Someone was crying.
The realisation snuffed out my anger instantly, dried my mouth yet threatened to wet my eyes. Slowly, I swung my legs out of bed and sat there, gripping the edge of the mattress. The silence went on long enough for me to imagine it must have been part of a dream, where nothing comes as a surprise. Not even the idea of a man like Sean Meyer weeping in the night.
And then I heard it. Little more than a gasp, a catch in his breath, brim full of anguish and pain. My night- dilated eyes could just make out Sean’s restless figure amid the snarled-up sheets only a metre or so away. For a moment I did nothing more than watch him sleep and listen to him dream.
The dream was hot enough to make him sweat, savage enough to send his heartrate soaring, and dark enough to force out quiet whimpers from between his clamped lips. Trapped in slumber, his subconscious was free to torture him at will.
I had nights like that myself.
I leaned over and stole a hand across the bedclothes. I found his twisting fingers and crept my own between them. He gripped tight, blindly, not knowing I was there. Instinct taking succour where it was offered, like a frightened child.
I suffered from my own nightmares. It had never occurred to me that Sean must have his monsters to face, too.
On the surface he seemed so calm, so solid and, despite what I might have thrown at him in anger, so in control. I’d never considered his doubt or pain. Yet here he was, crying out in his sleep and needing comfort of his own. Did I really have anything to offer him that hadn’t been irreparably damaged in transit?
Hesitant, I stood, pushed back the sheets and slid into bed alongside him, reaching out to him. His body was heated, febrile, so that where our skin touched I almost expected it to sizzle. For a second he resisted, tried to push me away. If he’d continued I think I would have let him, but he didn’t.
He seemed to rise a layer out of the hell where he’d been burning. Not enough to wake, but enough to recognise me. Or somebody like me.
He let me slink under his arm, sneak my head onto his shoulder and wrap my limbs across his shuddering body, anchoring him in this reality. His roughened chin skimmed the top of my head. I could feel his breath in my hair, slowing.
I lay awake and listened as his body began to drift, as his pulse climbed down. And I decided, fiercely, that I would give as much as I was able to. As much as Sean would take. Two broken halves could not necessarily be put back together to form a whole, but I had to try.
For both our sakes.
Twenty
When I opened my eyes the following morning, it was to find Sean lying on his side facing me, arm bent, head propped on his hand.
“Hi,” he said quietly, giving me one of those slow-release smiles.
“Hi yourself,” I said, feeling my breath hitch, my heart stutter. I stretched, hiding a yawn together with my self-consciousness behind my hand. “What is it with you and watching me sleep?”
He laughed, little more than a bubble of amusement, and reached to smooth a tangle of hair out of my eyes, using that distraction to neatly dodge the question. “You’re very peaceful when you sleep.”
“Not always,” I said. I paused. “And neither are you.”
The smile faded and Sean rolled away onto his back. The light filtering through the thin curtains touched on the healed scar at his shoulder and just for a moment I wished all his injuries had been merely physical. Instead, the one that had hurt him the most was the savage blow to his psyche and, as I well knew, treating those wounds could be a much more hit-and-miss affair.
“Ah,” he said. “I wondered what had brought you all the way over here from your own bed.”
“You don’t remember?”
He shook his head, frowning. “Nothing specific,” he said. “I never do unless something wakes me in the thick of it, so to speak.”
I passed over the admission of frequency. For the moment. “And then?”
He shrugged and it was my turn to rise up and lean over him. “Talk to me, Sean.”
A long sigh, a slow letting of breath. “Yes, I have nightmares,” he said at last, closing his eyes briefly. “Gut- wrenching vicious bloody nightmares.”
“The same one, or different?”
“Variations on a theme usually,” he said, using that flat emotionless voice I’d heard from him so many times before. “I’m either watching people die and doing nothing, or I’m killing them myself.”
“Who?”
He opened his eyes and flicked them sideways to meet mine. I saw him calculate whether to tell me the truth or just a version of it. Finally, he said frankly, “People I know. People I . . . feel strongly about. People I was in the army with, my friends, my family. The number of times I’ve slit my father’s throat in my sleep, the old bastard. Trouble is, I slit my mother’s alongside him without distinction. And then . . . there’s you.”
I laid a hand on his chest and told myself it was purely for balance. Under my palm his skin was taut and hot, a slightly elevated heartrate the only trace of his distress.
I stayed quiet, let him find his own way. “It’s like something’s trying to tell me that I’m only going to end up hurting you, Charlie,” he said then. “And not just you, but anyone I care for. It . . . worries me, sometimes.”
