35. Rhea
Brighton says goodnight to Daisy and drops onto the couch beside me, leaving a careful stretch of space between us.
After the dance, we cleaned the gym with the committee, drove a few kids home, and finally landed back here.
I kick my shoes off and curl my legs up beneath me with my head resting on the back of the couch.
Brighton leans back, his hands on his thighs, and stares at the ceiling.
“Never again,” he mutters.
“Pussy,” I snort, and he scowls. “We throw four dances a year, not including Prom.”
“Why?” A cross between a laugh and a scoff leaves his lips.
“Kids like to dance.” I rake my fingers through my hair, then glance at my busted hand.
“Is it still sore?” he asks, and I don’t know how he clocked that glance without even looking—but I hate that he did.
“Yeah, a little.” I chew my lip, mad at myself for an unpreventable injury.
“How many games are you out for?” He asks, finally turning his head and prying one eye open to look at me.
“Five. Minimum. Until the brace is off.” I try to move my fingers, but they’re stiff, and a stubborn pain lingers beneath the surface around the joints. “I should get to bed. I still have to make six a.m. practice, and Coach will kill me if I’m exhausted and injured.”
“Yeah,” Brighton nods, “yeah, go.”
He stares at me in the silence, and it feels like the apartment forgets how to breathe. I want to tell him to stop, but that would require me to explain why it feels like that and… I just can’t.
I collect my stuff and wander to bed, crawling in and curling up under the blankets.
Tonight the bed feels bigger than usual—and the apartment feels louder, too.
I can hear every creak and groan the old building makes as the wind picks up outside, welcoming a storm to Harbor that we desperately need to quell the heat wave we’ve been under.
The analog clock Brighton keeps in the guest room ticks like it’s wired to a speaker, and I can hear people laughing down the street as they stumble home from the bars on Main Street.
I check my phone and nearly two sleepless hours have passed.
I’m so screwed for tomorrow. Rolling onto my back, I look up at my ceiling and inhale sharply.
“Stars.” Tons of glow-in-the-dark stars, stuck to the roof in different formations, and enough to count until I fall asleep. He stuck them all to my fucking ceiling. “Damn you,” I swear, flipping back the blankets on a mission.
The second I open my door, my stomach drops—something’s wrong.
The apartment is dark as ever, with the street lamps outside pouring through the living room windows.
The floorboards creak heavily at the end of the hallway, and I see Brighton’s large frame shadowed against the wall.
I open my mouth to complain about the stars in my room when his whole body jerks. He’s sleepwalking again.
“Brighton,” I call out to him, trying to draw him out toward me and away from Daisy’s room before he wakes her, but he freezes, his head cocking to the side like he heard me but didn’t register what I said.
“Hey.” I snap my fingers. His shoulders turn toward me.
Something’s wrong. It doesn’t feel like last time.
He stalks down the hallway, his form seemingly growing in size with every heavy step he takes until he’s standing two feet in front of me with a glazed-over look on his face. I try to think about what worked the first time. Contact.
I step forward, and his body tenses further as I reach out to touch him, but his hand snaps out and clamps around my wrist. It’s clear in his movements that this is worse than before; he’s stronger than me, even in his sleep, but I step into his space and try to coax his fingers off my skin as my heart rate beats up beneath my chest.
Stay calm. Panicking isn’t going to help.
I repeat that to myself over and over again as he remains locked around me. He’s not your father; this isn’t that. Take a deep breath. I inhale and look up at him.
“Brighton?” My voice is shakier than before.
Nothing.
Daisy’s door clicks open, and my worst fears play out like a burning roll of film before my eyes. She steps out, confusion painted on her sleepy face, and Brighton’s entire body whips toward her. I don’t know if it's fear or muscle memory, but my body moves between them in an instant.
“Daisy—back to your room,” I say without turning.
“What’s wrong with him?” she asks, and he starts to move forward.
“He’s sleepwalking, just—”
Daisy flinches when he moves faster, and I extend my hand to her in comfort, ready to tell her to go back to her room again, but Brighton has other plans.
He’s too close now, and there’s not enough space in the narrow hallway to go anywhere but back.
I cover Daisy’s body with my own; every muscle beneath my skin trembles, but I don’t back down.
“Rhea…” Daisy’s voice is quiet and terrified.
“It’s okay. He won’t hurt us. He’s just sleeping.” I tell her as I repeat it over and over again in my head.
He’s sleepwalking; he won’t hurt us.
“Slow. Back into your room. Lock the door,” I tell her instinctively, and when I turn to make sure she hears me, Reid and Rue stare up at me, scared little kids with glassy eyes and bruises I couldn’t prevent spattered across their faces.
“Go back to bed, Daisy, he’s okay,” I tell her when she doesn’t move.
She nods gently, squeezing my hand, and takes two slow steps before she’s back in her room.
The door locks behind her, and Brighton’s head flinches toward the sound.
Contact. My brain is running in circles trying to figure out how to wake him up this time, and I’m coming up blank.
“Brighton,” I say again, and he hears me, turning his head as I reach out and take his hand.
If I can get him back into bed, maybe he’ll stay there for the night. “Let’s get you to bed.”
I lace my fingers into his and tug gently until his feet start to move.
His steps are syrupy and clumsy as he wanders through the dark into his room.
I get him to bed and manage to force him down into the sheets.
I dig around for one of the blankets, pulling it up around him and waiting a few seconds to make sure he’s going to stay put before taking a step back.
“Stay,” he huffs, the word still tangled in sleep.
I stare at him, and it’s clear he’s not awake, but he says it again clearly, and it’s so desperate that I consider it for a second.
I can wait until he’s asleep properly and sneak from his bed before he even realizes any of this happened.
But Daisy. I turn to the room and chew my lip, aiming to go back, sure she’s alright, but he repeats himself.
“Don’t leave me,” his voice isn’t his own, and it heaves at the barriers in my chest. Every logical thought I have is breaking down from the sound of it.
“Alright,” I say out loud, even though he can’t hear me.
I wait another second, hoping that this decision doesn’t backfire, before I crawl into his bed on the other side.
I pull up a blanket and tuck it under my chin as I roll to my back, trying to keep the space between us that he works so hard to respect when he’s lucid.
I sigh, seeing his ceiling. It's empty except for a group of exactly seven small glow-in-the-dark stars. “Is that the Little Dipper?” I whisper. My racing heart comes to a dead stop, and my mouth goes dry. “Right here, it’s the cutest thing on your stubborn face.”
He’d said it to distract me… but what if he wasn’t lying?
Brighton rolls over in the bed, scaring me from the surprise, and presses his head against my shoulder with a small exhausted huff as his hand creeps beneath the blankets and finds a place splayed over my stomach, all before his body goes completely still.
I’m really sick of waking up to sheets that smell like Brighton.
My eyes fly open against his chest, and I hold my breath as I gently pull back to find him wrapped around me like a blanket. His hair is messy against his pillow, and there are none of the angry creases to his face that are normally there when he’s awake. Shit, shit, shit.
I wiggle back, but his fingers dig into my back against the friction and keep me in place. He moves a little, his arms tightening around me as his body stirs from sleep. He freezes for what feels like an eternity before he slowly pulls back from me.
“Why are you in my bed?” His voice is caked with sleep that stirs up the butterflies asleep in the pit of my stomach.
Not the time, horny Rhea. You shouldn’t be here.
“Why were you holding me like that?” I fire back, slipping from the bed to the floor. He cracks an eye open and stares at me, confused. He’s trying to figure out why I’m here, and I don’t blame him. Unable to wake him up from the episode last night, he has no idea what’s going on.
“Well, I was asleep… I thought you were a pillow. You didn’t answer why you were in here?” he asks again.
I scowl at him. “Why did you put all those stars on my ceiling?” I’m flustered and don’t want to have to answer his questions, so I keep asking him more. He doesn’t move, just lies there with the blanket draped around his waist and his expression thick with sleep.
Deep breaths, one: two, three, four… every part of his body is tight.
“Because you said they help you sleep. And you’re my friend. I wanted to make you comfortable here.” He says it so smoothly, I almost believe him.
“So what’s that then?” I point to the ceiling. The seven perfectly placed stars on his ceiling.
“There were leftovers,” he lies— and I watch him start to squirm.
“That you just happened to place up there in the shape of the Little Dipper?” I call him out.
“I don’t know.” His eyes flicker to it, “Maybe I just did it subconsciously.”
“Likely.” I scowl.
“Rhea,” he huffs, “why were you in here?”
I stare at him, his eyes raking down my body, and I realize that I’m only wearing my underwear, and an oversized tank top longing for the trash bin that barely covers my thighs.
I cross my arms over my chest and try to make myself less exposed.
Brighton sits up in bed, pulling the sheets around his waist, and waits for an answer.
“You were sleepwalking again,” I say.
“Daisy…” He moves out of bed.
“She’s okay,” I say, a tiny lie because I never checked. But she hadn’t left her room in the time it’d taken me to fall asleep…
“Are you?” he asks next, and I nod.
“I couldn’t wake you up, so I put you back in bed and… I guess I fell asleep, too,” I admit, leaving out the part where he practically cried for me to stay. He’s got the Little Dipper on his ceiling. He’s past the point of shame, Rhea.
“Right.” He shifts beside his bed in his thin pajama pants, and I try to keep my eyes on the wall behind his head. “I’m sorry.”
“Does it usually happen this much?” I dare to ask.
“It’s never happened with her home,” he admits. “It’s this time of the year… it…”
“You can tell me, I’ve heard it all,” I say, and it’s true. Dad used to wake us up in the middle of the night to tell us horror stories.
He shakes his head. “No. It’s not for anyone to hear. I just… need a break.” He inhales a large breath that sounds painful. “I need to get out of the city.”
“Okay.” I’m not sure what to say because he feels so scattered compared to how controlled he usually is about everything.
“Usually I go alone, but Daisy is here for two weeks, and you’re here…” he says, trying to work out what he wants to do.
“I can watch Daisy. We can—”
“No, Rhea. I mean…” He swallows. “You can come. I want you to come.” He cuts me off, steadies his thoughts and his body with a huff and tries again. “Do you want to go camping this weekend?”
“Camping?” I swallow hard. “I—”
“It’ll be fun,” he says. “I swear.” He promises, but I’m not ready for his quiet plea, “I need it. Please.”
I hate camping. The outdoors and I are mortal enemies, Brighton.
This is a terrible fucking idea. His demeanor shifts so fast it’s hard to say no, to tell him that I can’t help him with this.
My eyes flicker to the ceiling. He’s been helping you since you got here.
It’s one thing, camping can’t be that bad…
“Sure,” I say, and hope I don’t regret it.