Dream Girl Read online

  Dream Girl

  Celia Crown

  Copyright © 2019 by Celia Crown

  All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and events are from the author's imagination or folklore, legends, and general myths.

  The book or any portion of the book may not be reproduced or used under any circumstances, except with the written permission from the author. Public names, movies, televisions, and locales, or any references are used for atmospheric purposes. Any similarities and resemblances to alive or dead people, events, brands, and locales are all complete coincidences.

  Business inquiries: [email protected]

  Cover Editor: Designrans

  Editor: Syeda Erum Fatima Naqvi

  Contents

  Dream Girl

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Epilogue

  Author’s other works!

  Follow the Author

  Dream Girl

  by Celia Crown

  “I had a dream, a dream not of Prince Charming but a broken soldier who needs me.”

  Our story began a while ago.

  Our love grows stronger every day; the relationship between nighttime and Milo have significantly improved, but the demons in him stay.

  I try, and I try to be there for him the best I can without pushing him too far, but there is a part of him that doesn’t want to be saved.

  I love him.

  I love him so much that it hurts me to know he still doesn’t trust me to be in that part of his life.

  Only he can conquer those demons, and I can only wait and wait.

  “I had a dream. A dream not of haunting nightmares but a tomorrow with my little dream girl.”

  Chapter One

  Amelia

  “I ate a plate of vegetables.”

  My boyfriend steps into the apartment, and that’s the first thing I say.

  He takes off his shoes with one burly arm balancing himself on the wall. He glances up briefly to look at my appearance before meeting my eyes.

  I shoot him a grin, teeth gleaming in the hallway light while he finds his balance again. Milo is a tall man, obnoxiously tall in some people’s eyes since he has to bend his head down to go through the door.

  His shoulders are about as wide as the door too, and I had jokingly asked him to be a door substitute if our door ever breaks. He gripped the top of my head; squeezed my skull as his answer, and I took it as ‘no’ indefinitely.

  I have faith in my persuasion skills to change his mind.

  “Did you really, though?” The sarcasm is heavy on his tongue when he leans down to kiss me.

  I huff at his tone. The least he can do is congratulate me because I have never been a fan of vegetables. There is that taste that I can’t get over every time I bite into a cucumber, but that wasn’t the worst experience.

  I bit into a bitter melon, and I thought I had glazed my tongue with poison.

  That day was the day I learned to do my research before I go grocery shopping,

  “Yes.” I nod vigorously. I want Milo to know that I’m telling the truth.

  “Over how long?” he murmurs softly against my lips.

  “A week, and I juiced it.”

  I made a goal for one week that I would consume the recommended amount of vegetables in one day, but that was asking for trouble, so I juiced it with a ton of fruits to cover up the bitter taste.

  “Of course you did,” he deadpans, eyes unimpressed and lips twitching at the corner.

  I never hold back my smile in his presence as I beam brightly at him. I take a good look at him. He had been gone the whole day to do his thing with physical therapy for his injuries.

  The blend between brown and black in his hair darkens under the florescent yellow light as his hot fingers curl into the drip of my hip to guide me into the living room. His scent is mingled with a trace of smoke and a hint of the environment outside this apartment.

  “It’s gross.” I can’t tell if I’m talking about the juiced vegetables or the smoke on his shirt.

  It’s not a smell that I’m accustomed to, but I noticed that he comes home a lot with that scent that sometimes my mind mixes that with his natural smell. Nonetheless, gunpowder smells too unique.

  “I’m proud of you.” He presses a kiss to the side of my head.

  I grin. A burst of happiness floods my heart with erratic heartbeats. I love it when Milo praises me, and I’m not ashamed to say that I’m desperate for his approval most of the time. I try to tone it down, but when he looks at me like I’m his whole world, I never want to let him down.

  “I was going to make dinner, but I thought I should wait until you get home.”

  He cocks an eyebrow at me, waiting for me to clarify what I mean. I can make dinner before he comes home, but it wouldn’t be as fun making memories of our dinner together. I like to include him in everything I do, and he doesn’t seem to mind it at all.

  “I don’t know how to make a vinaigrette,” I admit with a blush at the memory of those failed experiences where I try to combine the oil and the vinegar together.

  “You don’t eat salads,” he points out, stopping in front of the kitchen counter where I have all the ingredients out and a cookbook propped up against the large glass container for flour.

  I tut at him, waving my finger side to side with a smirk. My eyes gleam with the brightness of a mischievous cat; I am eyeing the impassive façade of the man I love.

  “You underestimate my research abilities.”

  He scans the cookbook that’s opened to a page for Snow Chicken. It’s a new recipe that someone created where it’s practically cheese on top of cheese. I can never turn down the cheese, and there is no such thing as too much cheese.

  His large hand swipes the page away along with my hope as I whine in the back of my throat. I know better than to argue with him over dinner when I know I can’t win against his logical side.

  He’s an old man so I’ll give him leniency about young people having better digestive systems than his. I doubt anyone can beat him in anything. I swear this man never even gets a cold for as long as I have known him, and not a sniff can be heard too, and I had to wonder if he was truly human in the first year of our relationship.

  “You can’t preen when you only clicked on the first thing on the search engine,” he remarks drearily.

  I crinkle my nose, “I had to do a lot of brainstorming.”

  “Nonsense,” he says.

  I blow on the piece of hair falling to my face and push it behind my ear, “Go shower before you help me, you stinky man.”

  He remains silent, turning to me with unreadable brown eyes and fisting the back of my head to press my face into his chest. My lungs quickly fill up with the smokiness and his own smell; the itchiness in my eyes burns with the thick scent and I whine at his devious behavior.

  I wiggle my face out of his chest and gasp heavily, face flushed with heat, and I greedily welcome the freshness of oxygen entering my lungs to expel that gross smoke scent.

  “Stinky,” I repeat with a twitch from my nose.

  He pinches my cheek before his long legs take him into the hall where the bathroom is located. I watch as his broad back gets stretched when he pulls his shirt over his head, showing me his tattoos across his back.

  The ink travels up to his shoulders and down his arms, around his waist and over the curve of his neck. His whole torso is covered in ink, and it’s impossible to tell where it begins and where the story ends.

  He hasn’t told me
why he decided to surround the Navy SEAL tattoo on his arm, but he must have a reason to divert everyone’s attention on other tattoos to hide what used to be his pride.

  I shake my head and decide that wondering would not get me anywhere, and if Milo wants to tell me what the stories on his body mean, then he will. I have no reason to push him into reliving memories that he clearly wants to keep to himself.

  Rolling up the sleeves of my long sleeve shirt, I take the knife with room temperature butter on slices of thick bread after the oven had done preheating. I finish preparing by the time he comes out of the shower, and only the vinaigrette needs to be done.

  His hair is wet, darkening the collar of his shirt as he takes over the kitchen counter.

  “Go sit and wait until I say you can come back.” He’s demanding and rude when he ushers me away from the bread that I have perfectly lined up on the baking tray.

  I pout at him, making sure he sees the dismay on my face before he stares at me with unchallenged dominance. My confidence withers away like a flower in harsh winter weather. My heart pounds when he shuts the cookbook and looks at the Snow Chicken that I had made when he was in the shower.

  I wanted cheesy chicken, and sexy Navy SEAL is not going to stop me from having that cheese pull that is trending right now.

  I plop down on the couch, flipping through the channels as I feel his stare at the back of my head. I strongly advise myself to not look back, and I’m proud that I’m able to listen to the voice in my head while his gaze slowly diminishes in heat.

  It’s hard not to look at Milo. He’s a fine specimen, a man of assertive control when he speaks and a lover of protective instincts when we’re together.

  I’m lucky to have him. I never thought that I would find someone as caring as him even if he’s a bit strict about what I do and a worrywart of my safety. I don’t blame him. I have heard of military soldiers coming home with a part of them still lingering in the warzone, and many of them have reportedly done something bad due to their post-traumatic stress disorder.

  I can’t even begin to imagine men like Milo who have been subjected to more haunting operations than the average rate of danger.

  And I don’t want to imagine. It would be disrespectful to Milo to think of warzone scenarios and being able to subjectively plan out a strategy and pretending that what they have gone through wasn’t that bad.

  Everyone goes through tough times and some more than others, and Milo happens to be on the unfortunate end when he came back.

  A whiff of garlic bread fills my nose, and I turn around on the couch to peek into the kitchen. Milo stands with a cheese grater and a block of cheese in his hand. He says that if I’m going to have cheese, then it better be the good ones.

  What a foodie.

  My brows furrow in confusion. Milo isn’t moving as a drop of water in his hair rolls down into his shirt, wetting the already drenched spot around his collar.

  I stand at the end of the table, calling his name and getting no response. I keep my hands at the edge although I am twitching to touch him and break him out of his trance.

  I never like seeing him lose himself in his thoughts. It always frightens me the way his eyes wipe away the warmth that he looks at me with, but the cold and hard gaze becomes unnervingly unsettling as I call for him again.

  His eyes are cast down at the cheese grater where his thumb is pressing on the sharp teeth of the backside.

  My heart lurches up to my throat, fear etching at the desperation in my voice as I try again.

  “Milo?”

  The rawness in them creates a barrier between us. His eyes convey a sense of threat and a brilliance of intellect as he watches me with depraved emotions.

  I’m the enemy in his eyes.

  As quick as it came, it’s gone the next second.

  “Didn’t I tell you to stay over there?” he asks.

  I open my mouth, voice struggling to speak because of the fear in my heart while I decide that the best, for now, is to ask him later. Milo doesn’t seem to know that he had tapped into the years of military training just then, but I have a feeling that he knows.

  He’s aware of his body and his psychology better than anyone, but he’s acting like he didn’t just look at me as if I was at the end of his gun barrel.

  It’s times like this that reminds me that Milo hasn’t always been caring, warm, and affectionate.

  I swallow my nerves and quickly replace the anxiousness with a vibrant smile. His posture relaxes when he sees my smile, and I’m glad that I can help him relax.

  He takes his thumb away from the sharp teeth of the cheese grater, brown eyes looking down at the red indent on his skin while staring silently at the gleaming sharpness of the grater.

  “What were you doing?” I ask, closing the distance between us.

  He puts down the grater and puts the block of cheese back into the packaging. Milo cocks his head down on me, searching my face for something as the indescribable blankness on his face remains.

  I wanted to ask what he was thinking earlier, but I couldn’t find the courage to do so. He stands by his conviction that he doesn’t want to taint me with what he had done in his past, and that he would rather have this emotional barrier between us than have me see him as a monster.

  From early on, he had warned me that he doesn’t know if he can ever let me into that part of his life and I was alright with it. I still am, but I want to help him. I can’t do that when he is adamant about the door to that chapter of his life remains a solid steel-reinforced gate.

  “There was cheese stuck there,” is what he says.

  I take that answer over silence. The oven beeps, signaling the finished product of the garlic bread before I turn to take it out.

  His arm shoots out, tugging me back to his chest while burying his face into my hair. The heaviness in his muscled arm puts uncomfortable pressure on my stomach, and its rising ache travels up to my gut as I grimace at the lack of space.

  The heat of his chest burns through the thick material of my long sleeve shirt, and the hotness is unbearable as I hold my breath. The wait for him to speak is long, longer than I had expected for whatever he wanted to do.

  “I love you,” he says with a touch of vile sneer coating his love confession. “You know that, right?”

  I do. I know he loves me. He tells me that every day and every night as if he is afraid that if he doesn’t say it, I’ll forget and leave his life. I don’t understand where this abandonment issue comes from, but I know that the therapist, that is mandatory attendance by the court’s order, had diagnosed him with abandonment issues.

  I’m not sure if he’s supposed to share those things with me since the doctor and patient confidentiality exists for a reason, but he doesn’t tell me things that he talks about in therapy.

  “I love you too,” I whisper back, tilting my head up.

  His eyes are back to their usual impassive, cold, and uncaring façade. He’s searching for a reason to hold onto the Milo that he had found in himself; he needs a reason to not let this cold-blooded killer side of him out when he has me in his arms.

  “I love you,” I repeat again, louder and clearer for him to hear.

  If he can feel my blood turning hot, boiling beyond its normal level under my skin, then Milo either doesn’t notice it, or he doesn’t care.

  A small smile appears on his lips, and his arm loosens the grip around my ribs. That hold is unbearably distinguishable from his usual hold, and it’s possessively terrifying as he was trying to physically be the chain that shields me from the world.

  Then a smell of something burning hits my nose and I gasp in horror. The garlic bread is burning, and I’m searching for the oven mittens when Milo beats me to the punch. He swings the oven open and snaps his hand on the scorching tray to pull it out. There is a loud clanking sound on the counter when he drops it and looks down at his hand before looking at me with an eyebrow raised.

  He acts like he just didn’t use his
bare hands to take out the extra golden garlic bread from a four-hundred-degree oven.

  My boyfriend is crazy.

  “Are you crazy?” I speak my thoughts, rushing to him and taking his hand to see the skin unaffected by the heat.

  I turn them over, not believing my eyes when I get his palm into my vision again. There is only a slight tinge of redness on his fingers where he had touched the black tray, but that’s about it.

  What in the world is his hand made of?

  “You were going to use your own hands,” he says, blatant disapproval in his voice.

  “I was looking for mittens, you caveman,” I grumble, blowing cold air on his hand.

  That’s useless effort when he takes his hand away with amusement flashing in his brown eyes. This is by far the least amusing thing I have experienced because my heart is still trying to clam down from his stunt.

  I spare a glance at the slices of bread, and my teeth ache from the extra crunch that I know will come from them. Well, we have vinaigrette to deal with the hardness.

  “Let’s eat, crusty man.”

  That’s a lie. Milo is not crusty because I make him put on a special type of lotion on his feet and hands before he sleeps since there are some ingredients in the lotion that helps with sleep and relaxation.

  He hates it because it’s thicker than normal lotions, so it takes a while to soak into the skin. Or it could be that his skin is too thick and it’s even harder for the lotion to go into his skin.

  Milo roughly and very affectionately rasps his knuckles to my skull. I yelp in pain and at the hollow echo in my ears.

  “I’m just kidding. You’re smoother than a—”

  “Don’t finish that sentence.”

  I gulp at the warning in his eyes. “Yes, sir.”

  A grin spreads on my face as he takes the semi-cool tray and the glass of mixed vinaigrette to the coffee table in the living room where I have a channel playing on the television. I follow him with the rest of the food.

  Sitting next to him on the floor, I lean back to the couch and bite into the slightly burnt bread with a happy smile on my face. I’ll be happy eating anything as long as it’s made from the capable hands of Milo.