Safe Haven Read online

  Rex looked away from my door to frown at her. “After fifteen years, he hasn’t become used to you. What makes you think he’ll ever be comfortable enough to come out of there so that we can meet him properly?”

  “Hmm… That’s a good point.” Then Sophia was marching back up the stairs. “Blake? Are you still right there by the door?”

  I knocked on it to let her know that I was.

  “I want to meet you. It’s been fifteen years. We’ve talked often. You know all about my kids and my grandkids, yet I don’t even know what you look like.”

  She wanted to see me? Now? After so long? My immediate answer was going to be no. It had been that way for so long. For years I hadn’t wanted to see anyone. Eventually Uncle Phin had stopped trying to push me into social situations, then he’d given up on getting me out of the house entirely.

  “They can’t see me,” I told her quietly through the door.

  “Of course not.”

  Well, that was one thing down. “And only for a few minutes. I can’t…” The truth was that I couldn’t handle being social for longer than that, but saying that made me sound like a freak because I knew that wasn’t how most people were. I watched enough movies and TV shows to know that.

  “It’s okay, baby. Let’s just talk without the door between us for once.”

  I didn’t know why it would be so important to her, but I figured that I could give her what she was asking for. I’d known her for fifteen years, in my own way. But she’d never once seen a picture of me or talked to me face to face. Bandit crawled into my lap as I pushed the door open a few inches.

  Sophia came in the rest of the way and quickly shut the door behind her before looking down at me. Her expression went from curious to pity in an instant, but I didn’t mind that. Part of me knew my isolation did make me pitiful. Maybe she was expecting scars or horrible burn marks to cover me. At least they would explain why I refused to be around anyone else. But I had none of that. I was just me.

  “Child, who does your hair?”

  Her question was a surprise and I took one hand off of Bandit to touch my short strands. “Uncle Phin.”

  She tsked and sat down across from me. She was within a few feet of me, but she thankfully made no move to touch me. “I’d like to start doing that for you, if you’d let me. I do all of my kids’ hair and my grandkids’, too. Your Uncle Phin may be good at a lot of things, but giving you a decent haircut is not one of them.”

  I blushed and dropped my gaze.

  “It must be strange for you to have so many people in your house right now.”

  I hadn’t realized that she knew me so well. “It is. They talk a lot and make a lot of noise.”

  Sophia giggled and it made her sound like she was nearly twenty and not in her sixties, like I knew she was. “Most people do, except for you. Were you always this quiet?”

  I shook my head. When I was a child, I’d been scolded for running too much and screaming too loudly while I played. I didn’t do that anymore.

  “If I tell them to go into a different room and close the door behind them, would you like to go downstairs and make yourself some dinner?”

  I looked up at her and my mouth hung open a little bit. “You’d do that for me?”

  Sophia got to her feet and I felt bad about not getting up to help her too, but I wasn’t okay with being touched as much as that would have required. “Of course I would. Blake, honey, I care about you like you’re one of my own kids. You’re even close to the age of my youngest. And I know that the only thing you really love in life is cooking.”

  “I design video games,” I reminded her. I did enjoy that.

  But Sophia shook her head at me, dismissing my words. “That’s what you do to keep your house. What you love is to cook. I know this because I’ve seen those big piles of dishes you leave me when you know I’m coming in the next morning.”

  I blushed deeply.

  “I don’t mind, though. What I want is for you to be happy and comfortable in your own house, beyond these rooms. You had Robert for eight years. I know you sometimes cooked while he was in a nearby room. There’s no reason that these three can’t give you the same privacy to do what you love.”

  I nodded slowly. I would love that. She knew me so well that it shocked me. “Thank you.”

  She took a step toward me but I quickly bunched my knees up against my chest to defend myself from her touch. Sophia stepped back and looked pitifully at me again, like I was a lost child or a puppy that she’d found by the side of the road. “Too soon?” she asked.

  I nodded. Fifteen years was not enough time to let her touch me. “Maybe if I upped my sedatives. They make it easier for me to be around people. I could go to two in the morning and one at night, then maybe this would be easier.” I wanted to try that, because I wanted to be able to be around her. I saw how sad she was when she looked at me and I didn’t want her to have to worry about me like that.

  “Oh, child, are you always on your medication?”

  I quickly nodded. I’d been taking different sedatives ever since I was seven. They were how I managed to cope with even the little bit of the world I experienced.

  Sophia shook her head. “I wish you didn’t need them, but if they’re the reason that you’re able to have any sort of a conversation with me, even through a door, then I suppose I should be thankful for them. You stay here. I’ll get those men to go into a different room, and I’ll leave, too.”

  I didn’t want her to go, though. “You can stay. If you want to, I mean. Um…” Being near her was getting to be more exhausting by the second as my nerves hummed with my panic and made me feel like being sick again. “Can I make you dinner?”

  Sophia just smiled at me. “I’d like that very much. Thank you, Blake. Now, you sit tight right here and come down once you see them all gone.”

  I nodded, and she left the hallway we’d been talking in. As soon as she shut the door behind herself, I pulled out my phone again and watched her go down to talk to Malcolm, CJ and Rex. They were watching a movie in the lounge, which, if the lounge had had a door, I would have been fine with. But I needed them to go away for a little while, and I needed a door between myself and them.

  Once they had gone into their bedroom and Sophia had given one of the cameras the thumbs-up signal, I headed downstairs. Now she was in the lounge watching TV. It was some fashion show with a runway model giving dating advice or something. Sophia looked pretty interested in it as I tiptoed into the kitchen and started pulling out what I’d need. The water had to boil first because I wanted to make a wild rice pilaf and, while that was going, I pulled out the salmon, some butter and the asparagus. I grabbed the honey, the bottle of soy sauce and some fresh ginger, which was by far one of my favorite ingredients to work with, then put everything out on the island in front of me.

  Sophia had been right. I loved cooking. I loved the concentration it took and how I could be all alone as I focused on something that I knew would turn out exactly as I expected, as long as I remained careful. When I was cooking, there were no bugs or crappy players to deal with who thought they deserved the world on a platter just because an update had interrupted their dungeon raid.

  Once the rice was halfway done, I started to sauté the salmon fillets. I didn’t know if the guys would be interested in having dinner too, but I had divided the fillets into five portions, just in case. I spooned the honey soy ginger sauce over the fillets while they cooked and, when they were nearly completed, I put the thin asparagus spears into a new, hot pan. They wouldn’t take very long at all. I pulled out five plates and built them up with the rice on the bottom, the salmon on top of that, then the asparagus, finished with a bit more of the sauce around the sides.

  When I was finished, I turned off the stove and took my plate upstairs. I didn’t tell anyone that I’d finished in the kitchen, but I didn’t really think that I needed to. Sophia would figure out that me going upstairs and closing the door again would mean that
I was done being downstairs. But I did want to thank her, so before I started eating, I pressed the intercom so that I could talk to her. “Thank you, Sophia.”

  “Oh, child, you’re quite welcome,” she called back to me. I saw her go to the guys’ bedroom and talk to them for a moment, and even if I couldn’t hear what she was saying to them, since she was being too quiet, I saw Malcolm smile over to the camera. Then the four of them sat down in the dining room and ate the meal I’d prepared for them.

  “Thank you for dinner,” CJ said as he looked at the camera in that room.

  I was just going to press the button once, but I decided to say something to him. “You’re welcome.”

  That was apparently it. They talked while they ate—but not about me. And, for once, I wished that I was down there with them, having a normal evening with other people. Robert had only rarely eaten with me in the dining room, and I’d never felt like cooking for him. Sophia didn’t usually work until that time, and I only really cooked for dinner. While I was working, I enjoyed easy meals like my sandwiches. But in the evenings, I liked to have a real meal, and a big part of me missed sitting down with family around while we all ate together. That had been something my parents had insisted on, and I hadn’t seen anyone sharing a meal in my house since their deaths, until now.

  Chapter Three

  I had therapy the next morning, which was all done through a video chat. I had to talk to my therapist, Farra. She wouldn’t let me go quiet. Sometimes I hated her for that, but after our fifty minutes was up, she let me return to being quiet, so I talked to her as much as I could and managed to get through it to the best of my ability.

  After that, I had a conference with everyone on my team for Underworlds. They, fortunately, were okay using instant messenger with me. None of them had ever met me, and we only spoke on the phone every once in a while, but they didn’t push me to change that. I figured eccentric boss with social issues was a decent cover for them. Most of them weren’t good with people, either, so I thought that they probably understood me too. And if they didn’t, they never said anything about my weirdness to me directly.

  By the end of that meeting, it had been decided that we’d do another realm attached to Underworlds that players accessed by answering a riddle from Saleen, which would give them special equipment that would put them into her home world. Or they could skip that riddle and just go in with the equipment they had on. After looking at the sketches one of the designers had come up with, I wanted to go play Underworlds again and wear that armor for myself. It looked amazing, even in a quick sketch, with small scales all over it. I was exceptionally pleased with my team. A quick email sent off to the head of the company that I was partnered with ended my work day, unless something catastrophic happened.

  With nothing else to do, I picked up Bandit and headed over to my favorite reading chair. I loved epic fantasies, the kind that took thirteen books to get to the conclusion of and without a real love story in them, only an ongoing quest to save the world from some dark menace that was constantly lurking behind every corner in the realm.

  Bandit made herself comfortable on my lap as I started reading. I loved my books, but with three people talking to each other downstairs, it quickly distracted me. Robert had always been quiet, and Sophia was generally too busy cleaning my house to have long conversations with me. The most I’d ever talked to her had been yesterday. And because the intercoms were on, I could hear everything they were saying.

  When they finally went quiet, I became curious enough to pull out my phone and see what they were doing. CJ was going from room to room—checking on things, it looked like—but I found Rex and Malcolm by the pool, with Rex on Malcolm’s lap and Malcolm’s hands beneath the back pockets of Rex’s jeans as they kissed. I watched them for a lot longer than I should have, and I felt a bit disgusted with myself for getting hard while watching. I pulled my attention away a few minutes later, and I went back to watching CJ walk around the house.

  He was methodical and completely at ease, as far as I could tell. I wondered about a relationship where the three of them shared a room—that meant a bed also—and two of them could be kissing while the third didn’t seem to care. Or maybe he didn’t know. I quickly dismissed that. It made sense to me. Maybe it was that they took turns. Maybe this was Rex’s date day with Malcolm, then CJ would get Rex another day—or he’d get Malcolm. That didn’t really work out in my head, either, since the math didn’t add up.

  I decided to leave it at the idea that their relationship was just too confusing for me to wrap my brain around, especially when CJ came into the pool room too and started kissing both of them. But seeing men kissing had gotten me hard, and I couldn’t ignore that. I didn’t touch myself often, but I figured I would right then. And I could have gone to porn, but with the three of them kissing on my phone, it was so tempting just to watch them. They weren’t doing anything except touching and kissing each other, and they were all still fully dressed, so I wasn’t sure why it turned me on to watch them, but I couldn’t ignore my body’s response, either.

  I put my book down and kicked Bandit off my lap as I lay back and watched while imagining being in the same room. I thought about being able to watch, about getting to stroke myself as I was doing now while they could see me. I never thought about anyone’s hands on me or about anyone screwing me. I didn’t want to be part of it. I just wanted to be able to be there, too, and have it not feel weird to be in the same room as another person, whether I’d been doing something sexual or not.

  I came with a whimper and cleaned myself off. By the time I was done, they were watching a movie in the lounge. That was good, because now I wanted to go for a swim. I changed into my trunks. I’d taken an extra sedative that morning, and I figured I had it to blame for the calmness I currently felt flowing through me. I wasn’t panicked by the thought of going swimming when I knew they were all in the house. I could lock the pool door behind me and no one would be able to bother me. It would be just fine.

  Part of my brain knew that it was just the sedative talking and making me feel calmly about a situation that would have normally had me rushing right back to my rooms where I could hide and be safe. But if the sedatives made me more normal, like I was trying to be, then was it such a bad thing to take more than my usual dose so that I could go for a swim? With Robert, I’d only had to worry about one person, and he had been fine staying in one room for a few hours when I’d asked him to so that I could have my privacy. That wasn’t the case now, and I knew I’d have to get used to being around other people more. The only way in hell that was going to happen was if I upped my dosage on my sedatives during the day. That was the one way I’d be able to handle even having them in the house, much less me being around them. I’d done the same to get used to Robert, and the other bodyguards before him, too. Sophia didn’t scare me, but she did make me nervous sometimes. I hadn’t increased my dosage to get used to her, though.

  I grabbed a towel and started heading down there with Bandit trailing closely behind me. She wasn’t allowed in the pool room, so she screamed at me through the door as I closed it. All of the walls of the room were solid but the whole wall that faced the backyard was glass, so I could see the leaves falling on the acre that stretched behind my house as I sank up to my neck in the pool.

  This was okay, I realized, even though I knew I was only calm because of the double dose of the very potent sedatives I had streaming through my system. Swimming was fun and relaxing for me. I floated for a while, and I dove, too. I did headstands, which I hadn’t done in years since they seemed so childish. I didn’t have the desire to push myself as I normally did when I went swimming, which I figured was also because of the sedatives. Everything was just fine, though. I was mellow and calm. I felt like I could relax. I wondered if this was how most people felt all the time, like there was nothing for me to be worried about because I was fine and everything was okay. I enjoyed feeling like this. If this lack of concern for the world a
round me was normal, then I could get used to it.

  I drifted for a long time, and after a while I let myself sink to the bottom where I looked up at the light coming through the surface of the water. It was dazzling, all that sunlight. All those bright lights and bits of color were so close I could touch them, if I wasn’t six feet down and laying on the bottom of the pool.

  That was a curious thing, too. I normally didn’t like being so still in the water. It made me uncomfortable to feel the water pressing in all around me and me not working against it. I liked fighting back. I felt stronger when I swam. But, with the sedatives, I was fine just to lie there and stare up at the surface of the water. I should need to breathe, I realized at some point, but that didn’t seem like such a big deal at the moment. Being perfectly still was much more important. Being still and watching the lights. They were so very pretty.

  There was a splash beside me then someone’s hand clamped down on my upper arm. I was struggling before Malcolm had managed to pull me out of the water. He was on top of me a second later and pinning me to the side of the pool as I fought against him. I tried punching him, but he was too strong as he held me down. Then CJ and Rex were holding my arms against the concrete, too, and all I could do was scream as the sedatives gave way to my panic and fear as I cried out and sobbed.

  There was talking, but over the noise of my fear I couldn’t understand any of it. They let me go a few seconds after it had all begun, and, as soon they released me, I took off running and didn’t stop until I was back upstairs and in my bedroom with every door between myself and the guys locked up tight. I sobbed into my pillows in between puking and I vowed never, ever to leave my rooms again.