fault.
After crawling my ass out of bed, I went straight for the bathroom and scrubbed my face with icy-cold water. When I looked up in the mirror, I wasn’t surprised to see a massive black-and-purple bruise on my forehead.
In the kitchen, I found the fridge stocked with essentials. Some fruit. Milk. Bottles of water. Some lunch meat. A package of English muffins. And a bowl of leftovers.
Elizabeth must have come in after I went into town again yesterday.
I gave the apartment a quick glance, wondering if I’d left anything incriminating out in the open.
Didn’t look like it. I hadn’t had much on me to begin with.