Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
Paul
The dream is always the same.
The road is wet, and rain slicks the asphalt into a black mirror, headlights smearing into long white scars that stretch too far ahead of me. The wipers move in a steady rhythm of left, right, left, right in perfect time.
They are predictable and controlled.
I like that part.
My hands are at ten and two, and the pressure of the steering wheel is familiar. I’m breathing evenly, in through my nose, out through my mouth. I am calm.
I am always calm in the beginning.
Because I know what this is. I know I’m dreaming.
There’s no confusion, no slow realization. I don’t question the road, the rain, or the car. I recognize the pattern the second I’m in it. That awareness always clicks in immediately.
This is the dream, the one I am cursed to endure night after night.
I register every detail with clinical clarity, cataloging sensations like I’ve practiced for years. The smell of wet asphalt. The hum of the engine. The exact tempo of the wipers.
And still, I can’t change a thing.
Knowing gives me no control as awareness slides in alongside the paralysis. I can think and observe. I can even brace, but my body belongs to the dream now, not to me, and the dream has already decided how it will end.
The road curves through darkness I don’t recognize, but that doesn’t matter. The dream doesn’t need landmarks. It only needs momentum, and I’m driving too fast.
I know this without checking the speedometer. I never check it. Some part of me understands that if I do, if I acknowledge the number, then the next part will come faster, so I keep my eyes forward as the rain thickens.
There are things you learn about a recurring dream after five years.
You learn its textures, the weight of the steering wheel in this dream versus waking life.
How the rain sounds slightly wrong, too loud, like the memory of rain rather than the thing itself.
You learn the exact moment the calm turns.
There is always a moment. A beat where the wipers keep their rhythm, and my hands stay steady, and I think, perhaps tonight will be different.
It never is.
The headlights catch a pale shape at the side of the road right before she steps into the beam. I don’t know what she looks like. There’s no face, no hair, only the certainty. Bone-deep, absolute, and devastating certainty.
It’s her.
My foot slams on the brake, but it’s too late.
It’s always too late, and the sound… God, the sound is so wrong. It’s not the crunch you’d expect or something cinematic. Just a dull, conclusive impact that travels straight up my arms and into my spine.
The car stops, the rain keeps falling, and I can’t breathe.
I know without seeing her, without opening the door, without checking the mirror, that she’s dead.
I killed her.
The love of my life, my soulmate. The only person I was ever meant to love, and I ran her down in the dark.
My hands shake as I reach for the door handle, but the moment my foot touches the asphalt—
I’m ripped out of the dream.
I slam back into my body with violent awareness, my heart hammering so hard it physically hurts, each beat erratic and wrong, nothing like the careful rhythms I force on myself when I’m awake.
I’m on my back.
I can’t move.
My arms are dead weight at my sides, my legs locked into the mattress like they’ve been welded there. I try to take deeper breaths, but my chest feels restricted, as if a heavy weight is pressing me down, pinning me in place.
Sleep paralysis.
My consciousness comes back online, but my body stays offline, leaving me stranded in between. I can think, and I can feel, but I cannot move, no matter what happens to her or me.
The panic of what I’ve done in my dream surfaces again, but burns away just as fast, because I shut it down how I’ve trained myself to.
You are awake. You are safe. It will pass.
I fold the words into my breathing until they become instructions instead of panic, and until I can force my eyes open.
I won’t beg or bargain. I will outlast it.
The ceiling above me is exactly the same as it always is—white and brightly lit.
I’ve stared at it often enough to know every faint shadow, every place the light shifts depending on the time of day.
I keep the lights on for a reason. Darkness has no rules in the dreaming world.
Except it isn’t the ceiling that has my attention, it’s the eyes staring back at me from it.
Light blue.
Beautiful, yes, and unbearable, because they feel like mine to protect and mine to ruin in the same breath.
They hover impossibly close, filling my vision without belonging to anything at all. No face, no body, just those eyes, wide, glassy, and terrified. They don’t blink, fixed on me with a fear so raw it seeps straight into me.
She’s afraid. The same way I am.
I have stared into these eyes for five years from this exact position, unable to move or speak, to apologize.
I don’t know her name, don’t know her face, but I know the light blue of her irises in the intimate way you come to know something shared for a thousand hours—every fleck, every ring of darker color at the edge.
I would know them anywhere.
I look for them everywhere.
I never find them, of course.
Finding them means being in a car and moving too fast in the rain.
My breath stutters, then I take it back under control.
I know this is an illusion. I know it. This is not real. This is my subconscious clinging to what happened, nothing more. I try to tell her I’m sorry anyway, but my mouth won’t open.
Pulling my focus inward, I search for the smallest fracture in the paralysis, any point of leverage I can exploit. I try to wiggle my pinky finger enough to remind my nervous system that I’m awake, and my body still belongs to me.
When I manage a tiny twitch, the light above me dims in a way that feels deliberate. Shadows stretch along the ceiling behind the hovering eyes, but they don’t behave correctly. They linger where light should erase them, pool at the corners, and seep outward in slow increments.
Of course.
He’s never original.
The room turns heavy and thickening as if the air itself has gained weight and is pressing down on my chest, pinning me harder as my mind scrambles for footing.
My skin prickles, awareness spreading along my arms and ribs, a phantom touch that skitters, pauses, and shifts again, too light to be painful, but it’s everywhere at once. I can’t look away from the eyes and darkness above me or turn my head to confirm or deny what my body already knows.
Spiders are crawling all over me.
I want to thrash and scream, but all I can do is breathe harder.
A laugh comes from the corner of the room, and I try to anchor to his presence, to turn my attention away from the crawling sensation before it tips into full panic. I still can’t move my head, but I don’t need to look to know he’s there.
He is every goddamn time, watching and enjoying how my control fractures under the weight of his doing.
The darkness keeps creeping in, and the edges of my vision blur. The light blue eyes remain, the only thing fully illuminated now, locked on mine, pleading and accusing all at once, asking a question I don’t know how to answer and refuse to try.
Somewhere, in a place I was never meant to reach, This Man noticed me, and he hasn’t let go since.
But after almost five years of this waking hell, I’m done giving him the reaction he wants.
I turn my attention back to my physical body, back to breathe in through my nose, out through my mouth, again, again, and again.
Then I squeeze my eyes shut, cutting off the blue-eyed stare and choosing the darkness behind my own lids over the one he’s feeding me.
The crawling sensation flares along my skin, his laughter curling closer, but I don’t open my eyes.
Not for him.
Slowly, the paralysis loosens its grip. A few more stretched, agonizing moments pass, and the crawling sensation finally dissolves. When I open my eyes again, hers have vanished, too, along with the pressure, the shadows, and him.
I gasp and roll onto my side, dragging in air.
The sheets are twisted around my legs, damp with sweat, and my muscles ache as though I’ve spent the entire night braced for impact.
Reaching blindly for the nightstand, I grab my glasses and shove them on, squinting at the red glow of the digital clock.
4:44 a.m.
I look away, glancing at the brightly lit ceiling, then check the time again.
It stays the same.
This is waking life.
I let my eyes fall shut and rest my forehead against the mattress, counting my breaths until my pulse slows to something manageable, careful not to lie there long enough for the quiet to turn on me.
Routine takes over, and I swing my legs out of bed, pull on my running clothes by muscle memory alone, lace my shoes tight enough to feel anchored, and grab my headlamp and headphones on the way out.
Outside, the air is cold enough that it stings your lungs enough to be a reality check on its own, but I still stop my hand in front of my eyes when I’m done clicking the headlamp on to check my watch twice.
4:58 a.m.
You’re fine, Paul. He can’t get to you here.
Dawn hasn’t fully arrived yet, only a thin, gray suggestion of it bleeding into the dark outside the stream of the headlamp. The street is empty. Predictable.
Good.
I start running the same route I take every morning, and movement shakes the excess out of my system, turns fear into exertion, and thoughts into breaths.
Music fills my ears and sets my pace. It always helps, giving my mind a thing to rest against, and for a while, I manage to think of nothing at all.
I run for exactly one hour, and when I come to stand in front of the house again, breathing heavily with sweat cooling on my skin, it’s still standing there exactly as it always is—too big, too quiet, too full of rooms I don’t use but are always brightly lit.