Free Before I Let You In by Jenny Blackhurst

start the night together, we end it together; she could picture her saying it now. But she hadn’t started the night with Karen and Eleanor; she’d started it with her new university friends, people whose loyalty was only to themselves. And now she was alone.
    ‘You look like you could do with a kebab and your bed.’
    For a minute Bea thought it had been herself talking, voicing her inner wishes out loud. But this voice was deeper, male. She forced her eyes open to see Kieran, the guy she’d been talking to when Ruby left, standing in the hallway in front of her. She managed a smile, or at least she thought she had – she no longer felt significantly in control of any part of her body.
    ‘You must be some kind of mind-reader,’ she slurred. Her voice was thick, and speech felt alien to her. ‘Don’t suppose you could add aspirin to that list, could you, Genie of the Lamp?’
    ‘Your wish is my command.’ Kieran grinned and offered her an arm. ‘Come on, I promised Rubes I’d get you home safe. I’ve been looking for you for ages – last time I saw you, you were doing shots of 20/20 in the kitchen with Freud.’
    Bea grimaced as a picture of the boy known as Freud – owing to his passion for discussing psychology every time he wasn’t alone in a room – wielding a bottle of 20/20 and talking about attribution theory passed briefly through her mind.
    ‘Eurgh, no wonder I feel like shit. Karen always stops me mixing my drinks.’
    ‘This Karen, she your sister or something?’ Kieran asked as Bea took his arm and allowed herself to be lifted to her feet. She wobbled a little, but walking made her feel less like Bambi, with Kieran’s steady grip holding her upright.
    ‘Or something,’ she muttered, not wanting to think what Karen would say if she could see her now. ‘Look, can we skip the kebab? I just want to crash out, to be honest.’
    ‘Yeah, no problem.’ Kieran bowed slightly. ‘At your service.’
    Bea woke on the cold bathroom floor with the ghost of a scream still on her lips. She didn’t have to wonder what she’d been shouting. She hadn’t had one of the nightmares for a long time, but whenever she did, she woke up gasping the same two words over and over again. Don’t go … don’t go … don’t go.

16
    Eleanor
    ‘I thought they’d stopped – the nightmares? I thought you were doing okay with sleep and stuff now?’ Eleanor sat down next to her friend and handed her a glass of orange juice and a Pritt Stick. Bea gulped down half the glass in one go, like she’d spent the last week in a desert, and picked up one of the silver foil letters.
    ‘They had. I hadn’t had one since the day you told me about the accident. That was my first dreamless sleep in years. It’s hard to be scared of someone when you know they’ll be in a wheelchair the rest of their life. This wasn’t like before, though – I literally blacked out. I haven’t done that since the very beginning. It was seeing that book, the book I could have practically written myself, sitting on my bathroom shelf.’
    She started spreading the letters on to the banner they were creating; noticing Eleanor’s frown, she picked up the ruler and began measuring the gaps between them. I’m going to have to redo the whole bloody thing , Eleanor thought. That’s all I need .
    ‘I know, that’s weird, right?’ She slipped down on to the mat next to Noah and flipped him on to his tummy, smiling at his immediate attempt to lift his head, kicking his legs as though he was swimming on dry land. ‘I mean, how could you order that and not know? You think Amazon sent it to you by mistake?’
    ‘I checked my account. Well, not straight away; when I woke up, I felt rough as anything, like I could have slept for a week, but I couldn’t bear the thought of closing my eyes again, so I just lay on the sofa staring at the ceiling. I must have dropped off again because I woke at about two a.m. and climbed into bed, but at least I