Chapter 174: Not Enough
Saturday night after only an hour of sleep. Emily had woken up to a nightmare so real, that for a few minutes after waking, she had struggled to breathe.
She had sat up, coughing, and shaking like a leaf. In the nightmare, she had been held down. Multiple hands pinning her in place while somebody poured water down her throat. At first it had not bothered her, the liquid pouring into her stomach. But then it had gotten to be too much, her stomach filling up. Then the excess liquid had started going up her throat...up, up, up... until it blocked her nose and her mouth. But the person pouring the water just kept on going, drowning Emily.
All the while the hands that held her down did not let up. After the nightmare, Emily had been too shaken to do anything. Even thinking of embroidering had seemed like too much, especially with her shaky hands. She had gotten out of bed feeling more rundown than usual in the morning.
Emily had dismissed her mom’s worried glances. Telling her that she simply had a bit of a headache. Too tired to come up with a more elaborate bending of the truth. But still, even after all that she had gone through, she still had hope. Hope that sleep that night would come a bit easier, and not only would it come easier, it would be more pleasant than the one that she’d had the night before. She turned out to be very wrong. The same dream that had woken her the night before, the one with the water and the multiple hands was back. But this time, it was not just water.
It was cold water. Freezing. The kind that set the nerves alight, even as it robbed them of warmth.
With each drop that glided down her throat, it felt as though Emily was being force fed liquid nitrogen. When her body finally kicked her out of the dream realm, forcing her awake, Emily was both terrified and grateful. Why was it that in all of her dreams she always dreamt that she was either drowning, suffocating, or running out of air somewhere? Why could it never be things that she’d heard other people complain about? Dreams that people said they had on the regular? Things like falling but finding no end in sight? Or nightmares that came because a person had been watching a scary movie right before they went to sleep. Emily was pretty sure that if she ever had one of those, she would wake up laughing instead of terrified. Because with those, she would be able to pinpoint the source. She would know exactly why she was dreaming like she was. Or she would at least be able to pass it off as something that was normal, that everybody experienced once in a while. But with her suffocation fuelled nightmares, there was nothing that she could do. She could not find a single incident in her childhood that could have led to such nightmares. And even as an adult, she had not had anything traumatic happen.
Sure, as a kid, her father had died of cancer. But that was it. He had died of an illness. He had not drowned or been suffocated or anything violent like that. It had simply been disease deciding that it was her father’s time to go. Knowing that in the state that she was in, she would not be able to embroider, without piercing holes into her skin. Emily instead decided to just get out of bed and walk around her room, being as quiet as possible. She ended up by her window, staring outside, placing her hand on the cool glass. She stared out into the night.
Given the number of tall buildings all around. Emily could not really see much of the rest of the city, but still, even with that as a hindrance, she found herself staring in the general direction of where Derek’s penthouse was located. Despite being on her own in her room and being the only person in the apartment who knew that she was still awake. By staring in the general direction of where Derek was, Emily did not feel so alone anymore because she knew for a fact that somewhere out there Derek was also as wide awake as her.
The two of them only ever seemed to get any rest when they were together. Just knowing that he too was not asleep made Emily want to pick up her phone and text him. ’Hey, are you still up?’ She wanted to say, but she shook her head. Dislodging the thought, instead continuing to stand where she was, her hand against the glass. It would be weird for a PA to be texting the CEO such a question, especially in the middle of the night. If their phones were ever hacked by anyone. Those would be difficult messages to explain away. So despite knowing that there was someone out there in the city, who was going through the same thing that she was, Emily endured in silence.