I sighed. I’d taken a class once—a women’s studies class. It was all about the way that early romance stories portrayed women as needing a man to survive. One of the books we read was Emma by Jane Austen, and the teacher had gone on and on about how Emma only stopped doing all the nasty things she did after she fell in love with Mr. Knightley. He fixed her. She couldn’t fix herself. My teacher had said that was the height of sexism, women didn’t need men to change them, and this kind of thing sent a disturbing message to young women.
According to my teacher, the way to have a healthy relationship was to fix yourself before you fell in love and to expect your partner to have done the same.
But I wondered. After all, in the book, Mr. Knightley wasn’t precisely perfect. He was jealous of that other guy—the one who was gay in the Clueless movie... (Our teacher had shown us Clueless afterwards, because it was based on Emma.) It didn’t matter. The point was that being with Emma had made Mr. Knightley a better person too.
Oh, hell. What did it matter? It was a book. And the person who taught my women’s studies class was divorced. What did she know, anyway?
I gazed down at Griffin. Did I need him to survive?
And if I did, did that make me pathetic and weak?
And after all the awful things he’d said to me last night, was I being a complete idiot to climb back into bed with him? Sure, we hadn’t done anything but sleep, but there was a promise that came from sleeping in the same bed. And the way our bodies were entwined right now could only mean that we were together.
I sighed again. I loved him. That was all there was to it. Maybe it was stupid. Maybe I couldn’t trust him. Maybe I should be fixing myself. Maybe he should be fixing himself. But. Well. That wasn’t the way things were going.
Griffin stirred against me, pulling me even closer, and I could feel that he was hard.
But it was morning. That happened to guys every morning, right?
He grunted, plunging his hips against my skin, pressing his erection into me.
I giggled softly. What was he dreaming about?
His eyes snapped open, and he pushed me away. He sat up in bed, glancing around the room, wild terror on his face.
“Griffin?” I said.
He turned to me, taking a deep breath. “Fuck.” He flopped back on the bed.
“Are you okay?” I said.
“Bad dream.”
I reached out to touch his shoulder. “You want to talk about it?”
“No,” he said. Abruptly, he pulled me back into his arms again, his grip on me almost suffocating. He buried his face in my neck. “It’s nice that you’re here. I missed waking up with you.”
“I missed you too,” I said. “But I can’t breathe.”
He loosened his grip. “Sorry.” He kissed my forehead. “It’s probably because we were talking about Op Wraith last night. About Jolene French.”
“Who is that?”
“The psychologist I told you about,” he said. “She’s a nasty piece of work. She’d tease out all our fears, but she wouldn’t help us work through them. Instead, she’d manipulate us so that the fears became permanent fixtures in our brains. And she knew how to trigger them. Whenever Op Wraith needed to take an assassin and turn him into a quivering ball of fear, she could snap her fingers, and it would happen.”
I shuddered. “Griffin, do you have any nice stories from your past? That woman gives me the creeps.”
“Yeah, she’s pretty horrible.” He lay back on his pillow, squeezing his eyes shut.
I propped myself up on one elbow. “You sure you don’t want to talk about the dream?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I haven’t had one like that in a while. I used to get them all the time when I was working for Op Wraith.”
I debated whether to let it go or not, and then decided that if I was the only thing that Griffin had to make him better, it was my job to dig. At least a little bit. “Was it about what happened to you when you were in jail?”
His eyes opened. “Doll.”
“Was it?”
“Yes.” His voice cracked. “I get them sometimes, and I wake up, and I’m always...”