Chapter 10
Oliver
For the fifth consecutive night, a broken cry tore me from sleep, gasping for breath. I might have escaped the physical walls of Vincent’s house, but he still lived inside me, an unwelcome tenant nestled deep in my mind. A resident I couldn’t evict.
Leaving the bed, I padded out into the living room, the place I inevitably ended up when the dreams turned venomous and sleep became a battleground I couldn’t win.
The outline of the couch greeted me. Luke hadn’t said anything about my nightly migrations, but I knew he’d noticed, because after my first night spent on the couch, ever since, a blanket and an extra bed pillow were waiting for me.
I pulled the blanket around my shoulders and curled up against the arm of the couch, tucking the pillow under my head.
I squeezed my eyes shut, willing myself to relax, to breathe, to exist without the ever-present thrum of fear vibrating beneath my skin.
But the remnants of the dream had fastened themselves to my brain, overriding it with fear and the ghost of Vincent’s hands still on me.
A floorboard creaked behind me.
I tensed. Old habits died slow, bloodied deaths, but before fear could take root, Luke’s voice, soft and a little sleep rough, filled the silence.
“Hey. Sorry to disturb you. I woke up crazy thirsty and needed some water. Couldn’t sleep?”
“Nightmare,” I mumbled.
“Do you want company?”
“I . . . I don’t want to keep you up.”
“I don’t mind,” he said through a vocal yawn. “Ignore that. I swear I’m awake and I’d be happy to stay down here if you wanted.”
Shame and the desire to not be alone waged a brutal fight inside me. I hated how I craved comfort now, how fiercely I wanted to lean into him. After a moment, though, driven more by a need greater than any shred of pride, I whispered a small, trembling “Yes.”
“Do you want me to sit on the floor or the couch?” he asked. Whenever my trauma hovered too close to the surface, Luke seemed especially conscious of letting me define the boundaries, offering his presence without presumption, his nearness without intrusion.
“Couch,” I said.
He settled himself on the cushion at the far end of the other side of the couch.
“Can you . . .” Uncertainty and shame cut the sentence off. While I did appreciate the power Luke granted me, I had a hard time asking for what I wanted. I feared he would reject me, or worse, get angry with me.
“What is it, Ollie?”
When he spoke like that, his voice became the auditory equivalent of a fleece blanket—soft, insulating, and full of comfort. The sound soothed my frayed nerves, and the fear clamped around my ribs loosened its grip.
“Would you sit closer, please?”
“Can do,” he said, moving to the middle cushion next to me without a hint of reluctance or sigh of annoyance.
It still didn’t match what I wanted. The mean voice in my head whispered that I asked for too much, but longing overpowered my hesitation. Inch by inch, I moved closer until my head rested in Luke’s lap. I waited for him to push me away, to scold me for being a stage five clinger.
He didn’t. Instead, he reached for the pillow. “Sit up for me a moment.”
Obeying, I lifted my head while he laid the pillow beneath it. “There. That’s got to be better than my tree-trunk legs. They might be built for squatting, but they sure as hell aren’t built for being squatted on.”
He teased, but I wanted to tell him he was wrong. To me, every piece of him embodied safety incarnate, the opposite of everything I’d ever been taught to fear. But I didn’t want to make things awkward and have him pull away. So I stayed silent.
He ran his fingers through my hair. I leaned into it, the comfort too enticing to resist.
“Do you think you can fall back asleep?” he asked.
“Not unless you stay,” I said. I might have been showing too much of my hand in that statement, but I couldn’t take it back now.
“That works out pretty damn perfectly, because I’ve got news for you, Ollie.
” He shifted his weight with a dramatic grunt, settling deeper into the cushions.
“I am officially parked. I have fused with the furniture. This couch and I have become one. If I stand up, I’m pretty sure I’m ripping off upholstery. ”
How did Luke manage to treat me as whole even when I came across a weak, cowering mess? Over the last week he’d had every chance to handle me with pity, but didn’t. He let me be frail without making me feel fragile, let me struggle without making me feel less.
Despite his comforting presence, the alertness in my body and the tension in my muscles didn’t dissipate. The memories saturated every crevice of my brain, a never-ending carousel of Vincent’s greatest hits pummeling through me.
“When I was six, I wanted to be an astronaut, and not just any astronaut, no, my plan was to be the first guy to build a house on the moon,” Luke said, disrupting the mental cache of horror.
“I think I’m starting to see a pattern. Your collection of books about the moon, all the documentaries of the moon landing and space expeditions you own. You’ve always had an obsession with space, haven’t you?”
“Pretty much,” he laughed, the sound rumbling under my cheek where it rested on him.
“I had it all planned out, like you do at that age when your dreams are large and nothing feels impossible. I even made blueprints in crayon. Super legit. A bright purple house with four slides on every side that shot you straight onto the moon. One even dropped into a crater.”
Mourning stirred within me. I yearned for a childhood that had granted me those kinds of memories, ones full of innocence and imagination, but I chased it away, choosing instead to live inside his memory with him.
“Carrie decided,” Luke went on, a smile in his voice.
“That if I was serious about my moon mission, I needed proper astronaut training. She duct-taped pillows to the bottoms of my shoes and called them moon boots. To practice low gravity, I launched myself off our backyard trampoline. Every time I landed, she’d mark the spot with chalk, tracking my jumps. Very official stuff.”
“What did the data say? Were you destined for NASA?” I asked, picturing Luke leaping off the trampoline with all the recklessness and enthusiasm a child could muster.
“Not even close. It was all fun and games until I landed weird off a jump and face-planted on the concrete walkway. Blood started gushing from my nose. Carrie wigged out. She pressed one of the pillows to my face, sobbing and apologizing, swearing she’d invent better, accident-proof moon boots next time.
When we told my mom what had happened and she saw me bloody, clutching a pillow to my face, she threw her hands up and went, ‘Well, let this be a lesson. This is what happens when you run unsanctioned space programs.’”
“She wasn’t mad at you?” I asked, trying to fathom such a reality. Anything that would have forced my mom to take care of me would have aggravated her.
“No way. She was worried, sure, but also kinda amused. She loaded us into the car and took me to the hospital. I’d busted my nose so bad I needed surgery. When the doctors asked what happened, Carrie told them it was my first astronaut injury from a lunar landing gone wrong.”
“Bet your medical team got a kick out of that.”
“Totally. The doctor played along, asked if I was considering early retirement after such a catastrophic mission failure. My mom jumped in and said I’d be forced into retirement for safety violations and unauthorized launch procedures.
And she meant it, ’cause the next day she bought safety nets for the trampoline so it couldn’t happen again.
But to soften the blow, she also came home with a science center brochure and said if I wanted, she’d sign me up for their after-school space program. ”
“That’s really nice,” I said, struck by the way his mom met his childhood interests with encouragement, fostering curiosity and adventure instead of anger.
“Yeah. Both our parents were like that. If we came up with some wild idea, they’d do whatever they could to make it real. They wanted us to aim high, even if we crash-landed a bunch along the way.”
Luke continued to share stories of his childhood, and my eyelids grew heavier with each pass of his fingers through my hair. Before too long I descended into sleep.
When I woke again, the light of dawn had begun its infiltration through the slatted blinds. For a few disorienting moments, I drifted in that space where sleep and waking entwined, my mind sluggish.
I realized Luke’s hand still rested in my hair.
Moving carefully so as not to wake him, I tilted my head to look at him.
He’d fallen asleep sitting up, slumped into the couch with his head tipped at an uncomfortable angle, legs still planted on the floor to keep me settled in his lap.
Guilt hit. I needed to stop asking him to compromise his own comfort for me.
Minutes later, his alarm went off, vibrating with a soft buzz against the coffee table where he’d left his phone. Luke stirred with a drowsy noise—a low, rumbling protest to the waking world—and let out the cutest little snuffle as he blinked into consciousness.
He fumbled for his phone, silencing the alarm. “Sorry,” he mumbled. “I hope it didn’t wake you.”
“No, I was already awake,” I said, sitting up off him.
“Did you sleep at all?”
“I did. I haven’t been up long, maybe five minutes or so.”
Luke stretched out the stiffness in his limbs with a quiet groan. “I’m glad you got some sleep. You looked peaceful.”
“You, on the other hand . . . I can’t imagine being half hunched over the arm of the couch with your torso twisted in the opposite direction to your legs is particularly comfortable. You didn’t have to stay out here with me.”
“And risk waking you up when I moved? Not a chance. I slept fine. A little crick in the neck is nothing, it’ll be gone by the time I’m through with my workout this morning. Speaking of which, I have to get going.”
Luke pushed himself upright, tilting his neck until it gave a soft pop.
He ambled into the kitchen and began fiddling with the coffee maker.
When the coffee finished brewing, he filled his travel mug, then poured the rest into a ceramic cup.
He added a generous splash of the caramel creamer he’d bought when he found I liked it, stirring it in before passing it to me.
I still found myself shocked at how readily Luke had integrated me into his life.
I kept waiting for the moment it would shift, when the unspoken debt would be named and everything he offered came with conditions.
But that moment hadn’t come and there was no hint it ever would.
Luke did all these small, thoughtful things with no tab to settle, just the simple, radical desire for me to feel like I belonged. The strangest part was, I did.