“JADE!” A chorus of voice suddenly calls out to me and I turn to notice a throng of people and the blinding light of flashbulbs to my left. By sheer instinct, I pivot to my right to escape them, only to be greeted by a similar group of about ten to fifteen people yelling my name, phones and cameras in their hands. The mob meet in the middle and crowd around me. Closing in a circle around me, blocking my path and escape, all I can see is a flurry of arms and faces, each one getting blurrier and blurrier.
I close my eyes for a moment, trying to focus on what is happening. Over the pounding in my ears, I can barely make out any words. Only the fuzzy, familiar sound of my own name. I need air. Badly. And my head is starting to throb.
I push forward with my body and arms, but that only seems to strengthen the mass of bodies. They push back against me, still throwing questions and queries at me in waves and waves of sound that I can’t process. Where have they come from? And what did they want?
“Please. Please,” I beg, trying to shield my face with my arms. “I need some air… I’m going to faint. Please.” The sky suddenly grows dark and the sun becomes the size of a pinpoint.
“Get the fuck out of the way!” I hear a voice say.
A voice.
His voice.
I feel my body being lifted, weightless.
And then the voice, his voice speaks again, in a whisper, quiet, just for me to hear.
“Jade, can’t you ever stay out of trouble?”
And then the sun disappears altogether.
***
“What a sweet little neck you have.” His voice grates over my ears, scaring me to my bones, like the aural equivalent of nightmare. “It’s a good thing you’re not wearing any jewellery, I wouldn’t want it to get stained by your blood when my knife slits it.”
My hand immediately goes around my neck. Protecting it.
“Please. Please,” I hear myself beg.
“It won’t hurt a bit… well, maybe just a little. Or it could hurt a lot.”
I feel the cold blade press against the skin behind my ear and his arm pull me harder against him, keeping me still.
“Ready?”
“Noooo! Stop please!!!” My scream pierces my subconscious and jerks me awake.
The reality isn’t any more comforting that the nightmare.
The room is pitch dark, but I know I’m not in my own bed.
Footsteps are coming my way, hard and fast, I give in to instinct and feel for the edge of the blanket and sink down into the mattress, pulling the cover over my head.
The door swings open, throwing light into the room, filtering through the fabric of my blanket shield.
“Ms. Sinclair! Are you okay?”
It is a voice I recognize. But it isn’t the one from the dream. Or the one that has saved me… twice. But I recognize it. Under the blanket, I search my foggy brain for a face to go with the voice, but I can’t find one.
The footsteps come closer and I pull the blanket tighter around me, my heart pounding so hard I am surprised I can even hear the footsteps over them.
A hand lays gently on the blanket.
“Ms. Sinclair? Are you okay? I heard you scream. It’s me, Xavier.”
Xavier? Now even the name sounds familiar.
“I’m Xavier, Jade. We spoke on the phone earlier today.”
It finally dawns. I can’t put a face to the voice, because I’ve never seen it. But at least I know who it belongs to now.
I slowly poke my head out from under the edge of the blanket.
“Xavier?”
An insanely good-looking face peers back at me. So good-looking I think I blush.
“That’s what I’ve been told, ma’am.”
“Don’t call me ma’am. Where am I?”
“I’ll answer all your questions in a minute, just after I make sure you’re okay. That was a pretty scary scream you let out there. I heard you from all the way on the other side of the apartment.”
I feel like crawling back under the covers. I don’t really know what is more embarrassing, screaming so loud that a hot stranger has to come running, or the reason behind it, having a nightmare.
“I’m fine, um, I can’t really remember what it was, maybe it wasn’t even a scream, maybe, er, I was just singing in my sleep? It kinda sounds the same.”
Xavier looks at me like my kindergarten teacher once did when I told her I didn’t know who drew on the turtle, even though I was still holding the pink marker in my hand.
I bite the inside of my cheek, trying hard to hold his gaze, without wavering. He gives up and drops his questions.
I take the chance to ask him again, “Where am I? What happened?”
“You don’t remember anything?”
I close my eyes, but all I can see is the glint from the knife in my nightmare. I flip them open again, fast. “What am I supposed to be remembering?
Xavier squints, focusing his eyes hard on me and I can almost feel him rifling around in the back of my brain. I wonder what kind of a lawyer he is, because if I were a hostile witness, I’d probably crumble on the stand under his questioning.
He finally looks away and I guess he’s content with the fact that I truly do seem to have suffered some sort of short term amnesia. But that doesn’t help me. What the fuck happened and where the hell am I?
“Please,” my voice comes out with a tremble and I suddenly feel more vulnerable than I have since the mugging. “Tell me what’s going on, Xavier.”
He sits down next to me on the bed, and smiles gently, “A crazy fan mob was waiting outside your office; they pushed in around you, and you fainted and nearly hit your head on the ground.”
My hand instinctively comes up to feel for a bump, but there’s nothing.
“He got to you just in time, just as you were falling. He saved you.”
And in the silence, I could hear the unspoken word, “again.” He’d saved me again.
“But… what were they even doing there?” I ask him, not yet ready to ask the question I was really wondering about, “what was he doing there…”
“Ah, Miss Sinclair…”
“Ew. Stop it, Xavier. We’re probably, like, the same age. Jade. Please.”
He smiles and tilts his head. Now he looks like an insanely good-looking puppy dog. “Jade-you’re not as naive as that surely. A heroine looking for her savior? Even wearied New Yorkers can’t resist a story like that.”