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Daisy wakes up from dreams about whirring, rabbit-fast heartbeats, the heavy footsteps of prey stumbling just ahead of her, the rich taste of blood at the back of her mouth.
Daisy wakes up taking one last long and desperate gasp for air into the thick black peat that fills her lungs.
Daisy wakes up both unsated and unharmed, Jon sleeping peacefully beside her.
Moving carefully, Daisy twists to face him. The motion brings her naturally into a crouch over his still body--no, don’t think of it that way, he’s not dead--one arm braced against the mattress on the other side of his shoulder. There’s never much space between them at night; Jon is the only person Daisy knows who is almost thirty and still sleeps in a twin size bed. She teased him for it the first time she came over, but she doesn’t really mind. Sometimes it’s good to be close.
Jon’s eyes glisten unseeing in the darkness, pupils so dilated as to fully eclipse his irises. He always sleeps with his eyes open now. Daisy hasn’t brought it up. No real reason to make him worry about it.
She leans down and her hair brushes against his bare arm. Daisy freezes, but long moments pass and Jon doesn’t wake. She doesn’t even know why she wants him to stay asleep, why she doesn’t want him to see her like this. What is like this? She is just the way she always is.
Slowly, painstakingly, she lowers herself until her head rests easily on his skinny chest, one hand curled around his shoulder like she’s holding him down. She’s not. Is she? No, he’s sleeping, she remembers slowly. He’s sleeping, and she’s sleeping next to him because she’s his girlfriend and he said he’s comfortable having her here, and this is normal. They’re being normal right now.
Jon doesn’t have a heartbeat. Daisy has noticed this before, obviously, and she assumes it’s a side effect of whatever the hell happened to him after the Unknowing, but it’s not a bad thing. Sometimes it’s good to rest her head on his chest and listen to the quiet. It’s good to curl up with him and hear nothing, so she doesn’t have to wonder how his heartbeat would change if he was running from her, how quickly it would speed up. It’s good that the panicked breaths she hears in her dreams are never his. Not anymore.
Suddenly, she feels restless again. She lifts herself back up--still gingerly, still trying not to wake Jon, he needs as much sleep as he can get--and nuzzles her face into his neck. His breathing doesn’t change. Almost by accident, her lips brush the scar on his neck. The scar she put there. A little thrill runs through her, guilt and self-hatred and something else that she doesn’t acknowledge.
It’s the worst thing she’s ever done to him. They never talked about it, but Daisy has a horrifying instinct for these things, and she knows as easily as Jon knows…well… everything, really….she knows with as much certainty that Jon has never been more terrified than he was of her that day in the woods. There’s nothing she can do to make up for that, is there? He will never forgive her. She would never ask him to.
If Jon woke up right now and felt her mouth against his neck, her teeth an inch from his throat and still half-asleep and not knowing what’s going on, he’d be terrified. The thought makes Daisy feel something but she doesn’t know what it is.
That scar is always going to be there, whatever else happens. She can never undo that. It’s her mark on him, her hold on him…
Daisy’s flipped through (pored over, searching blindly for a way out) a few of the statements Jon had mentioned were about the Hunt. The true crime club gone wrong. The first Everchase. Even more statements from police officers (Sectioned and otherwise) than she had expected. So many of them are about hunting in a pack, a vicious sense of belonging. Daisy doesn’t know if she should dwell on that or not.
She sighs against Jon’s throat, and feels him shift in his sleep. She freezes, but he doesn’t wake. He’s not going anywhere.
Suddenly tired, Daisy lies back down, head once again resting on his silent chest. He’s here, he’s safe, he’s with her. Daisy sleeps soundly, and doesn’t dream.