V awoke with a start and sat straight up in bed. She braced herself, quickly, for the panicked where-the-hell-am-I feeling that she never got used to, no matter how many times it happened. She didn't move, but her eyes scanned the room. Hastily drawn blinds. Still dark outside, but light from a street lamp sneaking in. On the floor, boots. She recognized her own, but the other pair were a different style. Cowboy boots? Her brow scrunched monetarily while the evening before came back to her. But the time she looked over at the man sleeping beside her, she remembered how she'd gotten where she was.
Her eyes grazing over his face in the half-light, she smirked. She wasn't getting any younger, but this was one was old enough to be her father. Hard-weathered skin, graying hair, a cruelly scarred lip. He actually looked a little bit like Tig. The thought would have amused her if her stomach wasn't already churning.
It was never quite the same dream. In the first weeks after her kidnapping, V dreamed things much more clearly, much more like they'd really happened. As time passed, though, the realism faded and all she was left with were cloudy impressions. The sneers on the mens' faces. The knife held to her throat. The gun barrel in her mouth. Then, the focus of the dreams had slowly changed. For months, it seemed, she had dreamed only about strong hands reaching towards her, about being on the floor of her apartment, curled into a ball, and being picked up. She'd thought, at first, that the hands were Jax's, but then felt something in them that she knew wasn't him. One night, she'd been sure the hands belonged to Chibs. She knew now, though, that she was dreaming it more or less the way it had really happened. She still never saw Happy's face, but she knew the arms around her were his. She felt him lift her, felt her face against his leather. For a moment, she felt safe.
The first time she'd had the dream, V had woken up next to Jax and felt only a bit guilty. That had been before her line of nameless cowboys. Soon, though the parts of the dream before Happy's hands disappeared altogether, and she was left only with him. Him, in all the broken glass and broken furniture, on the floor of her apartment. Him all around her, always silent, his hands always on her. Then him inside her, over and over again. The safe feeling turning to burning, to a need as strong as any she'd ever felt.
Then, inevitably, she was awake. Left wanting, but also left disgusted with herself, with the little girl in her who couldn't stop wanting this man who had saved her. When she awoke, she nearly always thought of Ben, who had, she heard later, picked her up off the parking garage floor where Leo and his men had left her to bleed out and cradled her against him as the ambulance siren blared in the distance. Beholden, she scolded herself. This isn't desire. You owe him.
As always, V wanted desperately to sink back into the dream. The dream, though it never culminated, was a hell of a lot more satisfying than this cowboy had been. V. turned her eyes down to him again. She wasn't sure exactly when she'd started cheating on Jax. It may have been a year after her kidnapping, maybe a bit less. The first time he'd left her to go on a run, she'd nearly driven herself crazy by the second night, pacing the floor of her apartment, unable to sleep alone. She'd quickly decided that wouldn't be happening again. She was careful now, though, always leaving Charming, and always picking people who had no connection to the Club. She was doing Jax the favor of being sneaky.
Sighing, V slipped out of the bed and began to dress. There was no way she would go back to sleep now, and she may as well be home early enough to dispel the suspicions she knew Gemma had about where she slept when Jax was out of town. She held her breath until the door clicked behind her, then lit a cigarette as she scanned the parking lot for the Charger.